Sleep Paralysis, Somnambulism and the Uncanny - 3

The sleepwalker appears to be an automaton, a puppet, animated by some unseen force.  In fact, Jentch explicitly refers to somnambulism as being a state capable of invoking a sense of the uncanny in the observer for this very reason.

The trigger for this piece was the artist’s own personal experience of sleepwalking (where, as in one scene in the film, he destroyed his own study while in a somnambulistic state, and knew nothing of his actions until he discovered the disorder of the study in the morning.)

However, this does not make the work merely autobiographical, or therapeutic in a cathartic sense.  Page has used his own personal experience of this phenomenon as an emotional engine to drive the intensity of the film, but he has then channeled this energy to push the subject forward into philosophical, social and political territories of investigation and exploration.  With the global increase in hyper-technologies-those telematic methodologies which go beyond the necessary functionality of the mechanical-computers, mobile phones, portable personal music collections-thousands of tracks carried in a pocket-size box- global positioning devices, etc, we are moving closer to a state of complete immersion in alternative dimensions, alternative that is to consensus reality.  There already exists the technology- head –mounted stereoscopic displays, data gloves (producing a ‘virtual’ cyber hand of for the user in cyber space), even pressure responsive sensors, so that the fully immersed ‘cybernaute’ feels as if they are actually touching objects which do not exist in the real world-which enables us to enter dimensions which challenge the dominance of a collective and consensual singular reality.  Dimensions, which bear more than a passing resemblance to the dream world.  At the same time the exponential expansion of capitalist production, consumption and waste proliferation is turning the world population into a sleep – and therefore dream-starved mass, hardly anyone sleeps eight hours a night anymore, the norm is more like four or five.  We are exchanging the interior dream world of our unconscious for the exterior dream world of computer-generated realities.

Sleep disorders proliferate.  We are becoming dislocated from the unconscious.  But, paradoxically, the reality we are creating begins to resemble that very unconscious.  A three-dimensional, stereoscopic realm where our wildest fantasies are only a mouse click away.  Our unconscious content seemingly no longer has a need to find expression in panoply of mythic symbols.  Secret wishes and hidden desires can be instigated and simulated in glorious 3-D within the realm of the virtual, the new, pixilated paradise of cyberspace.

We are experiencing an epidemic of somnambulism.  Our natural body and brain rhythms, thousands of years old, sleeping at dusk, waking with the dawn- have been disrupted and reconfigured by the onslaught of a techno-capitalist interruption of ‘standard reality’.  We now move between different levels of reality on an hour-to-hour basis, thinking nothing of talking to someone on the other side of the world, while viewing their image on a screen, listening to music a century old, while manipulating futuristic images in three dimensions, creating new realities, downloading possibilities, surfing the dark underbelly of the new world the digital collective unconscious.

A man wakes to find his murdered wife in bed next to him; she has been subjected to a violent and frenzied knife attack during the night.  But all the windows and doors are secure; there has been no break-in.  The man has committed murder whilst sleepwalking.  The unconscious is leaking into the real.  With the aid of technology, hyper-capitalism and the abolition of moral and social order, we are creating a reality that is only a whisper away from the tumultuous derangement and deregulated desire of the unconscious mind.  Freud’s hidden domain is now exposed for all to see.

References
1) REM stands for ‘Rapid Eye Movement’, that characteristic physiological indicator that the subject is dreaming.  It would appear that the eyes move in this way because they are following the unfolding events of the dream.
2) Jorge Conesa, Wrestling with Ghosts:  A Personal and Scientific Account of Sleep Paralysis, Xlibris Corporation, 2004
3) Ibid
4) Tiny Pain, 2005, 2 minutes, 16mm colour, mastered to DVD, single screen projection
5) Unknown Disturbance, 2004, 10 minutes, double slide projection for two screen projectors, two screens, dimensions variable.
6) Sleepwalker, 2005, Digi-Beta/16mm mastered to DVD, two projectors, two screens dimensions variable.
7) The term ‘telematic’ has been appropriated by the electronic arts community to describe artwork, which employs modern communications medium as part of its structure, or process.  A telemeter is an apparatus for recording readings of an instrument at a distance, usually by means of radio.  The term ‘telematics’ was first coined by Simon Nora in the late 1970s to mean computer-mediated telecommunications, or remote, automatic transmissions of information.

Richard Dyer is a poet, News Editor of Contemporary magazine, Assistant Editor of Third Text and Managing Editor of Wasafiri

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