Mirrorworlds

What if we could walk inside each other’s dreams, enter the subconscious and wander through our thoughts as if they were buildings?

In Ancient Egypt and Greece, dream incubation temples offered spaces for healing and encounters with the subconscious. Centuries later, Sigmund Freud interpreted dreams as gateways to desire. Today, with extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI), we can critically imagine new architectures for collective dreaming – not as fixed futures, but as evolving spaces for reflection and shared imagination. Mirrorworlds is a speculative XR prototype for AI-generated space prompting, where space forms through proximity and trust rather than through words or images. Here, dreams, memories, and immersive environments merge to create an allegorical architecture of desire.

Transforming MAGAZIN Vienna into a contemporary dream incubation temple, Mirrorworlds unfolds in three acts, inviting visitors to drift between sleep and awakening, between masks and headsets, between the real and the imagined. It reclaims dreaming as a spatial, collective act, and asks: How far do we let technology infiltrate our innermost architectures – our dreams, our desires, and our sense of self?

Over the course of the exhibition, visitors’ dreams are recorded, visualised, and reimagined through AI, gradually transforming the XR experience into an evolving collective dreamscape that grows, breathes, and responds to those within it. As dreams become data, and data becomes space, the exhibition morphs into a living architecture born from the subconscious of its visitors.

An exhibition in three acts:

Opening + Ritual Performance: 05.12.2025, 7 p.m.

Talk + Overnight Dream Session: 24.01.2026, 7 p.m.

Finissage + Panel Discussion: 20.02.2026, 7 p.m.
with Paula Strunden and guests