Project

Ocean of Dreams

Critical Matter Group , Ocean footage courtesy of Jan Erik Waider

Project Contact:

Groups

We are living through a moment saturated with anxiety: fear of AI replacing human labor, deepening political divisions, war, displacement, climate instability, and an increasing sense that the future is something happening to us rather than something we can shape.

At a time when uncertainty can narrow our imagination and make it difficult to envision a better future, Ocean of Dreams asks a simple question:

Can we dream together?

Ocean of Dreams

Ocean of Dreams is a participatory public artwork that transforms MIT Kendall Plaza into a living ocean of collective hopes. Through a multilingual web experience, people around the world are invited to write and send their dreams into an endlessly connected ocean. Each contribution becomes part of an evolving projected landscape of waves, sand, words, and collective imagination.

We invite you to share your dreams:

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.

—Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

We approach dreaming not as passive optimism, but as a form of agency: a way to imagine that the world could be otherwise and to recognize that the future is not yet fixed. Our capacity to hope together gives us the power to shape a collective future.
Perhaps one of the most radical things we can do right now is imagine.

Let’s dream together.

Submitted dreams will be projected at MIT Kendall Plaza as part of MIT Future Fest, taking place from September 30 through October 4, 2026.

Credit List

Critical Matter Group, MIT Media Lab

Behnaz Farahi
Saetbyeol LeeYouk
Jake Tan
Yuxiang Cheng
Ruipeng Wang
Julian Ceipek

Ocean footage courtesy of Jan Erik Waider