Gallery

hypnopompia

Works: 21
Views: 304
Likes: 11
Updated: Jun 25, 2024

Hypnopompia

Hypnopompia refers to the transitory state as one emerges from sleep into wakefulness. It may be remembered by the restful ease of snoozing in bed, or the disorientation of a piercing alarm. One can also harbour a sense of yearning for a delightful day that awaits, or a feeling of foreboding for a dreary day to avoid. Ultimately, it is a state of ambiguity and flux—liberating when one is still running ahead of the demands of reality, but crippling when one becomes powerless to stop the latter from catching up.

As a liminal state embodying such a diverse range of experiences, hypnopompia can serve as a fitting metaphor for our perceptions towards AI-enabled art, which has attracted much interest and controversy following the development of generative AI tools such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

By using hypnopompia as an experiential and conceptual frame, this gallery seeks to highlight several visual art projects that use AI as a tool, reflecting our nascent attempts to tap on the vast corpus of human-generated data to expand the latent space for artistic exploration. Unlike hypnopompic hallucinations that can feel paralytic and frightening at times, the “machine hallucinations” in this gallery may be seen as productive and compelling with time—encompassing visions of richer and more meaningful collaborations between man and machine in the years to come.