Sleeper Experiment.
a project about information management
Project Description
From April 16 to April 30, 2009 during business hours, the artist will be sleeping in the gallery inside a cabinet made for the purpose, and working during the night on drawings based on information provided by visitors. The visitors, virtual or actual, are invited to contribute random input (in the form of words, short phrases, or images) that will become the basis for concept maps. This input will be read into the artist's mind by a speaking computer program during his sleeping hours. In the evening he will rise and begin drawing, leaving the results on view for the following day.
PLEASE MAKE TEXT CONTRIBUTIONS
FOR THE DRAWINGS
What to Contribute
Keep contributions to single words, short phrases, or a few such entries. Long texts, blatant promotion, or entries that are gratuitously provocative or obscene may be ignored.
How to Contribute
Visitors to the gallery can write texts in the notebook provided in the installation.
Contributions can be submitted by e-mail to sleeperexperiment@gmail.com
Texts will be transcribed into the computerized reading program at the beginning of each day and will be read repeatedly during the artist's sleep period.
Here's a common theme from science fiction:
The hero(ine) awakens in a place she doesn't recognize. Things are rather familiar, but only vaguely so. She doesn't recognize the room, nor the scene outside her window. She understands the speaker on the radio, but not what he is talking about. People seem to know her, but she doesn't recognize them - in fact, she recognizes very little, only the things she otherwise would completely take for granted.
There is some urgency (probably a threat of some kind) and she needs to put it all together, to make sense of all these unknowns, to construct an understanding that will enable her to survive. Or (if it's not a thriller), she could begin to accept and adapt - not worry too much about getting it right, just find a comfort zone.
Either way, she is going to have to find a relationship to this strange newness, to assimilate and manage this unknown information. Because not to leads to insanity.
This is an exaggerated example of something that occurs continually.
Whether you find yourself in a foreign culture, or you are returning to a neighborhood once familiar, or on the mildest level, you are just waking up in your own bed after a good night's sleep. The world has changed in the meantime. You have to make sense of it.
Adapting to unknown information: You use what you know to help you figure out what you don't. You may not get it right, but you need to find a place for things you don't know by placing them in relation to things you do.
The Sleeper Experiment posits an extreme example, using nearly all indeterminate information, and attempts to reconcile it using improvised concept maps. It's like a game.
