Invited by the Sociability of Sleep project to develop the 5th edition of the Sleep Series, Shu Lea Cheang presents the previous editions of the series that includes SLEEP48 (Linz, 2018), SLEEP79 (Taipei, 2018), SLEEP1237 (NYC, 2019), SLEEP5959 (Malmo 2021). The Sleep Series derives from the idea of an aesthetics of sleep developed in Matthew Fuller’s book, How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Sleep (Bloomsbury, 2018). These projects lasting from a weekend to three-months in duration transpose art into sleep, and everyday and scientific sleep actions into active aesthetics. The essential claim of these projects, all developed in collaboration with Fuller, has been that it is possible to make ‘art by sleepers, for sleepers and art as sleep’.

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker whose work aims to re-envision genders, genres, and operating structures. Her genre bending gender hacking practices challenge the existing operating mechanisms and the society’s structural boundaries. As a net art pioneer, her BRANDON (1998 – 99) was the first web art commissioned and collected by New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her feature length films, FRESH KILL(1994), I.K.U. (2000) and FLUIDø (2017), respectively termed ecocybernoia, sci-fi cyberpunk, and sci-fi cypherpunk, seek to define a genre of new queer sci-fi cinema. Cheang represented Taiwan with 3x3x6, a mixed media installation at the Venice Biennale 2019. She is releasing her 4th feature film, UKI, a SciFi Viral Alt-Reality cinema in 2023. http://mauvaiscontact.info

Image from Sleep79, Taipei 2018.