COSMOLOGYSCAPE
Cosmologyscape is an invitation to the public to dream.
Created by artists Kite and Alisha B. Wormsley, this participatory multimedia public art project unfolds across both digital and physical space. Commissioned by Creative Time 2022
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.
Cosmologyscape’s Creative Time commission supported Kite and Wormsley to develop the methodology, the visual language and a collaboration with design firm Schooooool to make a website that can be used to facilitate community dreaming and programming and art making. Kite and Wormsley also developed a score so the dreams can be played by musicians in real time that led to Kite forming the Cosmologyscape Ensemble that performed with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Cosmologyscape has been re-imagined into workshops, events, performances, public art, and exhibitions. Wormsley and Kite are currently working on a book that includes their research, practice and process.
In 2025 they were awarded support from the Wagner foundation. Wormsley & Kite were invited to reflect on their methods of dreaming and making. This new body of work expands their research through a series of interconnected forms: a contextual diagram created with design studio Omnivore; furniture co-produced with Indigenous students from the University of Manitoba; and a “dream office” inviting visitors to rest, reflect, and enter the imaginative space of the project. Boston-area dreamers are also invited to share their dreams through the Cosmologyscape website, contributing to new works that continue to evolve this communal practice.
In partnership with the Wagner Gallery’s commitment to investing in artists’ visions, Kite and Wormsley are supported through a research grant by Wagner Foundation to work deeply within Boston-area communities to co-create a dream retreat and 2026 Summer Solstice public day of dreaming to envision a repeatable, rooted model for community-based dreamwork and technological collaboration.
Left - Right, top to bottom: Santa Fe NM, Carnegie Hall NYC, The Shepherd Detroit MI, Bronx Museum, NY, Lubeznik Center IL,