Date of Award

6-2025

Document Type

Thesis (Master's)

Department or Program

Sonic Practice

First Advisor

César Alvarez

Second Advisor

Bethany Younge

Third Advisor

John Bell

Abstract

DreamVisions+ is a transdigital and transhistorical odyssey into the realm of fiction and truth, reality and virtuality. Rooted in the tradition of late medieval dream-vision poems—wherein religious or political allegories unfold through dreaming protagonists—DreamVisions+ stages a multimedia dream vision of the digital age, reading medieval dream visions as proto–virtual reality. Through the creation and analysis of DreamVisions+, a full-length solo multimedia performance, I synthesize live electroacoustic music, XR technologies, and 3D game environments with medieval textual and visual iconography to construct a porous, unstable dream world that collapses medieval and digital imaginaries.

Situating my work within broader political and cultural currents—such as the rise of technofeudalism, the resurgence of medieval aesthetics in digital subcultures, the instability of “reality” in the wake of post-truth politics, and the hauntology of online dream rhetoric—I argue that both medieval dream visions and contemporary digital landscapes offer virtualized spaces for the speculative negotiation of identity, desire, and reality. This thesis weaves historical research, theoretical inquiry, and personal creative practice into an interdisciplinary investigation of improvisation, digital poetics, and collective mythmaking in the age of cloud capital. As tech utopian billionaires cascade invention towards their dream of inevitable extended reality hegemony, DreamVisions+ becomes a site for both cultural reflection, personal manifesto, and doomsday preparation: simultaneous optimism and pessimism, admonition and relinquishment, daydreams and nightmares.

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