DREAM DATA: Artistic Workshop
Dream engineering and the future of the unconscious.
Connected Minds Artist-in-Residence Gala Hernandez Lopez will be leading a 3-day workshop from March 21-23, during which participants will collectively explore the topic of dream engineering and have an opportunity to develop their own creative responses to artistic prompts. Participants are welcome to attend one, two or all three days of the workshop. The workshop is open to students, researchers, faculty, scientists, artists, writers and performers interested in the subject of dreaming in the digital age.
Day 1 – Participants will be introduced to contemporary advances in dream engineering technology and discuss the numerous social, ethical and cultural implications of this field. Keep reading below for background on this fascinating subject.
Day 2 + 3 – Participants will take part in group exercises where they will be invited to use imagination, improvisation and role play to envision and describe speculative future scenarios related to dream engineering. Portions of this workshop will be filmed and incorporated into an artistic work for public exhibition at York University and internationally.
This workshop is presented by the Connected Minds: Neural and Machine Systems for a Healthy, Just Society Artist-in-Residence Program, supported by Canada First Research Excellence Fund, and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology at York University. The film that footage from this workshop will be incorporated in is commissioned by the Fondazione In Between Art Film (Italy) and is supported by the BBVA Bank Research Grant (Spain), La Caixa Bank Production Grant (Spain), and the Science New Wave / Labocine grant (US).
DATES: March 21 – 23, 2025
TIME: 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
LOCATION: March 21 – 918 Bathurst Street | March 22 – 23 – Charles Street Video (76 Geary Ave)
Register HERE
DREAM DATA: Artistic Workshop – Background
Dream engineering technologies use neurostimulation, AI, and brain-computer interfaces to influence and extract dream data. While they offer therapeutic and creative possibilities, they also raise concerns about surveillance, data commodification, and exploitation. These technologies challenge the boundaries between subconscious influence, productivity, and rest, potentially reinforcing existing power structures tied to class, gender, and race. The future of dream data ownership and its ethical implications remain critical questions.
Efforts to regulate neurotechnology include the Neurorights Foundation, which advocates for rights such as mental privacy and protection against algorithmic bias. A 2024 report revealed uncertainty regarding corporate sale of neurodata, highlighting the need for stringent protections. Chile took a step in 2021 by enacting a constitutional amendment for mental privacy. The rise of cyberneurosecurity will be crucial as brain data becomes a tradable asset, potentially exploited by companies. The growing field of neuromarketing, exemplified by Coors’ Super Bowl campaign infiltrating dreams, has prompted neuroscientists to warn against passive advertising in sleep. Capitalism’s push to integrate unconscious thought into market economies threatens to eliminate “unproductive expenditure” as theorized by Georges Bataille.
This raises urgent questions about whether dreams—perhaps our last sanctuary of freedom—are becoming sites of economic exploitation. The history of biopolitical control over bodies, as explored by Jonathan Crary and Grégoire Chamayou, provides a crucial framework to examine how the unconscious is now subject to governance and market forces.
We are currently experiencing a context of crisis of the imagination in which the impossibility of dreaming, in a metaphorical and political sense, becomes more and more palpable. The speculative approach, through a projective exercise, allows us to connect the present to possible futures. As Bifo Berardi reminds us with his notion of futurability, our present beats with a multiplicity of forgotten pasts, but also a range of possible futures: the future depends on seeds that are being sown today. ‘Futures are inscribed in the present as immanent possibilities, not as necessary evolutions of a code,’ he writes. It is necessary to think critically about the horizons of possibilities inscribed in a contingent actuality that seems to be captured by a capitalist order on a global scale. Thus, in the face of the imaginary — the experience of the collective mind populated by imposed external images— the imagination and the imaginable are erected, unprejudiced, subjective and
free. To open the door to these immanent possibilities, in this workshop we will imagine futures scenarios. For in order to constitute new horizons of meaning, recombining the possible ones, it is first necessary to be able to imagine them.
