This weekend, Creative Time is pleased to unveil Cosmologyscape, a multi-layered socially engaged public art project and Creative Time commission by Kite, an Oglála Lakȟóta artist and composer known for her groundbreaking practice combining performance and machine learning, and Alisha B Wormsley, an artist and cultural producer known for leveraging art production toward the redistribution of resources and reimagination of Black futures. The project commemorates the organization’s celebratory 50th anniversary milestone, marking half a century of producing and collaborating on public, socially engaged art while honoring this legacy and continuing to look towards a visionary future.
Cosmologyscape was selected from over 600 applications from across the country to the public art nonprofit’s 2022 Open Call, which offers artists the opportunity to create their first major public artwork. Cosmologyscape is a series of sculptures formed by a machine learning process using the dreams of hundreds of participants who contributed to the project over the past summer. Rooted in the artists’ ongoing collaboration, the Black and Indigenous Dreaming Workshops, Cosmologyscape extends an invitation to dream futures into being. The public sculptures will be unveiled from 2-5pm at Ashland Plaza in Brooklyn on September 22, 2024 and will remain on view through November 3, 2024. The opening will further incorporate the public through interactive musical performances by which dreams can be submitted through the Cosmologyscape interface, sonically translated, and played back for attendees. A live performance scored by Kite: Owíŋža Íčhiyopatȟapi (for Cosmologyscape), which interprets the digital tapestry of dreams collected on the Cosmologyscape website, will be performed by six musicians to close the event.
Cosmologyscape expands upon Kite and Wormsley’s existing collaborative practice within this sphere and their focus on exploring art and technology through the Black and Indigenous lens. For the past five years, artists Kite and Wormsley have hosted the Black and Indigenous Dreaming Workshop series to build a growing community of dreamers.
Rooted in this ongoing work, Cosmologyscape began with a gathering of artists who dream and led to a participatory website where participants were guided into dreamwork. Each dream shared on the Cosmologyscape website became an algorithmically generated quilt square inspired by Lakota visual language and Black quilting traditions, represented in a growing digital tapestry of our collective dreams. These dreams were culled into one data set that moved through another machine learning process to output the patterns, colors, contours, and flow of the public sculptures. The result of this iterative, participatory project is a cluster of benches wrapped in vibrant mosaics and growing plant life. Charged with the collective interiority of hundreds of participants, Cosmologyscape is an offering to visitors to access deep sleep and to dream the world into being.
Cosmologyscape began in February 2024 with a gathering of interdisciplinary dreamers—artists, practitioners, scientists, herbalists, writers, musicians, and more—at a three-day Dream Retreat hosted by the artists and organized by Creative Time. Together, they shared and constructed “Dream Paths”: methods for deepening, influencing, and interpreting dreams through practices important to their lives and work. The Dream Paths that emerged from this gathering were collected and shared on cosmologyscape.com, which then invited the public to share their dreams with a dream journal chatbot, developed with the principles of Indigenous data sovereignty. The chatbot guided dreamers through the process of recording their dreams and fed the anonymized dream data, translated into a system of symbols developed from the Lakota language and Black quilt making traditions, into a digital dream tapestry.
The practice is guided by Kite’s long standing focus on developing Indigenous Protocols for AI—an approach that confronts the realities of technology used to perpetuate violence, erasure and surveillance of Indigenous and Black peoples; technologies used to oppress one being will inevitably oppress all people. Indigenous Protocols for AI positions Indigenous people in the development of AI as fundamental to ensuring the technology be developed in ethical and sustainable ways, informed by their own voice.
Using an Indigenous AI framework, the artists translated the collective dreams—whether daydreams, visions, lucid dreams, or nightmares—into a series of earthwork sculptures which will be installed in public space and unveiled on September 22, over the weekend of the Fall Equinox and commemorating the last day of the Creative Time Summit.
Cosmologyscape at the Plaza at 300 Ashland in partnership with Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Two Trees.
