I have been sleeping poorly

As part of Text Laboratory #3 residency program at the House of Text in Helsinki, Finland

‘I have been sleeping poorly’ is part experimental audiobook, part temporal installation, and part performance without performers. Devised during the Tex Laboratory #3 residency at the House of Text in Helsinki, Finland, the piece is interested in enacting the reading experience spacially, gesturing towards an immersive audiobook, but complicating a straightforward imaging of the reading experience by fragmentation, both on the level of text as well as space.

All photos courtesy of Otso Kähönen.

As the audience enters a black box, they encounter islands of cold light, in which several items rest: a large thermometer, a writing-desk that looks like it has just been vacated, and an alarm clock. Central to the space is a single-bed onto which a projection descends directly from the ceiling, throwing down textures of moving snow, wintery forests, and trains over snowfields.

Within each of these islands is hidden a speaker. What proceeds is a narrative poem in three textual types: a series of strange weather reports from a wintery wasteland, an obtuse academic diary, and a saga of an alarm clock gaining sentience.

A final speaker is installed in the ceiling that produces sounds of ice freezing, wind, snow, water, and some musical elements. The sounds were generously and professionally provided by a fellow Text Lab resident artist Olli Aarni. Simultaneously as the textual narrative unfolds, read by the author, a narrative occurs with the light - the cycle of day and night, the disappearances, reappearances of the items and narratives are punctuated by the room breathing with light.

The text itself considers insulation: that of snow, language, nation, and family. Throughout the narrative the speaker attempts, and eventually possibly finds, that through imperfect mediums connection can be made - that snow, while insulating, also retains heat, and that water remembers.

The format seems to ask, what remains of a reading experience? What do we truly remember? Rarely do we see a book as fully visualised, in fact, many literary techniques are depenedent on the materiality of text in such a way that it becomes impossible for it to be simply a window into reality. Often what we experience are moments, sounds, items, images, textures, feelings. What would it look like to imagine the experience of reading, for a book is also in some fundamental way a vehicle of experience, as a room? To read the room, to room in the book? To book a room?