Camp New Circadia explores America at rest. Part roadshow and part research archive, Camp New Circadia will be a big, traveling tent outfitted with “soft tools” for idling dedicated to collective rest and democratic dream sharing. This architecture of consciousness-expansion and well-being will engage diverse communities within overlapping indigenous and colonial geographies.

To go on the road for the purpose of recreation, escape, leisure or self-discovery has been a central feature of the American landscape. Today, in this time of highly-mediated 24/7 consciousness and growing political fragility, we see potential in mining the paradoxes at play when we venture out to pursue states of idle mobility. In this spirit, Camp New Circadia, is a traveling architectural ensemble dedicated to collective idling, with the aim of engaging and mobilizing a diverse set of communities within an array of distinct indigenous and colonial geographies - a patchwork of America at rest.

Taking cues from popular roadshows, rec centers, bookmobiles and mobile research units, Camp New Circadia is a performance and convocation space that instigates, gathers and circulates a collection of cross-cultural stories and events focused on restorative repose, sleep and dream-based practices. The project  conjures spaces and experiences of idleness at the same time archiving these encounters and experiments through visual and oral field recordings. 

The programming and fieldwork will be conducted by Camp New Circadia’s team, comprised of architects/urbanists, a folklorist/performance artist, and a scholar and practitioner of collective dream-sharing. Camp New Circadia’s team crosses disciplines and generations. The project will open new sites and ‘publics’ for Pillow Culture’s pedagogical and installation-based work on the nexus between architecture and sleep. For team member Richard Sommer, CNC is a design vehicle for putting his research on pageants, tours, and trail-making as proto-forms of democratic monument-making, into practice. For Matthew Spellberg, CNC will create an immersive architectural medium for his nascent Dream Parliaments. Team member Kay Turner has a distinguished record bridging folklore scholarship, fieldwork, and queer performance, but this project will provide a unique opportunity to recast her ideas in a setting especially equipped to support her multi-sensory art.

SELECTED VISUAL REFERENCES

The architecture and art that inform this project and the “beta” versions of this project – Test Bed and New Circadia – were recently addressed in Cabinet Magazine: Glossary of Dream Architecture: Genus for a New Circadia.  

Greek Sleep Temples (Asklepion); Garden Grottos; Phantasmagorias; Melnikov’s Sonata of Sleep; Taut’s Alpine Architecture; Kaprow’s Happenings; USCO’s Down by the Riverside Exhibition; Ant Farm’s Inflatocookbook; Lozano-Hemmer’s Relational Architecture; Pipilotti Rist’s Domestic Dreamscapes.

Other phenomena, and lines of research that inform this project are the history of pageants, roadshows, history/heritage trails, and cross-country tours with explicitly political and/or consciousness-raising agendas. 

Circuit Chautauquas; MacKaye’s Drama of Civilization and Anarchy pageants; Anishinaabe Hiawatha pageants; The Pageant of the Patterson Strike; WPA Guides to the States; GM’s Century of Progress roadshow; The Freedom Train tour; The Freedom Riders tour; The Merry Pranksters tour; Sister Mary Corita’s Mary’s Day pageant; Up with People tours; James & Deborah Fallows Our Towns project (100K mile tour).