Somnolent Cartographies: The Sonic Ecologies of Sleep
Somnolent Cartographies: The Sonic Ecologies of Sleep: A day-long workshop exploring the ecological connections between sound, sleep and the environment.
FREE but Ticketed
We encourage where possible that attendees stay for the full duration of the day, in order to gain the full impact of interdisciplinary discussion and creative experience.
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.
Open to anyone, the day will be of particular interest to those with a curiosity for sleep, environmental thinking and the sonic arts.
About the organisers
Dr Kevin Leomo is a Scottish-Filipino composer of experimental music interested in silence, fragility, perception, and liminality. His practice involves collaboration, improvisation, listening practices, non-standard notation, and working cross-culturally. He runs the experimental music collective Sound Thought and is the Community and Engagement Manager for the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow.
Dr Maria Sledmere is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, editor-in-chief of SPAM Press and a Tutor in English Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. Her most recent publication is An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023), a work of poetry, fiction and oneiric memoir. She is a member of A+E Collective and her book Cinders, a poetry collection about fire, hospitality and petro-femininity, is forthcoming with KRUPSKAYA in 2024.
Ane Lopez works as a Programme Facilitator for the artist-run initiative Market Gallery, and is the co-founder of A+E, a collective of artists playfully working together towards a post-oil vision. A postgraduate from Glasgow School of Art, Ane studied Communication Design and has recently collaborated with film festivals such as Take One Action and Femspectives as an artist and programmer.
Registration is free, and upon signup participants will be sent a link to optional preparatory reading.
Schedule
09:45 — Welcome and coffee reception
10:00 — Introduction
10:30 — Icebreaker Activity: Nonhuman Sleep
11:00 — Break
11:15 — Workshop 1: Sleep Factors
12:15 — Break
12:30 — Workshop 2: Sonic Cartographies + Film Screening
13:30 — Lunch (provided by Parveen’s Canteen)
14:30 — Deep Listening
14:45 — Unstructured move-around time: Ambient scoring, Sound walk, Nap station, Guided listening
16:00 — Plenary Discussion
Poster by Ane Lopez