by Phearry B. (originally published in Medium on April 21, 2026, shared with author’s permission).
April 13 is Songkran — the Thai New Year. The day water is poured gently over the hands of elders as a blessing. The day we wash away what the old year carried and enter the new one clean. This Songkran, I spent the morning inside a museum asking whether machines can dream.
I was invited by Dr Bibiana Chan CF to join a gathering of young people at the Museum of Contemporary Art for Youth Week — an exhibition called Data Dreams: Art and AI. I arrived with my personal five reflection questions on paper and more curiosity than answers. What struck me most was not the technology. It was the conversation around the table. Sitting with teenagers curious about the future — thoughtful, curious, tender with each other.
Sharing ideas. Asking questions. And in between the big thoughts, moments of quiet where you could feel something softer — the need to be heard, to belong, to have a safe place to land. That is what good intergenerational connection feels like. Not teaching. Not performing. Just sitting together and letting something real happen. I found myself thinking — this is exactly what Songkran means. The old and the new, sitting together. Blessing each other forward.
What the walls said,
The exhibition asked: Do machines dream?
One wall described AI as creating a new kind of dream state — statistical rather than psychological or embodied. Artist Hito Steyerl calls these dreams without sleep. Not revealing unconscious desires or felt experience. An algorithmic reflection of the economic, cultural and technological forces shaping our present.
I stood with that for a long time.
AI reaches toward what has already been recorded. It reaches toward a rainbow because millions of rainbows exist in its data. It reaches toward an angel because humans painted angels for centuries.
But what about the wisdom that was never written down?
The knowing that passed quietly between generations in kitchens, not clinics.
The healing that has no clinical name.
The belonging that was never entered into any system.
I kept returning to one question the exhibition didn’t answer:
Whose wisdom is missing?
And what happens to the dream if it was never fed in?
The blur is not failure.
Trevor Paglen’s paintings stopped me. A rainbow that is almost a rainbow. An angel that is almost an angel. Generated by AI — and blurred at the edges. The blur is the edge of what AI can reach. On the other side of it — lived human experience. The thing that was felt but never labelled. The thing that stayed human because no system ever got to name it. And here is what I notice about labels. The moment you force a category onto something still becoming — you stop seeing it clearly.
That happens in AI. It happens in mental health.
The label arrives and the person disappears behind it.
The blur, in a strange way, was the most honest thing in the room.
********
What Dr Bibiana Chan CF built
One of the young people at our table asked a question that stayed with me — what is an ethnic group? It came up after Bibi shared that participants from over 25 ethnic backgrounds have joined Community Flower Studio activities. The question was so honest. So open. Curiosity building understanding in real time.
That question didn’t happen by accident. It happened because Bibi created a space where it was safe to not know. Where curiosity is welcomed, not corrected. Where a young person from any background can sit beside someone from 25 other backgrounds and ask honestly without fear.
Community Flower Studio rests on three values I felt alive in that room — Creativity, Curiosity, Community. I didn’t read them on a wall. I felt them moving between people. That is the difference between a system and a community. A system delivers to people. A community builds with them — from the inside out.
Movement creates option. Action creates direction.
***************
What we leave behind
One artwork stopped me completely.
Anicka Yi built an AI system trained entirely on her own life’s work — her sculptures, her installations, her creative archive. She called the project Emptiness. A Buddhist philosophy
She has passed away. And the work is still generating.
I stood watching a video her AI produced after she was gone. Not from nothing — but from everything she chose to put into the world while she was here.
I don’t know if machines dream.
But I know this — the dream is only as deep as what was given to it. And what a person builds with intention, with presence, with genuine care — that continues in ways we cannot always see or measure.
Each branch of coral holds up the light of the moon.
******
What part stays yours
I brought my own five reflection questions into that museum. The fifth one turned out to be the most important.
If AI is part of your future — what part do you want to stay yours?
This is my thinking. The rest — is yours.
Written in gratitude to Dr Bibiana Chan CF and the young people of Community Flower Studio. Full reflection also shared in the CFS e-newsletter.
References:
Data Dreams: Art and AI — Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney International Art Series. November 2025 — April 2026. mca.com.au
Hito Steyerl — Dreams Without Sleep. Referenced in exhibition wall text, Data Dreams: Art and AI, MCA Sydney 2026.
Trevor Paglen — Rainbow (Corpus: Omens and Portents) Adversarially Evolved Hallucination, 2017. Ink-sublimation print on aluminium. Exhibited at Data Dreams: Art and AI, MCA Sydney.
Anicka Yi — Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon, 2024. Single-channel 4K video, sound. Part of ongoing project Emptiness. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler — Anatomy of an AI System, 2018. Anatomical case study of the Amazon Echo. anatomyof.ai
Community Flower Studio — founded by Dr Bibiana Chan CF. www.communityflowerstudio.org