The World is Sleepwalking

In its 21st edition, Mine, Yours, Ours Festival focuses on a reality that can, in certain aspects, be described as a form of ‘waking dream.’ The current state of our world reflects many characteristics of dreaming: a continuous flow of improbable images and associations, whether in the form of deepfakes, memes, documentaries, or fragments of post-internet visual culture. The images we encounter daily reach the deepest layers of the unconscious, connecting intimate and personal dimensions with clichés, fears, deceptions, and collective rituals. A key feature of these images is that they reach our awareness even before any value has been assigned to them. This may help explain the phenomenon of brainrot, a recently coined term describing obsessive engagement with content that is soon forgotten.

Most of this visual output is generated by large artificial intelligence models. It has become clear that this technology can be fully transformed into a weapon of mass confusion—an instrument that, even when not directly employed in drones or other military technologies, is capable of intensifying ideological division.

The result of this collective psychosis is an entry into a post-truth regime: a universe in which the high probability of encountering misinformation alters our relationship to reality itself, moving us away from notions of objectivity and toward the search for comforting narratives and mythologies. Is it possible to transform these dreamlike currents into lucid dreams? And what is the real role of artificial intelligence in all of this?

This topic will be explored through works presented in the group exhibition The World Is Sleepwalking, curated by Italian curator Daniela Cotimbo, whose research focuses on issues surrounding the use of new technologies and the relationship between contemporary art and artificial intelligence.