This film by Kate Taunton documents the installation the sleepover event which took place at Arnolfini on 21 July 2007

Below is documentation of Luke’s presentation and panel discussion event at Arnolfini on Sat 21 July. Click a size to view:

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On Saturday we held The Dream Director sleep over at Arnolfini. We had a guy (a warehouse manager from Bristol) who, in the morning spoke about his dream of a  empty teletubby landscape. But it was huge and the sky was blue and the space was vast, serene and empty with no trees or hedges. He was hovering high over this space.

When he then read his log of sounds for the night that he had been played he was amazed. That night he had slept in a pod which only played sounds of vast echoic empty spaces.-  Canyons, distant trains in the landscape, an empty cathedral. etc. We had made this bank of sounds specifically to promote this type of dream (as these are my favourite) where one can see for miles and experience a vast empty space surrounding your body. Most dreams for me tend to be smaller more enclosed spaces.

It could be complete chance, but I feel the Dream Director shaped not only the content but also the mood of his dream. He said he’d never had a dream anything like it. If this is the case and we had sculpted his dream and delivered this experience. What is the artwork? - Is the artwork the physical installation, the concept or participants 12 hour experience? Is the artwork his dream, the memory of the dream or the physical firing neurons. If he had other dreams of the similar nature but couldn;t remember them did the artwork still exist?

The Dream Director at Arnolfini - Sat 21 July:

Oliver here, thought I’d post some of Dave’s pics up.

Bertha is what we’re calling the “big box with lots of wires in” that is the heart/brain of the installation.

All the pods connect (via cat5 cabling for ease of use) back to this one box, which deals with:

* Playing a sound when the user is dreaming (so long as a sound hasn’t been played recently, and the hold switch hasn’t been pressed)
* Detecting the hold switch being pressed (which suppresses sounds for 30 minutes)
* Providing power and audio to each pod
* Logging all of the above

Attached to this post are some pictures. Explanation follows:

* A “podbox” sits by each pod (you can see the stack of podboxes on the shelves in the “podbox” picture)
* Dream mask plugs into podbox (user wears mask, which detects REM).
* A “hold switch” also plugs into podbox (user presses switch to stop sounds playing for a while)
* Speakers embedded into pod also plug into podbox
* When dream mask triggers, Cruzet unit in the podbox closes the connection on the cat5’s brown pair (which will be detected by the Mac Mini, and under normal circumstances this will cause a sound to be played to that pod)
* When hold switch is pressed, Cruzet unit closes connection on the blue pair (again detected by the Mac)
* The orange pair take power to the box
* The green pair carry left/right audio to the box (the ground is the common ground, i.e. the ground of the orange pair).

At the patch panel end, the green pair go straight from the back of the cat5 patch socket to the back of the minijack socket underneath, into the front of which is plugged a cable going to the relevant output on the relevant Firewire sound interface.

The blue and brown pairs go into a board full of diodes (to prevent phantom switching), then onto an interface board which connects them via an IDE cable to the XKeys Matrix USB interface which actually detects switches and tells the Mac Mini what’s happened. This is the mass of cables on the left of “Bertha’s behind”.

The orange pair go to the power unit (via the fuses, the black circles above each patch panel - see “Bertha’s front”).

At the time “Bertha’s behind” was taken, pods 3 and 4 had audio going to them (as shown by the green lights on audio interface 1).

Bertha’s front:

Bertha’s behind:

Podboxes:

Its all steam ahead now. Pods are being made, control units are being assembled. I’ve been buying all the components in bulk and trying to get discounts along the way. I’ve managed to get some sponsorship for the acoustic foam we’re using from Custom Audio Design.

I’ve really enjoyed working down the studio with my team of experts. Oliver, Dave, Steve and Dan. One day it might be nice to have my own full time team to help me on projects?

Its been hard managing and working on this project whist developing other artworks. As well as all this I have to be thinking about employment for nexyt year, pitching for new commissions and planning where I want to go next. Its like juggling, but as you go you have to put down the odd ball and pick up new ones. The trick is to always have balls in the air and be on the look out for more. Its quite exhausting in an exciting and challenging way.

Gill, Chris and I, have just put in a big application to the Wellcome Trust for funding to enable us to unpack our scientific findings to date, to create a publication and to tour the Dream Director. I do hope we get it. I should be surprised if we don’t at least get an interview. Fingers crossed.

