Cusp

Lyra Crosswell is obsessed with in between places. She dreams about corridors and mezzanines and transfer tunnels.

The Sitri Center shares her liminal obsession, both as a series and as a physical space. She dreams in actual maps, and those maps work.

The Mesopotamian geography in her journals, Sippar, Kutha, Eanna, Ereshkigal, Ur, traces a mythological descent. These are the gates of the underworld in Sumerian cosmology. Inanna passes through them one by one, surrendering something at each until she arrives fully stripped.

That’s literal at Sitri. They built those gates into the maintenance infrastructure and labeled them in shorthand.

It’s turning very literal for Lyra as well. Her mind’s found sixteen ways to hold her at the edge indefinitely.

When they watch her dreams, Meg and Tessa start to find the map legend in the story legend. When they go into the tunnels, they’ll find out if “ancient ritual geography” is just an evocative phrase, or a key that opens real doors.

Deep Dream State uses human art direction and human creative decision-making throughout the visual and audio supply chain. Episode artwork is curated as part of the Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns archive.