The Sleep Lab

The Sleep Lab is a speculative moving image installation that explores dreaming, and asks whether we would really want access to dreams -our own or other people’s- and what it might feel like to watch them.

Built as a commercial sleep laboratory with the look of an expo stand -complete with manufacturers’ logos and promotional material- the work invites visitors to follow the sleep of ten volunteers who spend the night in the lab. The volunteers’ “dreams” are drawn from video diaries they record beforehand, then recomposed live: a video-mixing system is linked to an automated sleep-stage detector, so shifts in sleep phase affect the image in real time. The dream feed is screened inside the laboratory and simultaneously streamed to a web-TV channel during the nights.

As sleep deepens, the transmission slows and becomes increasingly abstract; during REM sleep it sharpens into longer, clearer sequences. The installation does not claim to show what the dreamer sees. Instead it stages the discomfort, curiosity, and ethical uncertainty of witnessing someone else’s inner life on a screen. Based on a fiction film script, the work also asks how influence travels -through mediation, popular culture, and the images we absorb-long after consciousness has let go.

Technical Description

A volunteer sleeps in The Sleep Lab while a sleep-analysis system records and outputs data about their sleep. Two projections are shown on the wall throughout the session:

• One projection displays the commercial monitoring software, including the live EEG readout (brainwave traces).

• The other projection shows the sleeper’s “dream video”: footage recorded by the same person in advance, filmed from their own point of view.

Each overnight session is recorded to a computer and stored in an on-site archive. While the volunteers sleep in the gallery, the dream-video feed is also broadcast live online or to a public access “TV-channel”.  From 23:00 to 07:00, online viewers can watch the sleeper, follow the EEG activity, and see the corresponding “dream” projection.

During daytime gallery hours, visitors can view the recorded material from the previous night. After the first week, the exhibition contains an archive of seven complete sleep sessions, which remains available for the rest of the exhibition.

Exhibitions

The Sleep Lab was exhibited at Kunsthalle Lophem in 2006, as part of the Drawing Lust exhibition curated by Roland Patteeuw. In 2007 it was shown in Gallery Korjaamo, Helsinki.

Credits

Concept, video effects and sound: Minna Långström
Programming: Juha Vehviläinen
Programming of the automated sleep stage analysis system: Jussi Virkkala
Sleep analysis software and hardware: ResMed Oy

Special thanks to Jussi Virkkala at the Institute for Occupational Health Sleep Laboratory in Helsinki and Jussi Vuorela at Resmed.