watch me sleep: self-surveillance and middle-aging queer performance anxiety
A video essay for Intermédialités, Numéro 41, printemps 2023

Watch me sleep is a video essay that compares Restless, a video installation comprised of night-vision surveillance footage of my girlfriend and I sleeping, with an excerpt of Under Surveillance: 12hrs at the PHI, a live-feed performance that featured me sleeping alone at the PHI Centre—an arts research and exhibition centre in Montreal—that was livestreamed as part of a fifteen-day broadcasting program in February 2021. This video essay puts in conversation different affective moments of sleeping between these projects: one for an installation where I had editing control over footage of my sleeping self and what was eventually shown to an audience, and the other, where I had little to no control over what was shown to the original livestreaming audience because I was asleep.

Credits
excerpts: Under Surveillance: 12hrs at the PHI
was livestreamed Feb 19-20, 2021 (7pm-7am)
as part of INFRARED at the PHI Centre, Montreal

excerpts: Restless
produced as part of Parallel Lines, a 60-day residency with an online and IRL exhibition at the PHI Centre, 2021-2022

music: Dreaming Of Ambience
by Beluga Ten
is licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0

Creator’s Commentary excerpt: When I started this video essay, I thought putting these works onscreen together would illustrate different registers of anxiety I felt as a sleeper performing for an audience. However, because the live feed is now documentation of a past moment and not ‘live,’ and because I now have control of what you are seeing and how you are seeing it, this anxiety isn’t obvious or evident. These past live moments have been flattened into mediatized memories, transforming an anxiety I feel into an anxiety I felt that is firmly located in the past, although potentially foreshadowing how I may sleep tonight and in the future. This anxiety of sleeping for an audience has changed for me as the sleeper now that I am watching myself sleep and transfers to you (sorry!) as you watch me not/sleep through various lenses of surveillance. This project began with my sleep and exploration of embodied practices and evolved to tap into the sleep and embodied responses of potential audiences through the lens of the pandemic. Without intentionally formulating an approach to anxiety and fear at the start of this work, I realize that I’ve ended up making a project about fear, anxiety, and (night) terror because of the quality of my sleep, the performance skills and presence of my sleeping self, the universalizing experiences of sleep, and the conditions of a global pandemic.