Istikhara Dream Cycle is an endless conversation held between two entities, the Dreamer and the Interpreter of Dreams. Their discourse is formed through a generative language model trained on the English translation of Ibn Sirin’s 7th century oneiric manual, The Interpretation of Dreams. Through a series of questions and answers, the Dreamer poses increasingly challenging and self-implicating questions, seeking guidance to navigate the moral and spiritual complexities of modern life. The Dreamer’s constant desire for truth pushes the conceptual and formal boundaries of Istikhara dream divination beyond its traditional limits.

The dialogue unfolds as the Dreamer passes through a series of vibrant reveries developed using a separate generative interpretation of the artist’s own work. The answer to each question manifests in two forms. While the diviner speaks the reading, it also reveals itself visually in an ideogrammatic form, a totemic symbol that blends Arabic, Bangla, and Latin letterforms.

About the Filmmaker

Sadia Quddus (she/her) is a media artist and graphic designer based in Los Angeles. Drawing upon her Islamic heritage, her work crafts a new spiritual practice focused on the confluence of the technological, political, and metaphysical. Her practice utilizes observation and endurance through performance and ritual, connecting to natural landscapes through the manipulation of image surfaces. Her current research studies hyper-visibility, digital surveillance, sacred ecologies, empire, and autonomy. Sensorial and spatial, Sadia’s work takes the form of physical and digital sculpture, textile design, video installations, graphic objects, and imaging technologies. Using abstraction and fragmentation to express complex present realities, she develops her own palette of symbols, motifs, and entities rooted in natural landscapes to gesture at the relationships between the corporeal and territorial “body.” Sadia holds an undergraduate degree in Architecture and an MFA in Graphic Design from RISD.