3. spend the night

Sleep is a funny thing. When I’ve been at my worst in life, it is something I want lots of and cannot seem to get hold of. In fact, often the more I want it, the harder it is to come by. It is also orientated around very specific states of being. When I sleep during the day it feels fucking luxurious. I listen to audiobooks or television to go to sleep, so often my evening is quite blended into my sleeping - I almost don’t notice the process of falling asleep. I find it very hard to decide to sleep, I really have to fall asleep. When I wake up in the middle of the night I’m actually very attentive - for instance if I need to go to the toilet I never turn the lights on because I cannot bear the harsh lights, instead I do a clumsy (but often successful) journey through my apartment in the night - my proprioception kicks in beautifully. When I wake up in the morning, I find it very difficult to function for a bit - my eyes don’t really want to open and I have the sensation that my feet are slightly walking themselves towards the fridge to get some orange juice.

I’ve been chasing new ways of being with audiences, and three of the works that have left a significant impact all involved sleeping, they shaped artistic experiences around the process of staying somewhere overnight. I would love to write in more detail about my experiences of these artworks at some point, for now I wanted to make some quick reflections as a means of collating some of these thoughts.

In the order I experienced them, these works are:

• Walt Disney World’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser (2022) - a 2 day immersive experience inside your own Star Wars story, taking place on Walt Disney property in Orlando (United States). The work is a continuation of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, an immersive land as part of Disney’s theme park offerings.
• Sisters Hope’s Sisters Hope Home (2021) - a 5 year research project exploring ways of living and creating sustainably in an analogue environment. I engaged with this project as part of a Floating Inhabitation, which is an overnight stay. The experience takes place just slightly outside of Copenhagen (Denmark).
• Ida Mangsbo and Elin Julin’s Crescents (2016), which is one of the art suites at ICE HOTEL in Kiruna (Sweden). ICE HOTEL offers guests the chance to sleep inside of an artwork made completely of ice, Crescents is an abstract space which captures and fragments images of the moon. 

Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser

Okay so first off I should say that I am a big fan of Disney, Marvel and Star Wars - and of course I don’t like everything they produce but when they make something that I love, I very proudly love it. There was an interview with Empire where Martin Scorsese is asked if he watches Marvel movies, he replies “that’s not cinema… the closest I can think of, as well made as they are, with actors doings the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences”. I don’t strongly disagree with lots of things, but I really disagree with this. It’s not that I equivocate the amount of money these films make (and spend) with any value artistically, but when these films land with me they really land. I can still watch (and love) a low budget film which is intimate, quiet and incredibly slow - just because these films are the antithesis of one another that does not make one more deserving of being labeled as art. At least in these instances it becomes important to recognise that we have different definitions of what art is, and often use subjective ideals within these beliefs.

I also like that he critiques theme parks, and again I know they cost a lot of money and the world of the immersive experience is generally problematic in its exclusiveness and we could of course have a longer conversation around privileged artists making work for privileged audiences… but I loved my little star wars story and I want to give it space as an artwork because that was very much my experience of it. I heard Felix Barrett (of Punchdrunk) talking about how their shows don’t aim for gimmicks, the Disney approach is very much the opposite - and I really don’t mind that. I think Disney do a great job of ensuring you can have a good time, I experienced Galactic Starcruiser, as being very sharply designed to ensure there was something for everyone, there was enough space and interaction to allow everyone to feel special. Something that might seem like a gimmick, for instance the performers having an incredible talent for remembering names, made me feel so special - I could even argue that it points to a few human need to feel recognised and cared for.

My highlights from this experience are big and small: the one thing I was really surprised to enjoy so thoroughly was the food - the food and drink is all designed to taste and appear out of this world, and it really did. I drank so much blue Bantha milk over our two days that I can so vividly bring that taste to my mouth - it’s imprinted on my taste palette and I can feel very nostalgic thinking about it, it feels as though it belongs to me somehow. It is interesting that on such a high budget experience my highlights are small things like blue milk and my name being remembered, but they perhaps land with more resonance owing to all the elements that bring me sensorially to a new space - the interior design, soundscapes, smells, characters and video design etc. 

It was also (I think) my first time experiencing an AI as part of a performative experience, and I loved how this technology was integrated. In your hotel room there was an AI system who you could talk to, who would advise, summarise and play with you - she was incredible. She occupied a space where you were allowed to experience more of the world and be private, she didn’t necessarily replace the real interaction but she was a non-judgemental helpline in the room you were sleeping in - and again the weight of having something so precious in the room with you is really profound. These things are very hard to write about because I can’t really pick things out, or at least when I do they sound much thinner than how I truly experienced them. I love to be overwhelmed like this, not bombarded necessarily - but I am really able to get lost, I become a child again and the transformative power of that energy should not be disregarded.

