Mirrorworlds

by Paula Strunden

What if we could walk inside each other’s dreams, enter the subconscious and wander through our thoughts as if they were buildings?
In Ancient Egypt and Greece, dream incubation temples offered spaces for healing and encounters with the subconscious. Centuries later, Sigmund Freud interpreted dreams as gateways to desire. Today, with extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI), we can critically imagine new architectures for collective dreaming – not as fixed futures, but as evolving spaces for reflection and shared imagination. Mirrorworlds is a speculative XR prototype for AI-generated space prompting, where space forms through proximity and trust rather than through words or images. Here, dreams, memories, and immersive environments merge to create an allegorical architecture of desire.

Transforming MAGAZIN Vienna into a contemporary dream incubation temple, Mirrorworlds unfolds in three acts, inviting visitors to drift between sleep and awakening, between masks and headsets, between the real and the imagined. It reclaims dreaming as a spatial, collective act, and asks: How far do we let technology infiltrate our innermost architectures – our dreams, our desires, and our sense of self?

Over the course of the exhibition, visitors’ dreams are recorded, visualised, and reimagined through AI, gradually transforming the XR experience into an evolving collective dreamscape that grows, breathes, and responds to those within it. As dreams become data, and data becomes space, the exhibition morphs into a living architecture born from the subconscious of its visitors.

Put on a mask. Enter the dream. Awaken inside somebody else’s.

Paula Strunden is a transdisciplinary artist who studied architecture in Vienna, Paris, and London, and is currently an ETH Zurich Postdoc Fellow at Gramazio Kohler Research. She worked with Herzog & de Meuron and Raumlabor Berlin, and completed her PhD within the Horizon 2020 project TACK – Communities of Tacit Knowledge. Her dissertation on multisensory perception in extended reality received the 2023/24 Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Prize. Her immersive installations have been exhibited internationally at the Royal Academy of Arts London, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, MAK Vienna and Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Paula founded the participatory online platform XR-Atlas.org and has taught at leading institutions across Europe. In 2025, she served as Acting Professor at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.