AnalogDream

Who we are

AnalogDream e.V. operates at the intersection of contemporary art and engineering, focussing our diverse range of skills and expertise on exploring how both fields can mutually enhance the capabilities of the other. Bringing together painters, coders, dancers, engineers, audio artists and filmmakers to pose a myriad of urgent questions through both the artwork we produce and the means by which we produce it.

Distinct to our work, each performance makes use of various AI sensory hardware that we are continually developing to expand the ways in which our artwork can be displayed and interacted with. When paired with Founder Jonathan Apelbaum’s large-scale oil and canvas portraiture, these technologies communicate with nearly 2000 LEDs behind each ‘cognitive painting’ to change their compositions depending on how we programme them to respond to certain external stimuli. On a thematic level, our work investigates the ways in which we endure, but may also overcome, the intertwined violence of gender, religion and shame inflicted onto our bodies as they exist within contemporary Western societies governed by such structural forces.

As a collective, we are equally committed to exploring how collaboration between actors from different fields and social backgrounds can diversify how we can experiment with artistic and technological production and presentation. Conscious of artificial intelligence’s propensity to increase social inequalities, AnalogDream strives to utilise technology to empower both its members and its audiences. Through the combination of our minds, talent and creativity we hope to sublimate humanity, its diversity and its vulnerability through our artwork. Ultimately, we seek to materialise at least a vision of society where humanity transcends its current afflictions to become more honest, genuine, and present acceptance as the new valuta.