Ocean of Dreams is a participatory public artwork by Behnaz Farahi and the Critical Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab, presented as part of the 2026 MIT Future Fest.

The installation transformed MIT Kendall Plaza into a living ocean of collective hopes. Through a multilingual web experience, more than 430 people shared their dreams for the future. Their contributions were transformed into handwritten text and projected across an evolving landscape of ocean, waves, and sand, allowing individual dreams to become part of a larger public field of collective imagination. The project grew from a question that feels increasingly urgent:

Can we dream together and imagine a different future?

At a moment shaped by anxiety around AI, political division, war, displacement, and climate instability, Ocean of Dreams approaches hope not as passive optimism, but as a form of agency — the capacity to imagine that things could be otherwise. Rather than treating the future as something to be predicted or optimized, the project frames design as a creative and participatory practice through which people can imagine and shape possible futures together.

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

Ocean of Dreams used two Panasonic PT-RQ35K 30,000-lumen laser projectors with Panasonic ET-D3LEW300 lenses. Mounted on the fourth floor, the projectors covered approximately 75 × 38 feet of Kendall Plaza, creating a projected surface of roughly 2,850 square feet. The visual system was developed in TouchDesigner. Content was transmitted over a dedicated NDI network to the AV system and mapped onto the plaza surface. Participant submissions were collected through a multilingual web interface. The submitted text was transformed into handwritten visual elements and integrated into the moving ocean environment. The installation also incorporated an ambient soundscape combining ocean sounds with music by Juston Boreta.

Project Page | Critical Matter Group, MIT Media Lab

Credits: Critical Matter Group, MIT Media Lab / Behnaz Farahi, Saetbyeol LeeYouk, Jake Tan, Yuxiang Cheng, Ruipeng Wang, Julian Ceipek. Ocean footage was developed in collaboration with Jan Erik Waider, whose aerial imagery captures coastal landscapes in northern Iceland.