Smartphone app, sound, custom reclining furniture, climate model, wallpaper and prints on Dibond.
Perfect Sleep investigates sleep and dreaming as a potential climate engineering technology. By inviting participants to experiment with their own sleep cycles, the work explores how lack of sleep and climate change are both products of the same extractivist capitalist system where regeneration, rest and natural limits go unvalued.
The work is realized in two parts: as a smart phone app and an installation.
The app, titled The Perfect Sleep App, allows users to adjust their sleep schedule, slowly increasing their sleep time over the course of three years until they achieve a state of ‘total sleep’. To assist users in falling asleep, we have commissioned a series of dream incubation texts from Simone Browne, Johanna Hedva, Holly Jean Buck and Sophie Lewis that invite sleepers to dedicate their dreamspace to envisaging a world beyond our own. These texts have been transformed into dreamscapes by composer Luisa Pereira.
In the installation, titled Sleep Study the dreamscapes can be experienced from custom daybeds. The design of this reclining furniture takes inspiration from the deck chairs of Thomas Mann's novel, The Magic Mountain where tubercular patients doze awaiting a cure, as well as from the sleeping pods of Silicon Valley where sleep is seen as another parameter to be optimized in the unending pursuit of excessive wealth and power.
We attempt to model the climate effects of a user’s changing sleep schedule, drawing on research that correlates average sleep time and GDP, and GDP and carbon emissions. Emission reduction scenarios are presented for a population following different sleep schedules.
Artists: Tega Brain and
Sam Lavigne
App Development: Sam Lavigne
Dream Incubation texts:
Simone Browne,
Johanna Hedva,
Holly Jean Buck and
Sophie Lewis
Dreamscape sound composition: Luisa Pereira
Dreamscape narration: Mukundwa Katuliiba
Furniture design in collaboration with
Jordana Maisie Design Studio
Commissioned by
Museum Sinclair-Haus, Bad Homburg.
All exhibition views are from TEMPO, 26. September 2021 - 6. February 2022.
