Art sends participants to sleep

As night settles over India's capital, a dozen volunteers lie in soundproof cubicle tents, playing soothing music via Skype to try and lull to sleep collaborators in a German city halfway across the world.

In one such makeshift bedroom, participants are asked to recline with their eyes shut while engaging in simultaneous role play with a partner in Berlin, imagining scenarios such as being marooned on a mountain peak.

After about an hour, each participant moves on to another sleep chamber with a different set of tasks in an Indo-German project that explores shared experiences in an increasingly connected world. Many attendees fall asleep and are woken when their time is up.

Sleep Hotel is the final act of Downtime, a curated performance event over two weekends that revolves around human slumber, controlled dreams and diverse sleep patterns.

Project director Amitesh Grover, a new media artist, said he drew inspiration from conversations with sleep experts and therapists about the human need for eight hours of uninterrupted shut-eye, and discovering that the concept was "largely a post-industrialist phenomenon".

"The way we experience sleep has changed over the last 800 years, and this gave us the idea to experiment," said Grover, who created three performance events with his German counterpart and invited volunteers to sign up for the experience.

"I prefer ordinary people, or users, to discover our theater by immersing themselves in it," he said.

On the first weekend, attendees in New Delhi and Berlin were invited to swap beds in an event called Sleep Surfing with a fellow participant in the same city.

(China Daily 12/10/2014 page10)