Dreams Alive

Against the backdrop of mass media extensively permeating everyday life, the internalization and re-innovation of Internet culture have become a widespread cultural phenomenon. The project draws inspiration from the designer’s deep insight into individual expression of anxiety in social media. Compared with other posts, dream-related ones are more authentic, which reflect subconscious anxieties and desires in an unnoticed manner. Based on that, the project juxtaposes dreamscape and Weibo posts to associate online expressions with deep psychological activities. It delves into the complex relationship among digital identities, dreams and the self, providing a comprehensive view of individuals’ complex psychological and emotional activities in the convergence of the virtual and the real in the digital age.

In terms of technology, this project employs NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques to systematically organize and process data from Weibo; by virtue of LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and sentiment analysis datasets, it accurately captures Weibo users’ subconscious interests and emotions; corresponding paintings are selected according to specific images in dreams to train LORA models, aiming to visualize dream descriptions. The final output integrates Weibo data, dream descriptions and AI-generated paintings, presented in the form of a publication. The cover of the publication ingeniously incorporates the word association network based on user data from Weibo, visually demonstrating the connections and interactions among users. The inner pages, through the combination of text and visual content, display dream descriptions and AI-generated paintings, serving as an artistic reflection on how digital culture deeply permeates individuals’ everyday life and subconscious mind.