THE AWAKENED SLEEPERS

In “The Awakened Sleeper,” a radio talk from 1954, Gaston Bachelard explores the relationships between the nocturnal space of dreams and the diurnal world of reality. The philosopher sings, more than he states, the importance of the poetic imagination born of dreaming in the creative process:
“Philosophy often forgets that before thought there is dreaming, and that before clear and stable ideas there are images that shine and pass.”

The metamorphoses, fusions, and transformations present in certain AI-generated video images suggest, in a surprising way, memories of past dreams, born in the half-light of the bedroom. This half-light, Bachelard tells us, is where “unfinished forms move, forms that shift without laws, forms that endlessly deform.” The world of dreams and latent space therefore share opacity. One unfolds in the dimness of night; the other arises from an abstract and mysterious mathematical space.
Within the opacity of these two universes, actors perform strange scenes through processes of unsettling similarity, introducing AI as the most fully realized form of a collective unconscious.