A global, mostly English-speaking Electric Dreams Community has for a number of years been dream-sharing in cyberspace. People tell one another on the Internet all kinds of dreams; e-zines, magazines, report and analyse them. The group test bed is setting up the first German-speaking dream database and is conducting dream research using digital technologies.
Dreams and nightmares have always reflected man's technical environment. With the omnipresence of electronic media and tools, interfaces, program codes or shortcuts are also entering the dream worlds. test bed processes these dreams on a multimedia basis; it combines the art form of the radio play with a web portal and an installation.

For the radio play, electronic dreams are collected and viewed by means of an interactive, text-based web forum. The Internet as the potential subject matter of such dreams thus also becomes their archive. The radio play compresses significant and frequent dreams to form a collective dream fabric, a story. But this story is also fed from another source: from a forum accessible only to the authors. Here, in contrast to the dream records documented in the public web forum, quite different texts collected and written by the authors are filed and processed as "waking records": factual circumstances, observations, descriptions of current events. When the dream place has been penetrated by real places and waking states correspond with dream states, the question arises as to how far our unconscious is determined technically and how far dreams are co-determinants of technical and actual processes.

The two web forums and the radio play composed from them are shown in the form of an installation with a number of monitors. There thus arises a new dimension of the dream concept in a computer-networked world. www.elektrotraum.de stores electronic dreams, texts and commentaries.

test bed: Florian Clauß, Martin Conrads, Ulrich Gutmair, Anja Heilmann, Kito Nedo, Kathrin Röggla, Stefan Schreck, Vera Tollmann, Stephanie Wurster
the group emerged from parts of the Berlin net.radio/authors' collective convex tv. Multimedia projects (radio, Internet, installations) at numerous international festivals and exhibitions, Multimedia Prize of the State Capital of Stuttgart for the radio play werkleitz.com (2000), radio plays: HOCHDRUCK/dreharbeiten (BR 1999, by Röggla/Gutmair/Schreck/Conrads), Selbstläufer (BR 2000, by Kathrin Röggla)

BR/intermedium 2 2002