Sleeping A to -

As an extension of the fetish based book performances, I sleep next to a dictionary, I did this piece building on my interest in the intimacy between us and our written language/ us and our books.  It is not out of the ordinary for someone to fall asleep with a book.  The tactility and smell of old books are something that people look for.  We barely notice these things in some way, but in another there are few objects that we treat with such intimacy.

In bringing this piece to other people they have talked to me about these experiences that they have had with books that relate to this piece.  This performance made me recognize some pretty intense experiences that I'd been having that books play a role in (like your rocks, Lyssa).  The piece might be a little more vulnerable, a little more real, sometimes I think it might border on too personal (sometime life starts to imitate art), but I think that might be important.

I'm planning on making the stills collected from this performance into a book (probably print on demand), I took stills (1,807 to be exact) from each second of the video, knowing that there would be hundreds of almost identical images.  It's a meditation in some ways.  I've been thinking about page turning as a meditation lately.  Like using a mala to recite mantras.  Like flipping through the entire book could be similar to sleeping next to an old book, there could be some comfort there.  I'm also thinking about including the first word on each page of the dictionary from page 1-1,807 to relate back to the dictionary.  As if in some way sleeping with the book is a way of traversing through it.  I'm rambling a bit.

Unfortunately I can't upload the embed the video yet because youtube refuse to let me right now, I'll try again later.  For now here is a sampling of the stills (I couldn't include all of them because of google drive's file size limits), as well as the video.

P.S. I'm not sure why the contact sheet has pages of just filenames, maybe that's just me, but you get the gist, when I design the book that won't matter anyway.