ONIRICA ()

A live media performance combining dance, real-time generated imagery, and artificial intelligence to explore the bodily dimension of dreams and their fleeting, unstable logic. Created in collaboration with Italian choreographer Diego Tortelli, the project expands the Onirica series, this time focusing on the relationship between the dreaming body and the synthetic image.

The performance is structured around fragments of real dreams drawn from the archives of the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Bologna, comprising more than 28,000 records collected since 1930. Their analysis reveals recurring motifs, images, and emotions that emerge across different times, places, and cultures.

These individual experiences are transformed by AI into a fluid, cinematic reality that unfolds live in response to the performer’s movement. The work asks what happens to one of the most intimate and subjective areas of human experience when it is analysed, processed, and visualised by artificial intelligence. Here, the dream becomes at once an archive, a dataset, and a space of shared synthetic imagination.

The visuals of Onirica 0 are based on a pipeline integrating the Diffusers: state-of-the-art diffusion model library developed by Huggingface and OpenGL Shading Language (GLL). The performance is powered by NOITOM’s MOCAP Perception Neuron.

The Italian Cultural Institute is a co-organiser of this event.

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