Mine, Yours, Ours: The World is Sleepwalking

Contemporary reality is increasingly described as a waking dream. Indeed, the current media landscape echoes many of the characteristics of dreaming: an incessant flow of unlikely content and improbable associations—deepfakes, memes, documentary fragments, and artifacts of post-internet culture. Images and words merge on the retina, reaching the most hidden corners of the unconscious and connecting intimate and personal dimensions with clichés, fears, delusions, and collective rituals.

A defining feature of these media flows is their ability to reach our consciousness even before any form of critical evaluation or value attribution takes place. This may help explain the phenomenon of brainrot and the compulsive fascination with absurd and nonsensical content. Another common characteristic of these cultural artifacts is that many of them are generated through large-scale artificial intelligence models. This is far from trivial: it is precisely the material conditions produced by the AI industry that encourage the proliferation of imaginaries and aesthetics in which high levels of realism and plausibility converge with AI’s inherent tendency to mine online archives in search of clichés and recurring semantic patterns.

Under the title The World Is Sleepwalking, this year’s 21st edition of the MINE, YOURS, OURS festival unfolds as a delirious journey to the edges of the synthetic world, suspended between wakefulness and sleep, in an attempt to inhabit this state of algorithmic trance.

The rampant production of synthetic artifacts has not gone unnoticed politically. While the AI industry promises enormous economic advantages—often grounded in the commodification of narratives rather than products or services—it has become increasingly evident that this technology can also operate as a weapon of mass confusion: a tool capable of reinforcing ideological rhetoric, if not directly deployed in the operation of drones and other military technologies.

The result of this collective psychosis is our entry into a regime of uncertainty—an environment in which the high probability of encountering fabricated content has profoundly altered our relationship with reality itself, shifting it away from notions of objectivity toward the search for reassuring stories and mythologies. On the one hand, we strongly advocate for tools capable of verifying authenticity; on the other, we allow ourselves to drift within a fluctuating landscape of absurd narratives and conspiracy theories.

If, as Claude Lévi-Strauss argued, the production of myth is a foundational mechanism of cultural thought, the typology and quality of contemporary mythologies now appear increasingly shaped by the extractive logic embedded within algorithmic culture. Who, then, holds agency over these narratives? Is it possible to transform these dreamlike flows into lucid dreams? And what role does AI actually play within this condition?

It is from these questions that The World Is Sleepwalking takes shape. A constellation of artists, practitioners, and various kinds of algorithmic sleepwalkers engage with these issues in order to outline new perspectives capable of opening the algorithmic black box, recovering dreams, nightmares, distortions, and hallucinations in an attempt to break the fourth wall. The exhibition explores how these authors construct speculative scenarios that challenge the very nature of artificial intelligence itself.  

Curated by Daniela Cotimbo, in collaboration with Re:humanism

Artists: Zach Blas, Silvia Dal Dosso, Malpractice, Most Dismal Swamp