Fri 17.00 to 00.00 & Sat 09.00 to 17.00 | Sleep Installation, Savoir Beds
Sat 11.00 to 12.00 | Circadian Workshop - How long is now? Helga Schmid
“It was but yesterday I thought myself a fragment quivering without rhythm in the sphere of life. Now I know that I am the sphere, and all life in rhythmic fragments moves within me.” —Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam. Time is the scarcest, most difficult resource to manage. We can measure it, but can we see it? Some psychologists have proposed that the present has a specific duration of around 2.5 seconds—the average time people take to scratch an itch, for example, or check their social media. In this workshop, you will be enlisted as a researcher to investigate this, observing and timing common behaviours. The workshop is led by artist Helga Schmid, whose PhD research investigated societal time structures, and proposed alternative ones. Tools and materials will be provided, no scientific background is necessary, and the activity will be framed by discussion about acceleration processes and the atomisation of the present in contemporary society. You will take away new perspectives and ways of minding your own time.
Sat 13.30 to 14.30 | Meditative Workshop – Cellumonials (have a gut time), Baum & Leahy
More than half of the cells in your body are microbial. To these trillions of bacteria, archaea, fungi and protozoa your body is their home. How is time and space experienced from the depths of your gut? Comparative to our own, bacterial lifespans are short – ranging from minutes to a few hours. Yet these organisms live longer outside of the individual framework of lifetimes as we know them, as singular cells grow into multitudes by dividing into new bodies.
In a series of Cellumonials (cellular ceremonies) Baum & Leahy invite you to connect with your cohabiting microbes and understand your body as an ecosystem of constant lifecycles. Collective sensory reorientation masks allow you to pause visual stimuli, have a gut time and delve deep into the microbial cycles of your body, to connect with the invisible microscopic landscapes living within and around you.
Sat 16.00 to 17.00 | Spoken Word - Poetry Reading with Lucy Mercer
Lucy Mercer will read some poems concerned with dreams, time, night, the maternal body and mysticism. The poems combine doctoral research on Renaissance emblematics with states of sleeplessness experienced during early years motherhood.