Cosmologyscape is an invitation to the public to dream. Commissioned by Creative Time and created by artists Kite and Alisha B. Wormsley, this participatory multimedia public art project unfolds across both digital and physical space. 

While dreams are available to everyone, they are shaped by external conditions. Access to space, time, and resources allow for good rest. Data shows that dreaming is inequitable, along with the intertwined categories of class and race. In response to this, Cosmologyscape poses the questions, if dreams are the material used to build in waking life, whose dreams made the environments we live in today? Whose dreams might allow for a vision of a future everyone can thrive in?

This project began with a gathering of artists who shared their dream expertise–leading to the creation of the Cosmologyscape where participants are guided into dream work and encouraged to submit their own dreams, both online and through a series of community programs. Linking old traditions with new technologies, each dream inputted into the website became an algorithmically generated quilt square inspired by both symbols from Lakota visual language and Black American quilting traditions. These dreams were then combined into a single data set and moved through another machine learning process to output the patterns, colors, and contours of these public sculptures, wrapped in vibrant mosaics and growing plant life. The work is a profound collaboration between the individual and the collective, the cosmos (the unseen realm) and the landscape (the seen realm), and between technologies old and new. Charged with the collective dream space of hundreds of participants across physical and digital space, Cosmologyscape offers visitors a place to sleep, and to dream the world into being.