This event draws inspiration from the recent book, How to Sleep, the art, biology and culture of unconsciousness. The aim is to gather artists, designers, architects, dancers, musicians, poets, critical technologists, performers, scientists and others to explore how humans might have an aesthetics without consciousness. The aim is not to explore dreams, which understandably tend to be overworked in culture, but to work out how we might develop an aesthetics that is native to sleep.

Sleep is a complex physiological phenomena that changes over its duration and that has different cultural and physical expressions. Sleep draws out different capacities and aspects of bodies that are expressed in rhythms, hormones, variation in electrical activity, changes in the activity of organs and body-systems. Historically and across cultures, sleep has taken different forms in relation to light, work, sex, morality, sound, configurations of the body and understanding of the human. All of these and other factors can be considered as ground for precise, non-spectacular, experiment.

The aim therefore is to arrive at: Art for sleepers, art by sleepers and art as sleep.
By making projects that: Can only, or primarily, be experienced or undergone asleep.
Enhance the expressions of sleep - allowing sleepers to make art and to act in the world.
Consist of sleep - that enhance aspects of its characteristics, perhaps by addressing different bodily systems