A cross-disciplinary commentary on the inevitable nature of technological remediation

The Digital Dreamhacker: Crowdsourcing the dream imaginary' is a collaborative endeavour between Dr Eleanor Dare and Dr Alexandra Antonopoulou. It is a cross-disciplinary commentary on the inevitable nature of technological remediation even in the most unconscious aspect of human lives such as dreams.  The digital Dreamhacker application (Antonopoulou and Dare, 2011) is a Web based program written in Javascript that gathers dream themes reported by individual dreamers in the form of keywords, and turns them into crowdourced dream visualisations by sourcing online images. It is a “repurposing of dreams, a form of Crowdsourced  'hack', in which we take images from an online community and subvert them into dream visualisations and diverse social networks. The project is not about the literal illustration of dreams or a means of enhancing artistic skill, but more of a commentary on the 'social imaginary' and the connection between technology, culture and our individual ‘imaginings’, including dreams. Therefore, the visualisations re-frame dreams within a technical and cultural imaginary, meaning the systems of meaning that help form collective understandings and expectations of social life. 

Although the chance operations the computer uses resemble the illogical dream process, the computer cannot understand the context of the dreamer’s interpretation. This absence of conventional, logical reasoning, cultural and contextual awareness and non progressive thought processes, of the computer software makes it impossible to analyse dreams in the way that Freudian analysis proposes, in which meaning is hyper-associative, with myriad branches of symbolic meaning. In a paradoxical way, the computer resembles a human dreamer, as defined by Hobson: someone who uncritically accepts illogical events.