The sleeping body as an organ of thought, a connected consciousness as a network, a dormant land beneath the waking state, the sleep of the many as an entity: Nik, the Sleeper is a performative installation, a spatial sci-fi exploitation story told in scraps of text. Nik, the Sleeper deals with body, consciousness and technology. It engages in historical research on electricity, for example, and points to a techno-future as a potentially larger, connective unconscious network. Between algorithmic underground consciousness and self-fracking, however, the installation swallows almost all of its content. A fragmentary perceptual space emerges that combines pulsed textual content, diffuse imagery, states of creativity and self-forgetfulness, elements from regular sleep measurement, alienating afterglow effects, and elements of reduced movement economy.
Tanja Brandmayr (AT) is artist and writer and has been working for many years and in different contexts between text, media, staging and art. Undertakes art and context research Quasikunst in cooperation with STWST. Also, editor and author for art and culture magazines. Lives in Linz/Austria. quasikunst.stwst.at