'One Million Dreams' Visualizes Our Nightmares and Emotions Via Social Media

Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico, the partners behind Art is Open Source, an international informal network that explores human nature through digital technologies and social networks, wrote software that spent the last year collecting dreams on social media. Presumambly, it collected nightmares, as well.

Using natural language analysis, the algorithm identified the topic of people’s dreams and split them into nine categories, and then highlighted nineteen emotions surrounding them. The result will be a 200-hour generative video that Iaconesi and Persico will run continuously in a large-scale exhibition at an undetermined location.

For now, we have a 90 second preview. As individual dream-specks come wafting through the stratosphere to find the right place to settle, we start to see certain colors and subjects emerge. A yellow spot seems to shine brightest; it stands for dreams of family, and the emotion most commonly associated with that subject is “terrified.” “Mad memories,” and “sad love,” are popular, too.

Iaconesi and Persico’s ultimate goal is lofty: they want to archive their visualizations in order to establish “a global library of the dreams of all humanity.” Considering a large part of the world is still without Internet, it seems like a far-off fantasy. But then again, we never expected to see millions of dreams collected and categorized in one place like this.

h/t Designboom