Dream Painter is an interactive robotic installation by the artist duo Varvara & Mar that turns the audience's dreams into a collective painting. The work consists of several parts: interaction station, painting robot and creative coding that transforms the spoken word into art on canvas. We all dream. Some dreams we remember in the morning, others simply disappear. Often, we barely understand what we memorise until the end. The well-known psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud devoted much effort to understanding the human unconscious through dream analysis. Freud was convinced of the power of the dream world in understanding the human mind. In his famous book The Interpretation of Dreams he states: "The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind". (Sigmund Freud, 1899) The work raises several important questions such as: Can machines understand our unconscious? What if algorithms are able to make sense of our dreams, to understand us better than we understand ourselves? Is there a limit of trust in the relationship between humanity and technology?
