DREAMING COMMUNITIES: COLLECTIVE 3D WORLDBUILDING IN NEW ART CITY

Dreams ignite our imagination—and in this class, we begin there: with the dream as inspiration, we will build a collective 3D collage inside New Art City, an open-interactive world. You’ll be guided through demonstrations to work with 3D objects, images, and soundscapes to create a shared “dreamland” together. We’ll use tools like Blender, GIFs, and BandLab to design immersive spaces that reflect our collective vision. Drawing on contemporary digital art, Afrofuturism, speculative fiction, and critical theory—and engaging the work of Octavia Butler, Sayaka Murata, Annika Hansteen-Izora, Tabita Rezaire, Ruha Benjamin, Refik Anadol, Ursula K. Le Guin, Morehshin Allahyari, Legacy Russell, Carolyn Lazard, and the Hyphen-Labs collective—we’ll treat dreaming as a communal act of world-building, crafting digital portals of possibility grounded in accessibility and disability justice. Assignments will invite you to build your own collective world—arranging images, 3D objects, text, and sound—and link it to a growing network of dreamscapes that form our larger shared world. The class will culminate in a collaborative presentation of final projects, in a spirit of discovery, connection, and play.

Learn more at hibaali.info/workshops
Sundays, 12-2 PM EST (6-8 PM CEST)
​Online on Zoom
120 minute sessions, 5 weeks
February 1st - March 1st, 2026
$125 - $375 Tuition
Select scholarships and solidarity rate discounts available upon request.

INSTRUCTORS

Dr. Hiba Ali is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar whose work integrates 3D animation, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and immersive installations to explore technology as a site of healing, care, and imagination. Their research centers on digital somatics, a framework developed by Dr. Ali that reimagines somatic practices through digital media to restore the mind-body connection. Rooted in Swahili–Indian Ocean storytelling, the work engages world-building as a form of decolonial knowledge, connecting ancestral memory, ecological consciousness, and speculative futures. Grounded in collaboration and accessibility, Dr. Ali creates digital environments that foster reflection, community, and collective restoration. The practice enacts a politics of slowness and care, transforming technological spaces into portals of connection and possibility. Learn more at hibaali.info
Image credit: Student project from previous iteration of the class Dreaming Community: Immersive 3D World Building, Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency Online, 2024.