Rehearsal Room

Rehearsal Room (Sala de Ensayo)

[2025]

In collaboration with Dr. Adam Haar Horowitz and Manaswi Mishra

Dream Team: Alexej Alschiz, María Ferrer, Juan Necochea, Ina Ritter, and Justus Saretz. Contributions by dream/sleep experts: Dr. Adam Haar Horowitz, Kite, Dr. Karen Konkoly, NOMASMETAFORAS, Precious Okoyomon, and Prof. Dr. Björn Rasch

A collaboration between the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts and the Schering Stiftung Foundation

Rehearsal Room is a three-part, immersive installation invented to invite you into a world of resonance, dreaming, and collective attunement. I conceived this work together with neuroscientist Dr. Adam Haar Horowitz and AI researcher Manaswi Mishra. Sonic environments can help enhance our senses and, therefore, our consciousness. Once we feel in sync with the world that surrounds us, we are also in sync with the social. Sound is much more than noise or music. Sound is crucial for our minds —and I want to invite all of you to think of it not merely as medium, but as method and portal.

You are about to enter three rooms now. They are interconnected, and each stage is a distinct movement between dreaming and waking, self and collective, sound and space. Here my instructions on how to use them. Enjoy.

Gregor Gobec. MGLC Archive.

Room 1: Stage 1 — Collective Improvisation

Move, touch, interact with the instruments!

The journey begins with interactive “Dream-Drums”—sculptural instruments fitted with elastic microphone membranes that transform your gestures into resonant sound. This room as a site for collective improvisation. If you are alone you interact with the instruments, but maybe you are lucky and you are in the room with others. Take time playing and listening. You soon will notice how the instruments and the players will create a soundscape attuned to brainwave frequencies associated with relaxation and (day)dreaming (notably Theta and Alpha waves).

Indeed! You are now participating in the production of a sonic scape that synchronizes rhythms between bodies, instruments, and architecture. The drum beats sound like a heart—because that drum is a heart, and a heart is a drum, pulsing with life and promise.

Photo by Saelia Aparicio

Gregor Gobec. MGLC Archive.

Photo: Jaka Babnik. MGLC Archive.

Room 2: Stage 2 — Dream Sharing

Whisper your dreams!

In this room, an AI-generated choir of whispers fills the space. The machine has composed this pleasant choir from open-access dream reports. Distributed through sculptural speakers known as Whisperers, these voices evoke a dream logic that is at once intimate and collective.

At the center of the room you will encounter a spiral-shaped Dream-Drum. Take your time and whisper dreams you remember into the membrane. In whispering to this instrument, the machine will “listen” and record your dream. While you whisper your voice triggers a soft, droning sonic response, activating a feedback loop between memory, sound, and the space of dreaming.

Dream sharing becomes a method of seeding the future—an act of speculative care and communal imagination.

Gregor Gobec. MGLC Archive.

Photo: Gregor Gobec. MGLC Archive.

Room 3: Stage 3 — Receiving and Resting

Relax!

The final space offers an invitation to rest. The floor is blanketed in acoustic foam and dotted with sonic pillows emitting intimate, quiet sounds—cat purring, breath, ocean waves, heartbeats. Three speakers hang overhead like crystallized blankets, transmitting a 24-minute looping composition tuned for deep listening and dream incubation.

This room is a sanctuary for repose and tuning in—a site for practicing the slow rhythms of (day)dreaming, reflection, and nonlinear time.

Photo: Jaka Babnik. MGLC Archive.

Photo: Ingo Niermann

Gregor Gobec. MGLC Archive.