One Million Dreams at the MakerFaire in Rome, from October 3rd to 5th 2014, at the Auditorium Parco della Musica.

We will present an installation for the One Million Dreams project, through which we are capturing the expression of people’s dreams using social networks, to create a planetary database of dreams, and to make it available under the form of Open Data: for the arts, design, psychology, anthropology, communication sciences, humanities, sociology and more.

One Million Dreams

One Million Dreams

“Sleep is the best meditation” – Dalai Lama

Through the One Million Dreams project we search on major social network for people’s expressions about dreams. We analyse them using Natural Language Processing to understand which emotions are expressed, which topics, which modalities. And we relate it with news, events, global issues, trends and more.

One Million dreams, the main visualization

One Million dreams, the main visualization

We then visualise these dreams under the form of emotion/topic matrices (above), and under the form of correlation maps (below), highlighting the ways in which different dreams are related to each other, and under the form of maps (at the bottom), to understand where people dream, in which languages, and expressing which emotions and issues.

One Million Dreams, correlation maps

One Million Dreams, correlation maps

One Million Dreams, maps

One Million Dreams, maps

We make all of this data available under the form of Open Data, released with an Attribution license, to be freely accessed and used for multiple purposes: from arts, to research, analysis, and usage across disciplines.

What do people dream? Which topics do they dream about? About their families? Their job? Their social life? Their fears? The environment? Their joys? Or…

When do they dream it? How do they dream it? With which symbols, images, visions, desires, emotions?

Why do they dream it? And how is it correlated to their daily lives? Because of the condition of their jobs? Of their government? Of some recurring news? Of some event which is relevant locally? Nationally? Internationally? Globally? Because of something personal? What and how do they express about it?

This type of data can be very useful in gaining better understanding of the human condition, and about its evolution and transformation, across time, space, geography, cultures, communities, contexts.

Thus far, we have captured: more than 2 Million dreams; more than 6 Million expressions of desires and wishes; in 21 languages.

So, come and meet us at the MakerFaire in Rome, and follow the next steps here on Art is Open Source, and on Human Ecosystems.