Terms: intimate interfaces, affective labour, path stop, joy acceleration
The French artist Virgile Novarina has been investigating a dream for more than 20 years. He is not interested in the surface layer of dreams that we are accustomed to associate with sleep, but the profound processes that occur in a person’s consciousness in this state. Novarina developed his technique of micro-awakening, allowing to fix images of deep sleep in fast records and drawings. The artist cooperates not only with the galleries where he conducts public performances, but also with neuro-researchers, and, for example, with schoolchildren with whom he conducted sessions of discussions and training. Within the framework of the Work Hard! Play Hard! there was shown the film by Jean Seban “Virgile Sleeps”, documenting the five-day week of Novarina’s work in 2013, when he was sleeping publicly in the window of the Paris gallery on the classical office schedule, from 9 am to 6 pm. Here is what Virgile said before the show: “I wanted to offer passers-by to compare the time of their work and the time of sleep. A lot of people define themselves through their profession: I am a teacher, they are lawyers, she is an artist, he is a seller, I am a worker, etc. But paradoxically, we spend most of our life in a dream, although we do not think about it in a waking state. First of all, we are all asleep. If we struggle with oblivion, the time of sleep can become the source of the most vivid experiences in our life. From a certain point of view, in a state of sleep a person is capable of more than during wakefulness, because he can see in the dark and hear in silence.”