Sisters Hope Home

I’m very happy I got to see this and include it because it stands out substantially due to its form - embedded in research and defying capitalistic structures within the art world. This almost feels too private to write about - whereas the other works are perhaps internal reactions to considerable external environments, here I am reflecting upon internal reactions to my internal environment. I am just so impressed by Sisters Hope’s ability to turn a framework for living and being on its head, they tantalise you with connectivity, they care for you but you must also care for them, they leave you alone and you don’t even realise the facilitator has gone, you are self sustaining and caught inside a shared group experience.

My highlight of this experience is a new social experience, the non-friends you make overnight - there’s an ephemeral connection between strangers, who are not strange but somehow also distant. It feels very serious in the moment, but there are also things in the way, like the rules of the house, which are kind of just methods of disorientation. The imprint it leaves is very different, I both want to go back and it is also nice to only have these weird memories of holding a stranger in your arms not knowing their name, what time it is or what is going to happen next.

I could sense the magic of it when it was time to leave, the person I exited with helped me get back to the centre of Copenhagen - I had such a strong wish to not check my phone just yet, I wanted to just extend it a tiny bit longer. So we talked together, found our way to a train station and whilst we sat in the waiting room it started to snow - we didn’t film it on our phones we just went outside again to feel it. 

Crescents

This one is fun to discuss because it maybe would not consider itself as a performance, unlike the others it has no facilitators beyond the hotel staff. However, in terms of feeling the art and being together with the medium of the work it has an immediate power. ICE HOTEL host a residency for international artists each year to create their hotel rooms, the only rule being that there must be a bed inside the room. The rooms open in the day as an art gallery and in the night they can be slept in. There is a permanent hotel which is consistent in its temperature and there is a winter hotel that is sent back into the river each Spring. I stayed in a room/work titled Crescents - some of the rooms are fun, some are quite abstract, I would say mine was very beautiful.

It is funny because we actually spent most of our time in the room sleeping - it is only available from 18.00-08.30 and it is slightly too cold to be inside for too long either side of actually sleeping. I didn’t expect it to do much, if that makes sense - I imagined we would get wrapped up in our sleeping bags, look at the room for a bit thinking ‘wow this is beautiful’ and then go to sleep. The process itself was both exactly as I imagined and completely different. I dreamt about our room, whilst we slept in it - I kind of faded in and out of consciousness and while we had the lights turned on I consciously and unconsciously saw the artwork in vivid colour - I saw its geometric dance of light and shape and shadow, I remembered it and dreamt up new realities. I didn’t dream that something happened per se, I just dreamt it. Perhaps after seeing the Northern Lights the night before (wow) I mixed the two worlds, somehow I painted the ice in space across the sky within my fantasy.

You know that feeling after the first night of a holiday when you have to go look out the window to check that you are actually there? Maybe that is something adults are supposed to grow out of? Anyway, I definitely still do it. What was interesting with the ICE HOTEL experience is that you could feel the space so clearly, knowing you were there even with the lights off or your eyes closed. I love how varied the experience of coldness is, I could feel the cold air on my face which got much easier to embrace, it’s a tingling superficial sensation. There’s a much deeper coldness which does not necessarily have a temperature to it, it is some kind of stiffness and tightening of the body in response to the cold - in my imagination it feels as though the bones become harder. This was something new to experience, where every time I would wake up in the night, I would know instantly where I was, I could feel the artwork so clearly.

Some Finishing Thoughts

• I feel all these works needed to be overnight, it allowed them to expose themselves to me in points where I was vulnerable and it made them harder to leave.
• I started to think about other works I would like to sleep inside, my top choice is Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller’s Storm Room (2009).
• I have such a small sense of smell that I often feel excluded from profound sensory experiences, the overnight framework allows me to meet the work in a stronger sensorial capacity.
• I would be very interested to make something overnight. 
• I would have loved to see Zecora Ura's Hotel Medea (2009), I wish I could include it within this list - but I didn’t see it. Also Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel (2017).
• Whilst some of these works involve choreographic interventions / propositions - my sensation of their strongest physicality lies in unexpected places, for instance the taking away of time in Sisters Hope Home or the cold resting in the body in Crescents.
• Despite loving all of these works, it is important to recognise I could have stayed at Sisters Hope Home for a few weeks for the price of one night at Galactic Starcruiser - yet both experiences offer food a bed and performance experiences within the price. Even beyond the problematic nature of who this excludes, it comes along with a very real sensation of needing to get your moneys worth - which is a sensation I sadly experience more and more with the artwork I experience.

photo one - bernadotte & kylberg’s a midsummer night’s dream, author 
photo two - passenger cabin, disney tourist blog

photo three - blue milk, star wars: episode iv - a new hope

photo four - dormitory, sisters hope

photo five - blindfolding, sisters hope

photo six - art suite crescents, ice hotel

photo seven - northern lights, author

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‘Spend The Night’ - Baccara, The Collection & Tracklisting, Track 3