We are excited to announce our next event of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop, a late-breaking addition to our calendar, a week from today with Jean Ma. We’ll meet on Monday, March 9th, from 5 to 7 PM in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room.
Professor Ma teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program of Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History. On Monday, we’ll discuss some of her recent research on sleep in film and moving image art.
More information on the talk is below. There will be snacks and wine, and there is no pre-circulated reading for this workshop. Please feel free to circulate widely!
At the Edges of Sleep
This talk introduces my current research on sleep in film and moving image art, as both a subject matter to explore and a state to induce in the audience. An example of the recent turn to sleep is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL (2018), a work addressed to viewers presumed to be unconscious for the better part of its duration. The proposition made by SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL – that sleep can be more than a negative reflection on the work that arouses it – flies in the face of standard ideas about reception. I relate the provocation of sleepy spectatorship to a larger set of shifting conceptions of sleep, in disciplines of knowledge as well as popular discourse. As sleep emerges from the shadows into a newfound visibility, it undergoes a reevaluation. On the one hand, changing notions of the relationship between sleep and waking life reflect a new stage of the reign of instrumental reason, marked by nascent (bio)technological capacities to convert life processes into units of productivity. But on the other hand, as the boundaries between sleep and wake are displaced and reinscribed, we are also presented with an opportunity. What is the value of sleep? What can be preserved by carving out a space for sleep?