What happens in the aftermath of infinity? The Sociability of Sleep is collaborating with the Fondation Phi’s exhibition Yayoi Kusama: DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE and doux soft club’s bleu de lieu participatory installation for a day long exploration of this question: How to Stay Sleepy?

Again and again, we have encountered images of Kusama resting and sleeping in the world of her own work. For everyone, sleep is an everynight practice of meeting the edge of experience, in which we are all experts and always beginning again. Through her art, her techniques of repetition, and her explorations at the edge of the perceptual, the sensible and the real, Kusama provokes that threshold feeling of the fall into sleep, when the world shifts around us and anything becomes possible. Much of her work and her life has explored the question of how to make such experiences of intensity and uncertainty both liveable and shareable.

In How to Stay Sleepy, visitors will be invited to experiment with their own experiences at the edge of sleep, the hypnagogic state and the remix of dreams, imagination and the everyday. Guided by SoS’s team of expert artists, sleep scientists and fellow sleepers, we invite you to extend the edge of infinity as you step out of Kusama’s world. You choose how you wish to take part: through the Kusama sleep questionnaire, by recording your sleep rests and remixing the onsite soundscape, by napping alongside the action, opening up the infinite angles of sleep.

This work is made possible in part by the New Frontiers in Research Fund and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Foundation Phi, Montréal,

465 Saint-Jean Street, Education Room (SS01)
Free · Reservations required

To participate in the “How to Stay Sleepy” event, please reserve a spot by contacting Daniel Fiset at dfiset@phi.ca.

The experience will also be accessible to people who have tickets to visit the Yayoi Kusama exhibition on December 10, 2022.

More information | Facebook event

⟡ About our Sleep Salon 9 guest speakers ⟡

► Tega Brain (Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media, New York University) is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines issues of ecology, data systems and infrastructure.

► Sam Lavigne (Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at UT Austin) is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation.

Their collaboration on Perfect Sleep plays with self-tracking apps and furniture design, linking sleep to climate change, Silicon Valley and The Magic Mountain. On Twitter: @tegabrain / @sam_lavigne

► New Circadia is a collaboration between Richard Sommer (Professor of Architecture, University of Toronto), and Natalie Fizer (Parsons New School) and Emily Stevenson of the design team Pillow Culture.

Their recent co-curated exhibition Adventures in Mental Spelunking was inspired by Nathaniel Kleitman’s sleep experiments in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky to rethink the roles of daydreaming, sleep, and repose in contemporary design and architecture.

► Moderated by Curator and SoS Postdoctoral Fellow Erandy Vergara!

Perfect Sleep: https://perfectsleep.labr.io/

New Circadia: https://www.daniels.utoronto.ca/.../new-circadia...

◈ April 20, 4.30pm - 6pm ET ◈

- Details & free registration -

Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/235667095627

Facebook event: https://fb.me/e/2KNrVNBGx

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Watch our previous Sleep Salons on YouTube: https://buff.ly/3uJncs4

Thursday, March 10, 2022

2-4pm EST, on Zoom

This workshop explores the sonic dimension of sleeping spaces using the tools of a sound designer. Through embodied listening practices alongside digital media, we rediscover the shapes and textures of these intimate soundscapes–and the way we negotiate our environment while seeking rest.

Devon Bate is a composer and sound designer, currenlty Research Assistant with the Sociability of Sleep, and an MA student at Concordia University. His creative work explores how listening shapes social space, community and identity, and his academic research focuses on backgroun noise and ambient audiovisual media on popular streaming platforms.  

NOCTURNAL MILIEUS: A SOUND DESIGN AND SLEEP WORKSHOP

Thursday, March 10 || 2-4pm EST, on Zoom
► Register on Eventbrite (limited space!): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/274565612137

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“As the faithful, in the Dionysian mysteries, invoke the god by miming scenes from his life, I call up the visitation of sleep by imitating the breathing and posture of the sleeper.”
- Merleau-Ponty

For Merleau-Ponty, sleep is a performance in which we, as actors, imitate sleepers until we become one; the bed as our stage, and the room as our theatre. As we close our eyes to rest, we are left with the sounds of the theatre to support – or sabotage – our nightly performance.

In this workshop, we will be exploring the sonic dimension of sleeping spaces using the tools of a sound designer. Through embodied listening practice alongside digital media, we will rediscover, and perhaps redesign, the shapes and textures of these intimate soundscapes - and the way we negotiate our environment while seeking rest.

