Dreamgrove is an ongoing participatory project that connects a webpage and the iPhone to an interactive garden. It contains dreams. The app and webpage record them in a public, virtual field; the garden narrates them through an interactive soundscape. Dreamgrove features what you saw in your sleep written, and soon spoken, in various languages. Based on theories of memory and mental mapping, the project combines the digital and the botanical, transforming text into public space.
This iPhone app allows you to write your dream down and submit it to a public database. It also lets you access the database – through a virtual Field of Points, and through a Dream List – organized by date, number, color and writer’s name.
dreamgrove.org is the recipient of the 2009 Webby Award for Best Net Art Site. The iPhone app was launched to mark the opening of 2009 Hong Kong + Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism, where the project was featured.
Whereas dreamgrove’s virtual component is ongoing, its Interactive Garden has been realized as a temporary installation, last exhibited at the Athens Byzantine Museum in 2008. There, through an array of motion and proximity sensors, visitors trigger a soundscape: zones of white noise, whispers, augmented sounds, and narrated dreams- connected to the database, spoken through trees. The layout, clusters and memory spaces of the virtual Field of Points mirror the structure and the soundscape intensities of the Interactive Garden.
Gardens allow us to enter into ideal world-structures through synaesthesia, memory and perception. Our contemporary gardens are virtual spaces. Dreamgrove offers a shared experience of private memories that are never fully owned. The project is an interface and hearing-aid to the collective unconscious: it generates a surreal break with reality and gives back to speaking, writing and drifting some of their long-lost aura.
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Designed and produced by Drifting City and Dimitris Doukas.
Drifting City is a collaborative based in Athens and Los Angeles - creating works in Architecture, Media and Public space. Design team: Petros Babasikas, Chrissou Voulgari and Farzad Moré.
www.driftingcity.com
Technical direction and development by Dimitris Doukas.
In collaboration with Lambros Pigounis, Composer and Interaction Designer.
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Drifting City is currently seeking installation venues for the interactive garden: [email protected] for more info.