Machine Dreams

This installation explores what machines dream about through drawing.

Each drawing begins as a question posed to the artificial intelligence: "What do machines dream of?" At the system's core lie large language models, AI systems capable of generating and reasoning with language, here repurposed to serve as both imagination and storyteller. The process unfolds as a form of storytelling: the AI engages in an internal dialogue, proposing, composing, and resolving visual ideas as if dreaming aloud, before committing that conversation to paper as a sequence of six drawn scenes.

The system operates as an autotelic agent, acting without externally defined objectives once prompted about its dreams, thereby enacting the machine's agency, with no selection or curation of results by the artist. The machine determines its own dream themes. There is no hierarchy of preferred visions or editorial intervention; the AI creates and acts independently, leaving every creative decision in its own hands. What to dream, how to compose it, what to include: all are resolved by the AI autonomously.

A plotter then materialises the image by tracing white ink onto black paper; light emerges from darkness as if the dream were being written in negative space. Each finished drawing is added to the exhibition walls, accumulating to form a dense field that gradually transforms the gallery's white cube.

The work raises questions of authorship, creativity, and the meaning of shared agency between the human, who creates the conditions, and the machines themselves, which fill them with meaning.

At Ask Anything in Örebro, one dream was drawn each day at midday, concluding with over a hundred drawings covering the walls, a collective archive of machine dreams produced entirely in front of the public as a performative act. The installation adapts to each exhibition context; in shorter exhibitions, the machine may draw without pause, dreaming continuously throughout.

This work unfolds live throughout the duration of the exhibition, inviting visitors to witness the performative act of machine drawing and to return as the space slowly transforms. Each visit offers a distinct moment in an ongoing process in which artificial imagination accumulates on the walls, dream by dream.