The last work I started at Mills, finishing nearly a year later and presented as a monthly podcast of audio intended to be slept to with the final product being a 9-hour slumber party with breakfast served at the end. In 2007, I participated in a residency at iEar at RPI to convert this into an 8-channel mix that would have been presented at the Troy Gasholder Building but three days into the project, finding was cut, the residency was rescinded and I was left stranded in Troy in a blizzard. Fun times, that. At some point, I staged a stereo performance at the house venue I was living at in San Francisco (The Golden Trapperkeeper Lodge) and my general takeaway from the experience is that planning and executing a DIY sleep performance has far too many moving parts and unless you’re 100% committed to staying up all night policing the behavior of participants (or have a team of volunteers dedicated exclusively to community safety for such an event), it’s not worth it. It’s one thing to invite your friends over for an experiment, but all it takes is for one of them to bring one of their friends and suddenly things get weird. Thankfully, all our weirdo wanted to do was levitate and astral project for most of the night, but the art scene, especially in SF at that time could easily have veered off the rails fairly quickly.
Ironically, a few years later, another Mills alum ended up doing their doctorate at RPI, where most of her output centered around sleep concerts that became quite well known at the time. I legitimately have no idea if this piece was a factor – it’s certainly not the first sleep composition or concert on the books and in all likelihood, she probably has no Idea that I even did this or who I am, but for some reason this always kind of hit a little close to home.
Hypermetacontextual 