Circadian Rhythm

Especially focusing on atmospheres and conditions of sleep, complicating the sense that “the-subject-who-sleeps” is a static individual in isolated separation from the world. Brain and therefore animal-centric explanations of sleep begin to sway by recent suggestions that plants, which have no brain or neurological system, can respond to environ- mental contingencies using similar strategies. Plants also sleep, but what sleep is and does for vegetal life remains as mysterious as it is for humans. It may well be plant behaviours that provoke different conceptualisations and understandings of human experience, and our co-habitation with other species.

What emerges is an image of the body as a moving landscape: disassembling the body’s spatial coordinates, its upright vertical and frontal orientation is no longer held in place by the domination of gaze and speech. Falling asleep. Planting Hypnos. Reconfiguring the human being as trans-individual alive to an implicated kinship with other species and a chiasmatic intimacy with what appears outside and elsewhere, thus reframing locality and identity.

So, we enter the physical and perceptual states of sleep, falling asleep, and sleeplessness. In close exchange with a sleep neuroscientist, a plant behaviorist, a philosopher and a cinema and media theorist, the artistic research team of Unstable Bodies collectively asks “what is sleep?”. More specifically, how changes the relationship to the environment, if sleep is assumed as disconnection from the surrounding world. What can we learn from falling asleep with a (pea) plant? What new forms of conviviality might arise when considering a vegetal sensory perception system that also sleeps, dreams?

First, Vlad Vyazovskiy, Monica Gagliano, Vicki Kirby and Tom Lamarre 7 meet with Christian Freude, Christina Jauernik, Johann Lurf, Fabian Puttinger and Rüdiger Suppin by forming a reading group. Together, scientific papers, as well as literature and theory on sleep, consciousness, and its speculative dimensions are read and discussed over the course of the fall. These conversations lead to a visit of the sleep lab.

The reading list will involve works centering on concepts of consciousness and sleep:

Alexander Borbely, Das Geheimnis des Schlafs (1984);

Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious (2010);

Sigmund Freud, A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’ (1940);

Charles Sanders Peirce, The Law of Mind (1892);

David M. Peña-Guzmán, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (2022);

Arthur R. Reber, The First Minds. Caterpillars, Karyotes, and Consciousness (2019)

Followed by different cultural practices and studies on sleep:

Jonathan Crary, 24/7 Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep (2014);

Martin Kohout/Dan Meththananda, Night Shifter (2018);

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep (2009);

Jennifer Michelle Windt, Dreaming: a conceptual framework for philosophy of mind and empirical research (2015)

Continuing with texts reaching into more speculative arenas, such as science fiction:

Ursula K LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971);

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932);

Robert Sawyer, Quantum Night (2016).