The interconnection of sleep and dreams is experiencing a surge of interest across the sciences, arts, and the wellness industry, in contrast to the previous understanding of sleep as uneventful and subordinate to the state of being awake. Artists translate these discourses, in both their scientific and popular versions. The project researches three interlinked fields: (1) politics and aesthetics of sleep and dreams, (2) decolonizing sleep in terms of body-politics and epistemic disobedience, and (3) dreaming as incubator for visionary artistic and media-technological inventions.

In Western natural science, a skepticism towards subjective, ‘inner’ experiences exist, and yet it has changed profoundly during history. Early romantic authors already focused on dreams to reconcile subjective and poetic experience with science. In the 1960s hippie culture renewed the interest in (drug- induced or other) dream experiences beyond Freudian psychoanalysis, which nowadays are incorporated into immersive media technology. Contemporary artists experiment with employing dreams as creative raw materials, decolonizing sleep, and hybrid stagings. Insofar as decolonization is not only critical cognitive work, but also a bodily process and critique of technology, it is significant to analyze artistic practices in this field.
The project defines itself through a series of interlocking core fields, designed to traverse different disciplines and foster theoretical and critical interventions. The disciplines are theater and performance studies and media-cultural studies informed by postcolonial and queer theory. These fields are connected to approaches from neuroscientific, technological, and philosophical sleep and dream research, when applicable.

FWF Project V1053 at Music and Arts University Vienna MUK

Project leader: Dr. Marietta Kesting

Project Partners:
Alexandra Correll
Katharina Schmitt
Gaby Dietze
Bettina Malcolmess
Sandra Schäfer
Annabelle Lacroix
Lotti Brockmann