II. When the Machine Dreams
— From AI Misreadings to Exquisite Corpse

When I first began working with AI, I was less interested in its intelligence than in its mistakes. The machine, in its misunderstanding, seemed to dream. It could misread my memories, mishear my words, and return them as something slightly off, yet hauntingly close to what I never managed to say. These errors, fragile and luminous, began to feel more human than precision ever could.

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AI entered my practice not as a tool but as an accomplice. I treated it like a mirror that doesn’t quite reflect, a collaborator that listens but also invents. When I fed it fragments of my dream journals such as rooms collapsing into water, dolls whispering, teeth growing from walls, it responded with images that felt like déjà vu. They were not what I remembered but what I might have remembered. In that misalignment, I began to recognize my own subconscious more clearly.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that perception is never passive; it is a body thinking, a world sensing itself through us (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). When the AI misreads my language, it performs a similar act of embodied misunderstanding. It senses without feeling, interprets without knowing, and in that gap something poetic happens. The images it returns are not products of knowledge but of entanglement, a new kind of seeing born from shared blindness.

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Donna Haraway speaks of situated knowledges, where objectivity is replaced by partial vision, a kind of knowing that accepts its own incompleteness (Haraway, 1988). This has become a quiet manifesto in my studio. Working with AI is not about surrendering authorship but about dismantling the illusion of total control. It allows me to think through error, to treat each misrecognition as an opening rather than a flaw. I am not teaching the machine to see; I am learning how to see with it.

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In this process, authorship becomes porous. I begin an image by hand, AI transforms it, and I redraw over what it misinterprets, a circular exchange that echoes the surrealist exquisite corpse (Brett, 2006). Each iteration erases and resurrects the last until meaning collapses into texture. What emerges is not a collaboration between human and machine but a fusion between conscious and unconscious systems, between the will to control and the desire to drift.

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In the machine’s dream, I found another way of perceiving: not from mastery but from multiplicity. It does not replace me; it expands me. Through it, I have learned that the subconscious is not contained within the self. It can be coded, shared, and even misread, and still remain mine.

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References

Brett, G. (2006) Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality. London: Lund Humphries.

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Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp. 575–599.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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