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Cosmologyscape
September 20, 2024 – November 3, 2024
The Plaza at 300 Ashland
85 Flatbush Ave, B
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Cosmologyscape is an invitation to the public to dream. Created by artists Kite and Alisha B Wormsley, and selected in Creative Time’s 2022 Open Call, the multimedia and participatory public art project unfolds across multiple sites, digital and in public space.
While dreams are available to everyone, they are shaped by conditions outside ourselves—our access to the space, time, and resources that allow for good rest. Data shows that dreaming, too, is inequitable along the intertwined categories of class and race. Sleeping in public, for racialized bodies in particular, has long been deterred through loitering laws and hostile architecture – the spikes and knobs and barriers that keep people from sleeping, sitting, gathering, and staying. In response to this, Cosmologyscape poses the questions, if dreams are the material used to build in waking life, whose dreams made the environments we live in today? Whose dreams might allow for a vision of a future everyone can thrive in?
For the past five years, artists Kite and Wormsley have hosted the Black and Indigenous Dreaming Workshop series to build a growing community of dreamers. Rooted in this ongoing work, Cosmologyscape began with a gathering of artists who dream and led to a participatory website where participants were guided into dreamwork both online and through a series of public programs led by dream practitioners. Linking old traditions to new technologies, eEach dream shared on the Cosmologyscape website became an algorithmically generated quilt square inspired by Lakota visual language and Black quilting traditions, represented in a growing digital tapestry of our collective dreams. These dreams were then culled into one data set that moved through another machine learning process to output the patterns, colors, contours, and flow of the public sculptures. The result is a cluster of benches wrapped in vibrant mosaics and growing plant life.
The work is a profound collaboration between the individual and the collective, the cosmos (the unseen realm) and the landscape (the seen realm), and between technologies old and new. Charged with the collective dream life of hundreds of participants, Cosmologyscape is an offering to visitors to access deep sleep and to dream the world into being.
The opening reception was on Sunday, September 22 from 2-5pm with a live performance scored by Kite: Owíŋža Íčhiyopatȟapi (for Cosmologyscape), that interprets the digital tapestry of dreams collected on the Cosmologyscape website. Owíŋža Íčhiyopatȟapi (for Cosmologyscape) was performed by musicians:
Marilu Donovan
Nava Dunkelman
Kevin Farrell
Adam Markiewicz
Katie Porter
Robbie Wing
Cosmologyscape at The Plaza at 300 Ashland is in partnership with Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Two Trees.
Project Support
Project support for Cosmologyscape is provided by the Arts, Equity, & Education Fund, Molly Gochman, and Eric Richter & Charles Shoener.
We are also grateful for the support of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) in partnership with the City Council and Mayor Eric Adams.
Creative Time programming support for 2024 has been generously provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Arts, Equity, and Education Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Good Chaos, The Horace W Goldsmith Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation, The May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc., The Rockefeller Foundation, The Surdna Foundation, and Trust for Mutual Understanding.
Fabricators
Thank you for the fabrication houses and consultants who participated in the production of this incredible project:
Website Production by Schoooool, with special thanks to Andrew Herzog, Nicky Tesla, and Val Yang
Sculptural Production by Object Fabrication LLC, with special thanks to August Hunt, Sophia Rauch, Nick Ducot, and Harper Hunt
Windchime Production by Pat Spadine
Stairs Vinyl Production by Full Point Graphics, with special thanks to Hiroshi Kumagai
Graphic Design credits to Ming Fearon, Riley Hooker, and Dominic Maglio