CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- Carsten Höller presents Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams created in collaboration with dream scientist Adam Haar and artist and founding manager of the MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery, Seth Riskin as part of the MIT Museum’s new exhibition Lighten Up! On Biology and Time. The work transforms the act of sleep into a collective artistic and scientific experience, merging art, neuroscience and architecture in an exploration of shared dreaming.

Following the premiere of the first “Dream Hotel Room #1” in 2024 at the Fondation Beyeler, as part of Höller’s ongoing Dream Hotel project with Haar, Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams marks the second in their evolving series of environments exploring the engineering of dreams.

Höller’s exploration of sleep has been central to his artistic practice for more than two decades. Works such as Revolving Hotel Room (2008), in which museum visitors could spend the night in a slowly rotating suite at the Guggenheim Museum, and Two Roaming Beds (Grey) (2015), a pair of motorized beds that wandered through the Hayward Gallery after hours, turned rest into a disorienting experience. Similarly, his Elevator Bed (2010) invited sleepers to drift vertically through the Hamburger Banhof during the exhibition 'Soma', collapsing the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, and dream.

Continuing his inquiry into perception, behavior and the role of the museum as a site for experimentation, Höller extends his investigations of sleep into dreaming itself, inviting participants to move beyond observation and inhabit the artwork through sleep.

Developed in collaboration with Haar and Riskin, Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams invites three participants at a time to sleep inside a sculptural installation where pulses of light, sound and motion influence their dreams. The project, which will be on view for the first time, was incubated at the MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery and builds on Höller’s 2020–2021 Visiting Artist Residency at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). Drawing on recent MIT and Harvard research showing that dreams can be guided in real time, the work explores the boundaries between individual and collective consciousness. The piece transforms the museum into a site of “literal collectivity” where people not only observe together but sleep together, breathing in sync while sharing fragments of a communal dream.

Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams forms part of Lighten Up! On Biology and Time, on view at the MIT Museum from 28 October 2025 to 16 August 2026, presented in collaboration with the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). The exhibition explores the deep connection between living organisms and the natural cycle of light and dark. The exhibition brings together fifteen artists and eighteen installations to examine how circadian rhythms shape our health, perception and sense of time. By combining art, design and chronobiology, Lighten Up! invites visitors to experience light as both a biological necessity and a poetic force, revealing how exposure to daylight and darkness affects sleep, mood and wellbeing. Lighten Up! is the second exhibition unveiled during MIT Museum's inaugural thematic season of TIME.

“How does the rhythm of day and night affect our bodies and those of other living creatures? Why do we sleep? Why do we dream? Like the rising and falling tides, circadian rhythms punctuate our lives and the lives of all living organisms, profoundly influencing our behavior and health. By considering the nature of biological time, the exhibition Lighten Up! brings artists, architects and chronobiologists together to explore the nature of circadian rhythms in a series of artistic experiments and installations posing fundamental questions about the rhythms that define our lives. We are thrilled to partner with the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland on showing this major exhibition Lighten Up! at the MIT Museum.” Shared Michael John Gorman, The Mark R. Epstein (Class of 1963) Director, MIT Museum.