sleep

Hours of the Night, a collaboration between M.D. Coverley and Stephanie Strickland, is the most recent of their joint explorations. It arose from a concern for the portability of software in the current platform-rich e-lit environment, particularly because many of the tools they used in the past (Director, Flash) are no longer supported or have limited reach. Wishing to make use of a widely available and easily managed tool, they chose PowerPoint, believing it to be a popular, standard, authoring system, the products of which could be read on any desktop computer, tablet, or smart phone. Making and porting PowerPoint work turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. Fortunately the latest version of PowerPoint allows one to export MP4s from the PowerPoint file. Thus available in this exhibit is the truly portable MP4 and as well the PowerPoint file itself (as a slideshow). The latter is viewable only on a Windows machine equipped with PowerPoint for Windows and with the requisite fonts downloaded on it. The aesthetics of the piece are of course not those of a bit of a film but of a series of slides. Hours of the Night, an experimental poem, addresses subjects often avoided—age and aging, sleep and the night. (Source: ELO 2016, Artist's statement)

Les huit quartiers du sommeil was written in January-February 2007 during a six-week residency at Yaddo, where I didn't sleep at all. Thanks everyone at the Yaddo dinner table, for listening to thunks and rattlings of this text coming to life. And thanks CALQ, for helping me get to Yaddo.

The web-iteration of Les huit quartiers du sommeil was created in Montreal in July-August 2007. Thanks Sandra Dametto for the brilliant Google Maps idea. Thanks in advance Google Maps, for having a sense of humour - all the satellite photos are totally copyright you. Thanks Google Images for finding all the other images and thanks photoshop filters for making them look like something I would do. The tapestry obscuring the left side of the main map is lifted from Vermeer's The Art of Painting.

Les huit quartiers du sommeil was published in print in French translation in Le Livre de chevet, an anthology edited by Daniel Canty, published by Le Quartanier, Montreal, QC, Fall 2009. Thanks most of all to Daniel Canty for sending me stumbling into the theme of sleep in the first place.

This poem is constructed around an erotic scenario between two recurring characters in Sondheim’s writing: Nikuko “a Russian ballet dancer” and Dr. Leopold Konninger. From the loading frame in this Flash piece, we are provided a point of view as if we’re the computer and are about to enter Sondheim’s imagination, and the audio doesn’t set this up as a comforting prospect. The poem seems to be designed to disturb as images of fragmented, objectified human beings gaze at one from positions of powerlessness and empowerment. Nikuko herself is portrayed as a kind of geisha dominatrix, particularly when juxtaposed with Dr. Konninger’s post-coital supine body. Subsequent images of a pile of heads and body parts and phrases like “carnage and extasy” create an unsettling mix of death and “la petit mort.”

(Source: Leonardo Flores)