“DreamHouse” is a 4-6 hours-long role-playing experience in which participants are invited to take roles of housemates living together in a speculative near future. In this future, AI assistants are big part of everyone’s life. A housing corporation “DreamHouse” has recently introduced a project where tenants' rent depends on how well they live as a community in a shared household. AI technology is there to help them maintain possible communication issues. And evaluating how well they perform it.

The role-play is designed for 14 participants and includes a character-building workshop, a play, and a debrief. The play is created around several cycles of Nights and Days, during which the scene has different lighting. During the Day, participants interact with each other, trying to solve all sorts of communal and personal dilemmas, but also with AI voice assistant asking it for help or trying to avoid its attention.

The Night time is a collective unconscious dream that tenants see. Their realities and thoughts blend, as they dream of who they are, why are they here, and if AI is a savior, a guard, a friend, a father, an alien, or a part of them. Depending on how participants carry the narrative, there are multiple possible endings and the outcome can become both utopian or dystopian. Each of the endings and the play work as a source of inspiration for talking about how we create spaces by living together and how much hope we put into the non-human (technology) in solving our relationships with others but also ourselves.

This project’s game and play mechanics involve using Chat GPT and AI-generated voices.

DreamHouse ran twice at Instrument Inventors Initiative in The Hague in 2023 — in April and November. 

Images by Helena Roig, Myra-Ida van der Veen Jana Romanova