SLEEPING BODIES: Observation, Calibration, and Control

A public conversation on the relation between science, technology, space, and the sleeping body. This talk brings together Jonathan Crary, the author of 24/7: Late Capitalismand the Ends of Sleep, with Kenton Kroker, the author of The Sleep Of Others and the Transformation of Sleep Research, and Robert Kirkbride, author of Architecture and Memory. This conversation is part of the multi-component exhibition and public events program entitled TEST BED: a Sleep Forum, to be held in the Aronson Gallery, Parsons New School University, 66 5th Avenue, NYC February 17 - March 10, 2018.

As popular culture has increasingly sought to optimize sleep and to comfort the sleeping body through monitoring, accessorizing, and medicating the eight-hour sleep cycle, recent scholarship has depicted a denaturalized sleep located within the institutional spaces of the laboratory and the asylum as well as the extended political spaces of global capital. The resulting historical contexts address the subjection of sleep to scientific experiment, medical scrutiny, and managerial efficiency. As one in a series of events from TEST BED, Pillow Culture is pleased to present this evening’s wide-ranging conversation on the contemporary experience of sleep.

Speakers:

Jonathan Crary, author, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University, founding editor of Zone Books

Kenton Kroker, author, The Sleep of Others and the Transformations of Sleep Research, Associate Professor, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of York, Canada

Robert Kirkbride, author, Architecture and Memory, Dean of the School of Constructed Environments Parsons New School

Nocturnes

As part of the exhibition Test Bed, artists Tom Kotik and Robert Deeds presented a short program of improvised nocturnes composed live on electronic instruments. Evocative of the night, these musical dreamscapes will activate the gallery space through sound, building an aural platform for a journey into the collective unconscious.

Performers:

Tom Kotik is an artist, curator and musician based in Brooklyn New York. He makes sculpture that strives to visualize music. Tom Kotik received his MFA from Hunter College in 2004 and BS from New York University in 1993.

Robert Deeds is a sculptor and sound artist living in Brooklyn. His current work takes the form of composed and performed fictional narrative constructs utilizing field recordings, invented electronics, and modified drum machines.

Sleeping in Outer Space

At the extremes of history and technology, how might antiquity’s abaton and the astronaut’s space capsule inform the contemporary sleep experience? An astronauts sleep is as vital to their own health as it is to the well-being of all of the crew members and ultimately, their mission success. Examining the physiological and psychological stressors for humans living in micro-gravity environments, Michael Morris will discuss a multitude of factors and design considerations for sleeping berths in future deep space habitats. Using ancient Egyptian color cures as her point of departure, color scientist Gillian C. Rose will discuss the historic and medicinal uses of color, light temperature and the body’s circadian rhythms on human sleep and the constructed environment.

Speakers:

Michael Morris is the founder with the late Yoshiko Sato of the Morris Sato Studio, an architecture practice based in New York City from 1996. A collaborative member of SEArch (Space Exploration Architecture), Morris was the team leader of the winning NASA’s Centennial Challenge with Mars Ice House. Current SEArch work includes NASA’s on Mars Ice Home and designs for a leading Aerospace Corporation. For the 13th year, Morris leads the 3rd NASA’s X-HAB / Space Architecture Studio at Pratt Institute.

Gillian C. Rose, ASID, AIA, CMG, IACC NA color scientist & interior designer. Expert in creating and supporting the function of space & experience by avoiding adverse reactions based on personality and intent.

Sleep Sanctuaries and Collective Dreaming

Western medical and scientific studies, oscillating between a psychological or a physiological locus for dreaming, has consistently reinforced a cultural assumption of dreaming as a solitary experience. To reveal dreams is to identify pathologies or instabilities. Yet, among ancient and non-western cultures, dream sharing not only offered a means to highlight a medical condition and its cure, it also served to connect, and to prophesize.

For the ancient Greeks, the designated space for this collective activity was the Ascklepion, a ritualized complex of sanctuaries and temples overseen by the god Ascklepious and organized explicitly for fostering dream incubation, therapeutic sleep, prophetic dreaming, and medicinal healing.

Is there a broader role for dream sharing in contemporary culture? This evening’s event pairs two historians to speculate on this and other questions on contemporary forms of dreaming. Olympia Panagiotidou will be teleported via skype, for this dialogue.

Speakers:

Matthew Spellberg’s research is focused on dream-sharing, and the relationship between isolation and the imagination.. His work appears, among other places, in Cabinet Magazine, The Yale Review, The Southwest Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Music & Literature. He is currently a resident in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.