The workshop will include a guided listening exercise grounded in electroacoustics ear training and Viewpoints, and the opportunity to construct a personalized sound design for sleep, followed by sharing and discussion. It will be held on Zoom; participants are invited to join from and work with their own private space, ideally where they usually sleep or nap.

► Technical requirements: a laptop or phone. Headphones or speakers would be useful, though aren’t necessary.
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This workshop will be led by composer and sound designer Devon Bate, who is currently a Research Assistant with Sociability of Sleep and an MA student at Concordia University. His creative work explores how listening shapes space, community and identity, and his academic research focuses on background noise and ambient audiovisual media on popular streaming platforms.

► Find Devon on Instagram @bufflo.prod and visit his website: www.devonbatemusic.com

The Horror Reverie Nosferatu symposium features three panels on topics including filming locations, actor histories, re-scoring and restoration, queer readings, and more. Panelists include filmmakers, musicians, silent film historians, and horror film scholars. Check the Horror Reverie webpage for more details as they come.

Registration is free. A detailed schedule and Zoom link will be sent to registrants closer to the event date.

Co-sponsored by the Collective for Research on Epistemologies of Embodied Risk (CORÉRISC), the Montréal Monstrum Society and Monstrum, Oklahoma Baptist University, the University of East Anglia, and the Moving Image Resource Lab, with support from the Fonds de recherche du Quebec, société et culture.

Friday, February 11, 2022

2-4pm EST, on Zoom

In this workshop, I will share some of the dream recall, recording and editing strategies I’ve used when creating my “Pandemic Dreams” comic series, and talk about my interest in writing and drawing about my dreams as a way of navigating the space between documentation and fiction. We will discuss strategies of selection that can be used to distill and convey the feeling and narrative? of a dream; how dream recording can be a meaningful personal exercise; and how it can also be approached as a gesture of sociability, with a reader / viewer in mind.

This workshop will include some hands-on zine-making activities of a few single-sheet structures, as well as short writing and drawing exercises that activate these zine structures into platforms for our dreams. 

Participants are welcome to share their own dream writing and comics created during this workshop.

To follow along in the exercises, please have with you:

• a dream you remember

• 6 sheets of paper that are easy to fold by hand (I will be using 8.5 x 11” printer (bond) paper for my demonstrations but you can use other types you might have on hand)

• a ruler

• scissors or an exacto knife with a surface to cut on (for example, a piece of corrugated cardboard or a self-healing cutting mat)

• a pencil

• an eraser

Jenny Lin is a visual artist based in Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal. Working with experimental narrative and autobiographical fiction, primarily in the form of print-based installations, artists’ books and zines, Lin is drawn to the socio-political, accessible and community-based aspects of print and zine-making, self-publishing and self-distribution. Lin uses drawing and text as a way to process life experiences and current events, parsing situations into visual sequences that move through, in particular, discomfort, ambiguity and uncertainty. She has collaborated with Eloisa Aquino as B&D Press, a queer art and micropress project, since 2009. Lin was involved as a core member of Qouleur Qollective, a member of articule’s Fabulous Committee, and cofounded the Queer Print Club at Concordia University where she teaches as a sessional instructor in the Print Media Program Area.

Instagram

http://jenny-lin.ca/pandreams.html

Destinée à être visionnée sur un appareil personnel, la vidéo 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙨𝙘𝙚𝙣𝙞𝙪𝙢 d’Allyson Packer et Jesse Fisher explore l’effondrement de l’espace « réel » et virtuel. La présentation vidéo sera suivie d'une discussion animée par Alanna Thain.

Jeudi 27 janvier, 19h — 20h
En ligne
Inscrivez-vous via ce lien : https://us06web.zoom.us/.../reg.../WN_Dv1UEEBESXeWE1eoOXGk5g

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Intended to be viewed on a personal device, Allyson Packer and Jesse Fisher's 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙨𝙘𝙚𝙣𝙞𝙪𝙢 explores the collapse of "real" and virtual space. The video presentation will be followed by a discussion moderated by Alanna Thain.

Thursday, January 27th, 7 — 8 pm
Online
Register via this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/.../reg.../WN_Dv1UEEBESXeWE1eoOXGk5g

Image : courtoisie des artistes

Zoom event: Click to register

Speakers:

Antonio Zadra (Psychology, Université de Montréal)

Elizaveta Solomonova (Psychiatry, McGill University)

Is it possible to control dreams through lucid dreaming states? Do dreams control us in the form of nightmares and other disturbances along the sleep/wake threshold? The act of dreaming and the research on dreams raise profound questions about the modes of agency, (inter)subjectivity and experience that we inhabit through sleep. This Salon brings together dream researchers from the team at the Sociability of Sleep to discuss the philosophical and social questions raised at the margins of the dream world.

✦ Antonio Zadra is Professor of Psychology at the Université de Montréal, where he is a researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine. Having published extensively on dreams and parasomnias in both scientific and popular literature, he is most recently co-author of When Brains Dream: The Science and Mystery of Sleep.

✦ Elizaveta Solomonova is a postdoctoral fellow in Psychiatry at McGill University and member of the Culture, Mind and Brain research group. Her interdisciplinary work considers consciousness and experience across wake-sleep states, with an interest in dreaming, empathy and intersubjectivity. Her recent work includes the impact of the COVID pandemic on sleep.

Moderator Claudia Picard-Deland is a PhD candidate in Neuroscience at the Université de Montréal, working in the Sleep and Nightmare Lab at Montréal’s Sacré-Coeur Hospital. Her research interests include dreaming and memory consolidation; nightmares; sleep during the pandemic; and the effects of VR simulation on dreaming.

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The Sleep Salons are curated by Josh Dittrich (Postdoctoral Fellow, Université de Montréal), Aleksandra Kaminska (Associate Professor, Université de Montréal), and Alanna Thain (Associate Professor, McGill University). They are part of a year-long series:

• Salon 1: The Social Lives of Sleep, ft. M. Wolf-Meyer & C. Alcántara: September 29

• Salon 2: The Future of (the History of) Sleep, ft. K. Kroker & B. Reiss: October 13

• Salon 3: Traumatic Sleep, ft. F. Nudelman & J. Blanc: November 17

• Salon 4: Controlling Dreams, ft. A. Zadra & E. Solomonava: December 8

The Sociability of Sleep is two-year research program that explores both everyday and exceptional experiences of sleep and its disturbances. Launching our programming this Fall are the Sleep Salons, monthly public sessions featuring scholars, artists, and researchers on sleep, showcasing innovative research though conversations that examine how we learn and know about sleep, and that question and expand the methodologies, epistemologies, and equities of sleep knowledge. Exploring the value of sleep research in art and design, humanities, and social sciences, and taking experiential, experimental, critical, and sociable approaches to sleep, each monthly Salon pairs short talks (ca. 25 minutes) from two featured speakers to generate interdisciplinary insights in the ensuing discussion about the sociability of sleep.

The Sociability of Sleep and its Sleep Salons are supported by funding from the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF).

Zoom event: Click to register

Speakers

Franny Nudelman (English, Carleton University)

Judite Blanc (Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Miami)

How does the sleep of individuals and populations register traumatic experiences and events, from war to natural disasters? How has sleep served to shape our understanding, treatment and experience of trauma? For our featured speakers, the question remains how sleep might also serve as an expression of resilience and resistance to the traumas it enfolds.

✦ Franny Nudelman is Professor of English at Carleton University, focusing on war in 19th and 20th century US culture. Her recent book Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the US Military looks critically at military-scientific interventions into the troubled sleep of US combat veterans, as well the efforts of a group of Vietnam veterans to transform sleep into a form of antiwar protest.

✦ Judite Blanc is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at the Miller School of Medicine of the University of Miami, having just completed a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University School of Medicine’s Center for Healthful Behavioral Change. Her research examines the impact of traumatic and chronic stress on sleep and health outcomes, tackling racial/ethnic and gender disparities locally, nationally, and globally.

Moderated by Alanna Thain, Associate Professor of English at McGill University, director of the Moving Image Research Lab and the research team CORERISC (Epistemologies of Embodied Risk) and former director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies. As a co-applicant for the Sociability of Sleep project, she is interested in exploring sleep’s intimate opacities, when we become other to ourselves. Her work explores sleep’s relation to radical forms of care and relationality in queer and feminist cinema and performance and in relation to urban ecologies.

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The Sleep Salons are curated by Josh Dittrich (Postdoctoral Fellow, Université de Montréal), Aleksandra Kaminska (Associate Professor, Université de Montréal), and Alanna Thain (Associate Professor, McGill University). They are part of a year-long series:

• Salon 1: The Social Lives of Sleep, ft. M. Wolf-Meyer & C. Alcántara: September 29

• Salon 2: The Future of (the History of) Sleep, ft. K. Kroker & B. Reiss: October 13

• Salon 3: Traumatic Sleep, ft. F. Nudelman & J. Blanc: November 17

• Salon 4: Controlling Dreams, ft. A. Zadra & E. Solomonava: December 8

The Sociability of Sleep is two-year research program that explores both everyday and exceptional experiences of sleep and its disturbances. Launching our programming this Fall are the Sleep Salons, monthly public sessions featuring scholars, artists, and researchers on sleep, showcasing innovative research though conversations that examine how we learn and know about sleep, and that question and expand the methodologies, epistemologies, and equities of sleep knowledge. Exploring the value of sleep research in art and design, humanities, and social sciences, and taking experiential, experimental, critical, and sociable approaches to sleep, each monthly Salon pairs short talks (ca. 25 minutes) from two featured speakers to generate interdisciplinary insights in the ensuing discussion about the sociability of sleep.

The Sociability of Sleep and its Sleep Salons are supported by funding from the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF).

CFP: Special Issue, Monstrum 5.2 : Short-Form Horror: History, Pedagogy, and Practice

Editors 
Drs. Alanna Thain (McGill University) and Sonia Lupher (University of Pittsburgh)

Description

From TV to TikTok, movie trailers to music videos, and GIFs to short films, the short for dominates most of our media consumption. The horror genre is ripe for experimentation in the short form, through screamer videos, short stories and flash fiction, television series, and even commercials. Today, most horror creators work primarily in the short form; with the continuingly prohibitive costs associated with a sustained feature-length filmmaking career, many filmmakers and creators—particularly those marginalized by race, gender, or socioeconomic status—prefer, or are compelled, to explore the creative and professional possibilities of short-form media. While the number of BIPOC, queer, and women-identifying creators who have established and successful careers in horror filmmaking remain few and far between, the short-form market is brimming with content from these often marginalized voices and is, therefore, one of the most productive media niches for theorizing issues of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and the intersectionality of these identifiers in the horror genre. In attending to the richness of the short form, how can scholars, makers and curators not simply diversify the content and canon of horror as a field, but also challenge our assumptions of how we read, analyze, consumer and react to horror media However, the saturation of independently-created media online and other platforms also presents limitations and challenges, above all the difficulty to curate and spread information about content, creators, and titles. Organized and curated services such as Shudder and YouTube’s “Alter” channel attempt to counteract the populated video heaps on services such as Amazon Prime and Vimeo. Scouring through the titles on many of these services can be unproductive and unwieldy, despite the growing interest among professionals and instructors to create and screen short-form horror in courses and for use in digital humanities projects. The challenges and productive avenues of studying short-form horror intersect with those of studying the short form at large, itself a diverse topic of study due to the multiple forms, genres, and cultural contexts that comprise it. Though short-form horror is often devalued as simply a calling card to a future in features, how might we attend to the affordances of the short form’s value in itself?

This special issue therefore contributes to the intersections of study between short-form media and horror media. We invite scholars, critics, and digital creators to propose articles, interviews, or audiovisual essays that analyze and theorize short form horror texts, trends, teaching strategies, curatorial challenges and solutions, and propose new methods for the study of short-form horror. We especially welcome work by emerging and independent scholars, and from scholars or research areas currently underrepresented in the field. We invite submissions on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Textual analysis of short-form or serial horror texts or creators, including short films, online videos, commercials, TV series, podcasts, music videos, dance films, horror GIFs, short stories, flash fiction, multimedia projects, photo essays, video essays, experimental film, etc. 
• The circulation of short-form horror, including television, film festivals, online platforms, etc. 
• Short-form horror curation (digital, physical, museum/festival settings, etc.) 
• Interviews with short-form horror creators 
• Teaching short-form horror texts and creators 
• Industrial concerns (funding, production, and post-production) of short-form horror 
• Intersectionality in short-form horror production, study, and pedagogy 
• Histories of short-form production and distribution, including public broadcasting

Timeline 
Completed essays will be between 5,000 and 7,000 words, including notes and references, and formatted according to standards set out in the current Chicago Manual of Style. Please see the Monstrum website for more information on submission guidelines. In addition to written essays, we strongly welcome multimodal submissions. In your proposal, please clearly specify the format and scope of your project, including intended length and other practical information.

October 31, 2021: Proposals due to the editors: please submit an abstract of approximately 250 words, including a title and format information. Please also send a bio of approx. 100 words.

November 30, 2021: Author acceptances sent out.

July 1, 2022: Accepted essays due to the editors, with revision timeline to follow.

December 2022: Publication

Please direct questions and submissions to corerisc@gmail.com (please include “Monstrum Short Form” in subject line).

A public talk and q&a with artists Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa about their collaborative project "Black Power Naps." "Black Power Naps is a sculptural installation, vibrational device and curatorial initiative that reclaims laziness and idleness as power. Departing from historical records that show that deliberate fragmentation of restorative sleep patterns were used to subjugate and extract labor from enslaved people, we have realised that this extraction has not stopped, it has only morphed. A state of constant fatigue is still used to break our will. This “sleep gap” shows that there are front lines in our bedrooms as well as the streets: deficit of sleep and lack of free time for some is the building block of the “free world”. After learning who benefits most from restful sleep and down time, we are creating interactive surfaces for a playful approach to investigate and practice deliberate energetic repair. As Afro Latinx artists, we believe that reparation must come from the institution under many shapes, one of them being the redistribution of rest, relaxation, and down times."

The MIRL, in collaboration with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art, presents TRANSMISSIONS (2020). Featuring six new videos about the ongoing HIV and AIDS crisis, from artists around the world: Jorge Bordello (Mexico), Gevi Dimitrakopoulou (Greece), Las Indetectables (Chile), George Stanley Nsamba (Uganda), Lucía Egaña Rojas (Chile/Spain), and Charan Singh (India/UK). Online premiere, followed by a Q&A with the artists and Jih-Fei Cheng.

Presented by the Moving Image Research Lab (McGill) as part of the HTMlles festival, this workshop and roundtable center around questions about How art practices can give us survival tools for enduring zoomlife? How can digital art and performance practices expand the threshold between offline and online living in a time of crisis and connection into a more breathable space? In part one, four artists—Olivia McGilchrist, Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, Emilie Morin and Nadège Grebmeier Forget--will activate warm-ups for online bodies in a participatory activity; in part two, the artists in conversation will Professor Alanna Thain (Moving Image Research Lab, McGill) and other participants will discuss what happens when you work the transition to Netflesh’s sensitive skin.

Moving Image Research Lab presents: Masterclass Workshop
feeling, sensing, filming

Atelier #1: practical explorations in somatic listening
Feb. 20, 1:30-4:30pm
Presented though the SSHRC funded project “Anarchival Outbursts: Movement Practices of Post-Digital Cinema”, Professor Alanna Thain, McGill.

A new series at the intersection of the somatic + cinematic, Feeling: Sensing: Filming takes a research-creation approach to experimenting with filmmaking practices that understand embodiment as relational, ecological and ethico-aesthetical.

This practice based workshop brings together two artists working around questions of corporeal possessions and dispossessions, fabulation and documentary, dance practices and filmmaking. Participants should come prepared to engage in somatic and cinema exercises; wear comfortable clothing and please bring any device that you have that can be used for filming.

We will start with an artist talk via skype with Jatun Risba (London) on how a field research about Zar spirit possession rituals in Ethiopia brought the artist to develop a self-healing possession dance and a performance practice rooted in hyperawareness. This has included working with new forms of language and pronouns. Recently, ki has been living through a “kinship possession” that has been generating, on one side, a language of Terrestrial kinship. On the other, it created a new field of artistc research called ‘Life matters’.

The second part of the masterclass is a practice based movement workshop with filmmaker Ashley Duong . “Being able to react to the unexpected and to truly listen are two invaluable skills for filmmakers working with unscripted, real-life moments. This is less a pragmatic issue than an ethical and political one: if creating intimacy in film is about building trust and creating a shared language with documentary participants so that they are comfortable calling “cut,” then it is clear that these variegated levels of consent are founded on trust and close listening. But how can we as filmmakers foster these skills? I have actively sought out and developed techniques to nurture the improvisational “reflexes” required to sensitize oneself to verbal and nonverbal cues. In this practise-sharing masterclass, I invite attendees to participate in improvisational exercises from a variety of dance, martial arts, and acting practices which I have found particularly transferable to filmmaking. We will practice receiving haptic information through scores borrowed from contemporary dance, we will watch for somatic cues with an exercise adapted from martial arts, and we will practice listening to subtle cues through a Meisner acting game. Expect to feel, touch (safely, consensually), move, and to “get out of your head.” Afterwards, participants will be invited to discuss their experiences and we can explore the ways that somatic practices may help in the development of feminist and decolonizing filmmaking methods.”