Somnolent Cartographies: The Sonic Ecologies of Sleep

Description

For Jonathan Crary, the 24/7 pulse of attention demand and work constitutes ‘a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within which sleep has no necessity or inevitability’. The framing of 24/7 — from on-demand rolling news to social media and increasingly precarious labour patterns — normalises ‘the idea of working without pause, without limits’ (Crary). This conception of endless availability and accumulation is inextricable from the kinds of capitalist growth and extraction which have instigated planetary-scale levels of ecological crisis. In this workshop, we question the assumptions behind sleep, circadian rhythms and everyday life primarily through the means of sound. We explore how and why human and nonhuman animals sleep, what is at stake in how we understand rest time and what environmental factors affect it.

Somnolent Cartographies traces the contours of space, time and sound within daily life, reprioritising the vitality of sleep through personal and environmental contexts. Drawing on poetry, sonic arts, ecological theory and philosophy, our day long experience offers practical, creative and critical interventions in the essential art of slumber. Asking what can we learn from the sleep habits of whales, how does locality and place influence the quality of sleep and what kinds of perceptive awareness sleep enables, we will dive right into the oceanic feeling of more-than-human zzzzzzzz’s.

Funded by NERC and supported by the Dear Green Bothy.

Period	7 Jul 2023
Degree of Recognition	Local