PLAY IT AGAIN, FOR THE NEXT TIME

Dreams are brief immersive encounters that begin to fade as soon as we wake. They elude our grasp as soon as they are interrupted, and the more we try to hold on to them, the more they change. When we try to recall them the next day, we combine their content with our mood that day, what we want that day, and what selective memories of them that we recall, changing them from their native state into a new object for the next reinterpretation. PLAY IT AGAIN, FOR THE NEXT TIME, are a set of Generative AI (GenAI) interpretations of the dreams of the artist iterated by his collaborators, showing seemingly faithful but deceptively different visions of the dreams from an AI process designed to hallucinate anew for each “next time.” The work consists of a set of six visual stories that capture aspects of original dreams but transformed through the hands of the designer/creators and the lens of GenAI. These stories include spying at a library, escaping from outer space collection operation of a home, a comical conquest of a fairy tale castle, an underwater fresh air bubble for dancers, taking a cruise on a cargo container, and investigating bottles of water that contain memories of the past. A Virtual Reality (VR) experience depicts a scene from one of the dreams, creating additional context for reliving a GenAI-interpreted version of a dream, combining the original content of a human dream with both human and machine perspectives that fundamentally skews the brief encounter: a new dream for every time it is played again.