Olympia Panagiotidou is a Postdoc Researcher at the Department of the Study of Religion of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in Greece. She is currently working on the application of cognitive theories to ancient Greek divination. She holds a MA in Cognitive Science and the Study of religion from Aristotle University and Aarhus University. She also holds a BA in the History and Archaeology from Aristotle University.

What a Witch, Part 7 NIGHT HAGS: Visitation

For TEST BED performer and folklorist Kay Turner presents #7 in a series of participatory performances exploring and reimagining the figure of the witch. Night Hags, cultural variants of which are found worldwide, come unbidden to interrupt dreams and cause frightening experiences of sleep paralysis.  With help from dancers Katya Lazor, Lea Fulton and performer Angeli Sion, as well as audience members, Turner reveals new meanings of this hag. Perhaps, she is, in fact, your dream come true….

Performers:

Kay Turner is an artist and scholar working across disciplines including writing, music, performance, and folklore. Turner holds a PhD in folklore from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the current president (2015-2018) of the American Folklore Society. Since 2002 she has been Adjunct Professor in Performance Studies at NYU. Turner's latest book project What a Witch queerly rethinks the witch figure in history, story and performance. What a Witch includes an ongoing series of performances exploring the complexities of the witch figure.Turner's recent performance works include “Before and After: What the Witch’s Nose Knows that Andy Warhol’s Nose Can Never Know” (2017); “Hansel and Gretel Queered (Devouring)” (2017); and “Otherwise: Queer Scholarship into Song” (2013- present).

Angeli Sion lives and works in New York. Her practice attends to embodied transformation and moves toward the more than human. Some people call her a performance artist.

Lea Fulton is a movement artist working at the intersection of intimacy, vulnerability and ritual. She has worked in NYC for the past 14 years in the fields of dance, immersive theater and dance film.

Katya Lazor is a dance artist who graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in dance in May ‘17. While at Tisch, Katya performed in works by Stephanie Batten Bland, Crystal Pite, Trisha Brown, and Cherylyn Lavagnino.

Dream machines

“Dream Machines,” assembles a series of short films exploring the ethereal borderlands between unconscious desires and conscious thought, visionary dreaming, and spaces of somnambulistic sanctuary. Films by an international roster of historical filmmakers and contemporary artists, have been selected by experimental filmmaker Albert Nigrin, who will be introducing the screening.

Aurelia or Echo In Her Eyes: Part 3 – Albert Gabriel Nigrin, 1985, 13min.

Meshes of the Afternoon – Maya Deren, 1943, 12min.

Dreams That Money Can Buy – Hans Richter, 1946, 80min.

As part of the exhibition installation, OPHELIA is a video based on an architectural, interdisciplinary performance by Nadja Verena Marcin. Drawing on masterworks from art history—such as John Everett Millais’s painting of the same name, “Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank” (Jeff Koons, 1985), and “The Werld” (Daniil Kharms, 1939), Marcin​ floats under water. Wearing a breathing mask and Ophelia’s dress, the artist quotes text from Daniil Kharms’ "The Werld" about our limited human subjective perception. The image of a nineteenth-century Ophelia, supported via a breathing mask and reconfigured within a technologically constructed reality, becomes a metaphor for our current state of existence in the Anthropocene Period. 2017; 3 min.

Organizer:

Albert Gabriel Nigrin is an award-winning experimental media artist whose work has been screened throughout the world. He is also a Cinema Studies Lecturer at Rutgers University, and the Executive Director/Curator of the Rutgers Film Co-op/New Jersey Media Arts Center, Inc. -- a non-profit organization which screens and promotes independent, experimental and artistic cinema in New Jersey via the New Jersey Film Festival, and the United States Super 8mm Film + DigitalVideo Festival.

The Botany of Sleep

Alongside contemporary demands for optimizing sleep that tend toward the technological and pharmacological, remedial and therapeutic approaches for enhancing the quality and duration of sleep reside in plants. This evening’s event brings an anthropologist, an ethnobotanist, and a professional chef together for discussion and olfactory digression into herbal interventions in sleep.

Speakers:

Meringueshop chef and founder, Diane Forley, has been a long-standing advocate and practitioner of plant-based cooking and baking. Diane’s “roots” in modern American and classical French kitchens have allowed her to develop a personal approach to cooking and baking that breaks with, yet remains mindful of, tradition. Her restaurant, Verbena, and botanically-inspired cookbook, Anatomy of a Dish, established Diane at the forefront of the plant-based movement. 

