Oscillations

Durational performance, Royal College of Art, London, 2025

 

For three hours, I occupied the threshold between waking and sleeping inside the Royal College of Art library, visible only through its glass door.

The performance draws on Thomas Edison's microsleep technique, in which an object held in the hand falls as the body enters sleep, producing a sound that wakes it. I repeated this procedure using three relaxation balls, cast and reproduced in plaster, wax and cement.

Each attempt brought the body towards sleep before the falling object interrupted it. The same action produced different durations, movements and states of attention. Repetition became a means of registering difference: the body could return to the same procedure, but never to precisely the same condition.

A technique associated with harnessing the productive potential of sleep was displaced into an extended period of apparent inactivity. Within the library, an architecture organised around knowledge and concentration, my body entered a temporality that resisted the expectation of continuous productivity.

The performance could be observed through the glass door, while the transitions it attempted to make visible remained largely imperceptible. The falling objects marked moments at which the body crossed a threshold it could neither fully anticipate nor consciously sustain.