By Sara Oscar
Publication Date: 2025-11-26 00:54:00
Surrealists believed in the power of dreams. Inspired by Freud’s theories of the unconscious and dream work, André Breton saw the irrationality of dreams as an artistic method that could reveal new, revolutionary ways of being.
A century later, the meaning of dreaming extends beyond the unconscious to the disembodied processes of machine systems.
Dreams have become a metaphor for how artificial intelligence metabolizes information and produces “AI slop.”
It is no longer possible to exit AI systems. Each digitized trace will eventually resurface as a synthetic output. As AI conjures us from our information, its neural processes exceed our understanding – and reinforce our biases in the service of capitalism.
Data Dreams at the Museum of Contemporary Art brings together artists who make these tensions visible.
AI and the “social dream”
Hito Steyerl argues that generative AI produces “mean pictures”: statistical averages derived from training data sets….