Deadline for completing the work is 15thJune - our first sleep over event in at-Bristol. No pressure though, its only an event for invited curators, national journalists, sleep scientists and fellow media artists.. Aaauggghh !  

Spent yesterday setting up at Spike Island’s Artspace for a 5 person test. People arrived and everything more or less worked well. It was the first time I was a participant in one of my sleep artworks. It was a really fun and sociable event! It’s certainly more fun than carrying out my sleep experiments at home alone. I had the most positive and vivid dreams too. Not the best nights sleep I’ve ever had though!

Oliver’s system was great and collected lots of data, which should be useful for our scientists.

I did two nights testing with the dream director. I had a really bad night’s sleep!  It was too sensitive and kept triggering every 10minutes. Turns out there’s a sensitivity setting so I need to alter that. We also need to attach a snooze switch, to allow participants to get back to sleep in silence if they wake up in the middle of the night. These additional requirements that you discover along the way are called design brief ’slippage’. Dave (who’s dealing with the electronic hardware) knows a lot about design philosophies and I’m learning a lot from his more academic approach.   

Looks like the event will not be held at the Watershed. Its just too noisy at night with sound from the nightclub below. We’re currently looking at alternative spaces. I’m interested in how the context will alter the experience people will have. What will happen if the event is staged in a science museum, a sleep lab, an old derilict house, a modern art gallery? The context will also potentially change peoples expectations, the rules of engagement and how the event is interpreted.  

If we describe the sleep event as scientific research how does that alter peoples expectations to if its just an artwork? What hat should I wear for the night? Who would you trust more, a University science researcher, an inventor or an artist? Or perhaps what is more important is the way I describe the event and help set the tone for the nights event?

The sleepover events we’ve held so far are very relaxed and with an exciting feeling of expectation about them.

5 Sleep Pods have been built for the first sleep test. When you’re inside you feel a bit like a child in a den. It feels safe and quite private. I hope other people feel that way.

bed-design-animation.avi  - 1.39MB

We did a sound test at the watershed with sound absorbant foam to design the sleep pods/booths. Decided not to use perspex domes as it would cost alot and they’d be difficult to store. Came up with a design using MDF that flatpacks, easy to make, easy to store and is cheap. They work and you feel like you’re in a den once inside. The only problem is they look a bit like a bread bin!!

Sleep mask fitted with electronics. Something really nice about sewing electronics into material. They make the wearer look a bit like a cyborg which is fun. The sleep mask contains an Infra Red transmitter and receiver to track your eye movements when you’re in dreaming REM (rapid eye movement)state. The idea is the sounds, eg a steamtrain, will play during REM and will be incorporated into the participants dream space. The prototype is ready for testing,  so I’ll let u know what happens!    

Here is a picture of the first prototype of the dream director:

To explain:

Normally the Mask circuit is tucked into the mask, which the sleeper wears. When the sleeper’s eye movements become REM-like, the LEDs in the mask circuit flash: however, Dave’s circuit picks this up (you can the wires going between the two circuits), and closes a relay. The act of this switch closing triggers the joybox to send a signal to the laptop to say that the switch has closed. On the laptop, software called USB Overdrive notices the switch press, and runs an Applescript which plays (and logs) a sound, selected at random from the sounds we want the sleeper to hear.

The point of all this is that the joybox can support up to 8 people. If the laptop has a firewire breakout box that can support up to 8 audio outputs (such as an M-Audio Firewire410), then up to 8 sleepers can be played different sounds totally independently, depending on their own dreaming patterns.

I’m looking forward to testing this kit on Thursday, when we all get together and spend a day working on it.

Hi this is Gill from Watershed. Luke is currently in Australia performing another of his projects ‘The Sky Orchestra’, which is the opening event of The Sydney Festival. Seven hot air balloons, each with speakers attached, took off at sunrise to fly across the West of the city creating a sky borne symphony. The performance was created by Luke with composer Dan Jones who is also collaborating with Luke on The Dream Director for the Clark Bursary. Luke sent through the links below which show how the events have been going in Sydney.
Festival preview
Film of first flight
Film of 2nd flight
Film of fourth flight
Film of fifth flight
Sydney to Bangkok
Slide show of images