Co-Applicants: Aleksandra Kaminska, Alanna Thain, Marta Kaminska
Core Collaborators: Natalie Doonan, Dayna Macleod, Navid Navab, Tore Nielsen, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Elizaveta Solomonova, Antonio Zadra
The Sociability of Sleep is an interdisciplinary research-creation project exploring the epistemologies and equities of sleep. We are interested in both the everyday and the exceptional experiences of sleep and its disturbances. In sleep, we all become radically vulnerable in a way that requires social forms of care: individuals are experts of their somatic experience, and yet access to the sleeping self relies on the perception of human and technological others. How might exploring a sleeper subjectivity—the quotidian ways we navigate time, space, ourselves, and others—help us rethink and reanimate the sociability of sleep itself? Across societies and cultures we can see traces of sleep: from shiftwork to overwork; from racial and gendered inequities to cultural alterities; from lucid dreams to dream engineering; from stigmatisation of fatigue to the burgeoning of sleep apps, technologies, and the sleep industrial complex—these are some of the manifestations of the social lives of sleep.
At the same time, we also aim to generate new knowledge and empathies for chronic sleep conditions/disabilities, those defined as generating a disordered and debilitating relation between sleep and wakefulness and as affecting long-term health and quality of life. These include, but are not limited to, somnambulism, insomnia, idiopathic hypersomnia, narcolepsy, parasomnias, restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, circadian rhythms disorders, etc. These extremes further challenge the ways we (can) document and know sleep. As a team made up of film and media scholars, artists, and researchers in psychiatry, psychology, and medicine, we are exploring together how the tools, methods, and insights of arts, humanities, and social sciences can enrich knowledge, understanding, and normative treatment of sleep conditions, as well as the collective care of all sleepers.
Our approach is rooted in art-science experimentation, collaboration, prototyping, and various forms of “critical making” that integrate and engage with qualitative or quantitative research data. We aim for interventions into sleep in art, design, media, and performance to generate novel sleep situations that make perceptible, and thus actionable, our key intuition: that sleep is much more social than it might seem.
Over the two years of the project we will host a series of experimental events, including Sleep Salons, maker labs and prototyping workshops, artist residencies, pedagogical videos, a summer school, and a final exhibition.
This project is supported by a Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF).