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

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