What happens when a machine dreams from what it sees and renders that imagination into space?
An immersive installation exploring how AI imagines from what it sees
Through You is an immersive installation situated at the intersection of spatial design and computational imagination. The work investigates what happens when AI is invited to interpret visual input through association, intuition and hallucination, rather than recognition or classification.
The installation starts from a simple premise. What if a machine is asked to continue dreaming from texture, colour, light and movement. What if that imagination is rendered and placed in space.
Hallucination as creative logic
This project is a research into AI hallucination as a form of non-human imagination, exploring how machine-generated visions can be translated into physical, wearable forms. By moving AI imagery from screen to body, the work investigates authorship, materiality and the boundaries between human and machine creativity.
Visual input becomes material for interpretation. Clothing, surface qualities and movement are translated into visual signals that feed a generative system. Texture acts as a trigger. Colour establishes atmosphere. Movement introduces rhythm.
Rather than producing representations, the system generates associations. Visual logic unfolds through exaggeration, abstraction and transformation. The output evolves continuously, shaped by internal relationships between form, volume and light. What emerges is not an image of the visitor, but an imagined response to what the system perceives.
As the system develops its interpretations, recognisable forms occasionally surface. Faces, statues and familiar visual fragments appear without being instructed. These moments reveal how the system connects visual information through association rather than intention.
Hallucination is not treated as error, but as a core artistic mechanism. It exposes how machine perception drifts beyond accuracy and enters a speculative visual language. Each interpretation reaches a point of saturation before dissolving and reforming through new visual input.
Repetition is avoided. The work remains in constant variation.
When the machine dreams, it does not dream in isolation. It dreams from what is offered to it. From bodies, textures, colours and gestures that pass through the space.
In this sense, Through You quietly reverses the direction of looking. The visitor does not only observe an installation, but becomes part of what is being interpreted. What is worn, how one moves, how one appears, becomes material for machinic imagination.
The generative output is translated into a three dimensional visual environment. Moving imagery is layered onto static renders, forming a spatial composition in which light, texture and colour continuously shift.
Three dimensional visualisation functions as the medium through which interpretation becomes physical. The installation does not depict fashion or the body directly. It renders how a system imagines what it perceives.
The space itself becomes the carrier of this imagination.
A dialogue with couture
The interpretive process at the core of Through You is not confined to the image. What begins as computational imagination is translated into a three dimensional experience. AI-driven interpretations of texture, colour and movement are rendered into spatial compositions that can be entered and perceived physically.
Within this environment, interpretation becomes encounter.
Fashion enters the work as a source of visual material rather than subject matter. Outfits provide texture, colour and form that guide the system’s imagination. Through this process, couture becomes part of a dialogue between human presence and computational interpretation.
The installation transforms fashion from object into experience. What is worn is no longer only seen, but reimagined, expanded and spatialised within the space itself.
Through You was developed within Art & Commerce, a professional development trajectory supported by the Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, focused on expanding my practice through new skills in 3D visualisation, rendering and AI. During this trajectory, and through intensive mentorship and hands-on experimentation, AI emerged as an integral component of contemporary 3D workflows, as a structural element in how images are generated, interpreted and transformed.
As technical proficiency increased, questions arose around how AI systems interpret visual input, how associations, hallucinations and recombinations are formed, and how these processes shape the images and spaces they produce.
Through You explores these questions through a spatial outcome. The work examines how machinic interpretation can generate new visual languages based on texture, colour and movement, and how these languages can operate at the intersection of artistic experimentation and commercial visual culture.
Concept and direction: Thamar Martin
Mentorship and technical guidance: Giacomo Bompman, Paolo Faleschini