Matthew Wolf-Meyer is the author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine and Modern American Life. His research focuses on the biology of everyday life – the ways that human biological experiences interact with the expectations of American capitalist institutions, and how medicine is used to ease these frictions. The Slumbering Masses explores how consolidated sleep developed over the 19th century into the basis for sleep medicine in the 20th century, and how this conception of sleep foreclosed other possible ways to sleep while shaping American work, school, and family schedules.

Jillian De Gezelle is an ethnobotanist whose research focuses on medicinal plants, traditional medical systems, plants of spiritual significance, and biocultural diversity conservation in Central America and the Caribbean.

SYZYGY

Test Bed: a modern Abaton takes a cosmographical turn with SYZYGY, a collaborative performance by scent artist and choreographer Beau Rhee and composer Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste. “SYZYGY,” an ancient Greek astronomical term referring to the phenomenon of planetary alignments, explores the frequencies and mysteries of sleep expressed through gesture, sound, texture, and material.

Performers:

Beau Rhee is an artist, designer & educator. Her studio Atelier de Geste is based on gesture and body-space concepts extending into various media: performance, drawing, objects, scent, textiles. Collaborative work grounds the studio in social practice, and haptic material experiences connect the body to the senses, ecosystem and space. She has exhibited and performed internationally; most recently at Kaaitheatre Brussels, MoMA/PS1, Sight Unseen Offsite, Slought Foundation, and Bard Graduate Center Gallery. She is a part-time faculty member at The New School / Parsons School of Design.

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste is a Bessie-nominated composer, designer and performer, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. A current Issue Project Room Artist-In-Residence, his work, through the lens of precarious labor, complicates notions of industry, identity, and environment and the implications of the intersections of such phenomena. He has presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Newark Museum, Under The Radar at The Public Theater, and The Studio Museum In Harlem, amongst others.

The Internet of Things

Will sleep habits succumb, as Jonathan Crary suggested in his book 24/7, to an exchange of personal behavioral as well as biological data for an expectation of full participation in a globalized economy? How do advancing sleep technologies, in promoting more efficient modes of sleep as well as relaxation techniques, facilitate this exchange? Or, paradoxically, will sleep and relaxation products merely heighten anxiety when behavioral expectations do not match a product’s goals?

“Part 1: The Internet of Things: Monitoring Sleep”:  From 4-6pm join companies and designers who will be presenting contemporary sleep aids, tracking devices, and dream induction objects. In the intimate setting of the exhibit TEST BED: a modern Abaton, interact with the featured objects on display, test your sleeping habits, and speak with the product developers.

“Part 2: SLEEP: The Last Bastion of Privacy?”: From 6-7:30pm designers, roboticists, and media technologists will be discussing the introduction of technology and specifically the collection of behavioral and biological data as it relates to issues of privacy.

Participants:

Rama Chorpash MFA Industrial Design Director, Parsons

Carla Diana smart object design, robotics

Julie Lasky design journalist, NYTimes, Dwell, Wall Street Journal

Scott Stein CNET writer, wearable technologies

Ruslan Tovbulatov Thrive Global, Arianna Huffington's platform for healthy relationships with technology

Tucker Viemeister product designer and co-founder of Frog Design, Smart Design, Razorfish

Sleep and the Interior

From the bedroom to the psychiatrist’s couch, Pillow Culture presents an evening of dialogue exploring notions of “interior” with philosopher John Paul Ricco and psychiatrist Nathan Kravitz.

Speakers: 

John Paul Ricco works on social-sexual ethics & aesthetics at the intersection of contemporary art and architecture, queer theory, and continental philosophy. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure (University of Chicago Press, 2003)—the first queer theory monograph in art history—and The Decision Between Us: art & ethics in the time of scenes (Chicago, 2014). He is currently completing a third book, The Intimacy of the Outside. His essay, “Drool: Liquid Fore-speech of the Fore-scene,” addresses the rarity of excessive and inassimilable forms of pre-verbal liquidity in continental philosophy from Descartes to Nancy. He is Professor of Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where he is currently leading a Research Working Group on “Sex, Ethics and Publics.” 

Nathan Kravis is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College where he is also Associate Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Cornell, Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is the author of On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press, 2017). His latest paper, “The Googled and Googling Analyst,” appeared in the October 2017 issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Pillow Procession

Back to Bed is an exhibition by four Fashion BFA Thesis students whose current projects explore themes of sleep. IIt will feature work by designers, Mengzhu Li, Peng Ye, Yimin Deng, Zi Qing Gao, and include a guided meditation. Portrait photographer Paul B. Goode will be available in the gallery to photograph you and your favorite pillow.