A short version, in plain language.
The dreamworld now opens as a fresh field for this show at the HR MacMillan Space Centre. New IMPACT dreams appear as glowing spheres in semantic space. Dreams that are close together are close in meaning, and their edges connect nearest semantic neighbours rather than just submission order.
The previous Digital Ecologies dreams are still honored, but they are hidden by default. They return only while the visitor performs anjali: palms together at the heart, fingertips up. During that held gesture, the past dreams fade in as translucent fish at their original positions. When the hands release, the past recedes again.
This is why the current field has two visual registers:
The current dreamworld does not turn the new dreams into herring. That was the earlier Digital Ecologies register. Herring remains a core ecological story in the project, but it is not the active graph gesture for this show.
A mudra is a held position of the body that closes a circuit of attention. You cannot do it by accident, and you cannot do it fast. The gesture asks for the same thing the installation asks for: stillness, presence, and the willingness to hold a shape long enough for something to happen.
A button rewards speed. A mudra rewards attention. The whole piece is about slowing down enough to perceive a sea, so the interface itself has to be slow.
Anjali: remembering the past
Palms together at the heart. Hold for a moment. The Digital Ecologies dreams fade in as translucent fish around the new spheres. This is the remembrance gesture: the past visits, but does not take over the fresh field.
Thumb and index pinch: gather clusters
The field gathers toward cluster representatives. It lets visitors feel how individual offerings collect into shared themes.
Thumb and middle pinch: gather the whole field
The clusters gather again into one dream-field. This is the all-my-relations register: many offerings briefly felt as one field.
Open palm sweep: time spiral
The field moves into a temporal spiral, showing how the dreams of the show unfolded over time.
Two-hand fingertip contact: field-wide ripple
Two hands meeting fingertip-to-fingertip sends a slow Coast Salish primitive ripple through the field. Circle, Crescent, and Trigon are used as functional motion language: not as static decoration, but as a way of showing relationship moving through semantic edges.
At Digital Ecologies, Hakini could gather many dreams into the shape of a herring. That was right for that show: herring carried the ecological story of forage species, food web, and Kwaxala.
At IMPACT 2026, the dreamworld is at the Space Centre and begins as a new field. The active gesture language is now remembrance, clustering, time, and ripple propagation. Herring still matters to the Salish Sea Dreaming knowledge graph, but the new visitor dreams do not become herring.
When visitors ask what their hands are doing, the system should answer simply:
The system should not overclaim cultural meaning. It can describe the visible interaction and name the approved visual primitives factually. It should not speak on behalf of Coast Salish people about what those forms mean.