About
Project Somnolence is a portable lab for encouraging curiosity, reflection and speculative approaches to sleep in the past, present and future.
Graphic design by Douglas Pattison.
Working through literature, philosophy, music, visual arts, sociology, psychology and creative writing, Project Somnolence will take the form of public engagement workshops, a residency, perception-focused activities such as deep listening, artist talks, design collaborations and public lectures, a multimedia ‘somnolent symposium’ and a night of poetry, sound and performance.
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.
While about one third of our lives is spent sleeping, sleep itself is poorly understood and often neglected at the level of education, governance and policy. As Dr Matthew Walker reminds us, ‘sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day’. The world of sleep has been explored in everything from The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2000BC) to twentieth century surrealism, psychoanalysis and the durational performances of John Cage’s Vexations (1963). Our aim is to galvanise public interest in sleep at the level of individual experience, ecology and society. We propose an ambitious, three-year project which takes interdisciplinary and practice-led approaches to the study of sleep. Situating sleep within fields of inquiry which include health & wellbeing, sustainability, environment, space and place, we combine creative-critical methods to improve attitudes towards sleep and put issues of rest, recovery and somnolence (a desire for sleep) at the forefront of academic discussion.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to our funders, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Strathclyde; The Dear Green Bothy, College of Arts & Humanities, University of Glasgow; Natural Envrionment Research Council (UKRI).
Many thanks to Douglas Pattison for designing the Project Somnolence logo and digital assets. Check out Douglas’s work here.