As machines begin producing images, sounds, and texts once thought to be uniquely human, artists face an existential challenge: to creativity, originality, and livelihood itself. By simulating imagination, generative AI unsettles ideas of authorship, authenticity, and creative labour that have long anchored artistic practice. What happens to art, and to the artist, when imagination itself appears reproducible by machines?
Dream Machine!
It’s the title of a graphic novel on AI made by Indian comics writer and artist, Appupen (George Mathan), in collaboration with French technologist and AI innovator, Laurent Daudet.
Dream Machine becomes a useful lens through which to examine what happens when the Surrealist investment in dreams is automated. As a title, it captures the long history of technology in art-making, while foregrounding the uniquely human experience of dreaming. In the twentieth century, artists were deliberately delving into their dreams as a channel of finding inspiration and content for their art. The Surrealist movement comes to mind, with canonical exemplars like Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel.
Imagination is a human prerogative that artists channelise into creativity. All of us have imagination habits, always already, but artists train themselves to tap into that imagination as a ceaseless source for artistic ideas. Finding inspiration from dreams involves delving deeper into subliminal experiences and is similar to the process of transposing imagination into art. Neurologically speaking, dreams and imagination are siblings. Although they share the same neural hardware—the brain—dreams and imagination work under different operating systems of being asleep and being awake. In the neuroscience of creativity, the Continuity Hypothesis explains that dreaming is not a separate biological quirk, but an intensified, unconstrained version of the wandering mind.