“People fall asleep into the lap of the earth, giving themselves over to the immeasurable force that they have spent the whole day trying to master.” [1]

Sleep is an essential part of life—roughly one-third of our time is spent in a state of rest. Yet, despite being a universal necessity, sleep is not universally accessible and where it is disrupted or prevented, its absence becomes a crisis. Sleep, therefore, is a condition determined by external and structural factors, making its dependencies starkly visible.

Historically, this vulnerability was mitigated through communal structures and shared sleeping spaces (“communal sleeping”)—a collective, physical ritual that included not only family members but also friends and strangers. Today, sleep has largely become an isolated, privatized act, increasingly accompanied not by human or more-than-human agents but by technical and intelligent systems. Through tracking technologies, these systems analyze, regulate, and commercialize sleep patterns and habits, rendering this inherently restorative and hidden activity as something “active,” publicly visible, evaluable and exploitable for other infrastructures.

In his first major solo exhibition, Body without Narrator, artist and system/game designer Martin Dörr explores sleep as a globally networked infrastructure and resource within late capitalist

society. At its center is the digital and participatory life form Latent Entity, which is linked to the sleep of people around the world, across different countries and time zones [2]. Their individual sleep patterns are recorded via a tracking system developed by Dörr and transmitted in real time to a digital entity—a kind of game character. Based on the participants’ individual and collective sleep phases and cycles, Latent Entity manifests as an audiovisual projection in the glass architecture of saasfee*pavillon, evolving autonomously over time.

The exhibition stages a fictional nocturnal workspace for the participants: at night, it transforms into a sleeping space, as the specially designed Sleep Station, on which Latent Entity becomes visible, serves as a sleeping retreat at the back. Visitors can also get involved in the cluster structure—either within the interactive Sleep Station in the exhibition space or remotely using individual Sleep Kits from home.

Latent Entity is only temporarily visible and audible throughout the exhibition’s duration. As the participants awaken, the digital character disappears and enters a dormant state itself. In doing so, it withdraws from external control and resists the common strategies of media attention economies—an alternative to traditional game mechanics, where avatars are usually controlled through active user participation.

Apps, tracking devices, and other sleep-enhancing tools from the ever-growing global sleep-aid industry are repurposed to generate a subversive parasite—Latent Entity—which exploits these capitalist structures to sustain itself as a “useless” yet active character. This systemic experiment intertwines capital, control, and sleep in an inseparable web, turning the act of collective sleep into a transactional form of resistance.

– Sonja Borstner

[1] Haytham El-Wardany, The Book of Sleep, 2020.
[2] People from different time zones and countries—including Australia, Chile, Germany, Finland, France, Hong Kong, India, Kazakhstan, Macau, and South Korea—become part of a collective organism through their sleep.