DB: Communal Dreams suggests that dream content can be influenced through created sensory hints. At what point does this shift from observing dreams to actively crafting them?
CH: It does not, truly. Engineering implies total control, and the dream resists control in such a way I discover extremely stunning. Adam Haar and I utilize a technique called Targeted Dream Incubation– light, sound, spoken words provided at specific minutes of sleep beginning. In Dream Hotel Room # 1: Imagining Flying With Flying Fly Agarics, we recommended flying with fly agarics. Sixty-seven percent of sleepers reported flying dreams. We published this lead to an American Psychological Association journal– as far as we can inform, this is the very first paper of its kind producing real and serious science from data collected within an art exhibition like this. However still, this is not overall control– what they flew over, what they felt, whether they hesitated or delighted– totally unforeseeable. I spent years studying insect interaction, where you send out an unstable signal and get a behavioral response. Dreams are not like this. You send out a signal, and the unconscious does what it wants with it. That’s why I find this more intriguing than the control of stimulus input and behavioral output.
Carsten Höller, Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics, 2024, installation view, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel © Carsten Höller. Picture: Mark Niederman, courtesy Fondation Beyeler DB: The job is developed with scientists studying dream incubation, a method that tries to guide the styles people experience while sleeping. What did working together with researchers change in the method you think about dreams as an artistic medium?
CH: When I was a researcher, subjective experience was forbidden as information. You might study an insect’s olfactory action, but your own perception of the experiment was unimportant. When I started making art, I wished to revive precisely what had actually been prohibited– the first-person. Not only my very first individual, however subjective experience in general. Now, dealing with Adam and the MIT researchers on Dream Hotel Space # 2: Communal Dreams, I discover myself in a fascinating position: working together with scientists who have actually found extensive methods for studying the subjective. They can spot sleep beginning from brainwaves, understand when a dream is simply starting, intervene at the right split second, and then ask: what did you experience? The dream report becomes data. It alters both what art is andwhat science wants to engage with.
the setup hosts three individuals at a time within a shared sleeping structure DB: Dreams are typically considered the most private of experiences, yet this installation
welcomes strangers to sleep together and potentially share dream themes. What fascinates you about the concept of cumulative dreaming? CH: With Rosemarie Trockel, I developed House for Pigs and People at the documenta X in 1997 where human beings saw pigs. The audience believed they were observing the animals. But naturally the real question was: who is the animal and who is the observer? Communal Dreams have a similar inversion. You think this universe of sleep is personal, the mind is completely your own, even when sleeping with complete strangers. But the truly upsetting thing is that when three individuals get the very same sensory cue and 3 of them imagine being in a tunnel, on a train, traffic signals flashing as they pass by– you don’t understand whether that’s neurology or something else. I’m dissatisfied with the givenness of what we accept as specific experience. The setup doesn’t show that dreaming is cumulative. It produces the conditions under which you can no longer be specific it isn’t.
pulses of light, ambient sound, and subtle motion are calibrated to affect dream states in genuine time DB: Many of your works run like experiments where the outcome doubts and individuals become part of the procedure. Do you think about
this setup as an art work, a scientific experiment, or something else? CH: The real product I work with is individuals’s experience– and in the case of Communal Dreams, people’s experience is individuals’s dreams. Dreams are gathered, transcribed, studied. Some will appear in a peer-reviewed paper. Some, an individual will carry with them for several years. Peer-reviewed and personally effective. I would like both things to be real simultaneously, because I believe the separation between them was always synthetic.
illustration on research from the MIT Media Laboratory and Harvard DB: The installation turns the museum into a location where visitors are asked to sleep. How does this inversion challenge the function of the museum as a site of mindful attention? CH: My first overwhelming experience in a museum was at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. I was alone. The paintings did something to my perception that I might not describe, and I didn’t wish to explain it. When I saw a Rothko exhibit years later in a packed space at the Tate, with everybody performing their attention, the impact was not the exact same. I have actually constantly disliked the concept that the museum asks you to be a mindful, upright, mindful viewer. There is a social norm present in the method we are suggested to interact with the art work. The most interesting perceptual states– doubt, vertigo, hypnagogia, among others– take place when that uprightness, those standards, they collapse. In Communal Dreams, the visitors rest, close their eyes, and become the work. In the space of a dream there is no uprightness. The operate in Common Dreams is made in the unstable in between, somewhere in between the physical sculpture and the audience’s mind, in between the viewers and each other, in the minute of being required to another world by something as simple as a passing red light. The museum doesn’t lose its function. It ends up being a place for experience with simply internal attention and no guidelines, only stimuli.
the work frames sleep as
a
porous, collective experience DB: Throughout your practice you often build environments that change mindsets. Do you see dreams as another type of architecture, one that exists completely inside the brain? CH: George Stratton, in the 1890s, wore inverting lenses for 4 days till his brain flipped the world back. That experiment captivated me because it proved that perception is a construction– the brain develops the world it anticipates, and by grabbing expectation we can invert the whole world. My upside-down safety glasses, my moving hotel spaces, these are architectural proposals to that building and expecting brain. Dreams are an action beyond, to the brain building without expectation. Only memory, just emotion, just the residue of the day, only possibility. And it develops entire cities, whole strangers with their own motivations. That architecture is more expansive than anything we can produce in steel or glass. Areas built by, not for, dreams. Therefore Communal Dreams is metal and glass built as an invitation to the most effective designer, the designer of dreams.
external stimuli and the presence of others infiltrate the subconscious DB: If innovations for influencing dreams continue to establish, they might eventually be used beyond creative contexts. Do you see this work as opening a speculative discussion about the future principles of shaping human imagination?
CH: This is not speculative. Gordon Wasson, among others, documented cultures where the content of dreams was a common resource, shaped by ritual, by mushrooms, by shared objective. The idea that dreams are unblemished personal area is traditionally very current and probably incorrect– information, media, screens already shape what the mind does when it wanders. The concern is not whether dreams will be affected but by whom and for what purpose. I choose to raise this inside an art context because an art work proposes an experience– it does not harvest it, at least not commercially. But naturally we are really uneasy in our culture with the unforeseeable, and dreams are one of the last unforeseeable things. I would be extremely unhappy to see them domesticated. This work and the bigger Dream Hotel task with Adam utilizes science to plant a seed in the unconscious– a seed of movement, a seed of flight– but as anyone with a garden understands, a seed is not an instrument of control. A seed is a way to make something in partnership with an existing substrate, a method to be familiar with the soil. Incubating a dream is similar. The Dream Hotel provides seeds, visitors come and plant them (a noise, a sight, a smell) in their unconscious, and by doing so they end up being conscious of the substrate of their self. Without purposeful tools to interact with this part of our perception– the unconscious– we simply must take it as offered.
the installation develops on recent research studies recommending that dreams can be assisted and even partly integrated dream series start to overlap, producing pieces of a shared story
the project extends Höller’s enduring interest in altered understanding