By David Graver

The second exhibition within the MIT Museum’s inaugural thematic season, “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time” surveys the connection between living creatures and circadian rhythm through 18 contemporary artworks and experiential environments. Though we may be acutely aware of the function of our biological clocks, and the cycle of day and night, the exhibition not only poses fundamental questions but gleans insight from the artistic experiences it presents. Central to this is the immersive installation Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams by Carsten Höller, dream scientist Adam Haar, and Seth Riskin (of the MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery).

The sculptural piece welcomes three guests to sleep inside—sharing an environment of diffuse light pulses, spatialized sound, and gentle motion—to prove that dreams can be influenced in real time. Born within Höller’s 2020-2021 Visiting Artist Residency at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams was incubated within the MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery and informed by dream research and engineering from the Fluid Interfaces research group at the MIT Media Lab. “The initial idea came from a tension we kept returning to: dreaming is treated as radically private, yet so much of human cognition—even at rest—is socially structured and relational,” Höller tells Surface.