Aarhus City Lab X Walid Breidi & Virgile Novarina

Aarhus City Lab

The purpose of the Aarhus City Lab is to be a test facility for Smart City solutions and a showroom for new smart city initiatives. The City Lab will function as a playground for partners, a test facility for current and future EU initiatives and a place where Aarhus can develop its digital citizenship. The concept of a Smart City can be hard to make tangible for citizens. This means that solutions/experiments within this space do not create the intended impact because citizens living and working in the city are not engaged. Aarhus has a broader and more citizen-centric perspective on what a Smart City is and can be. Aarhus City Lab is intended to be the meeting place for these co-created and engaging urban experiments, artworks and solutions. How can art help realize this vision? How can a seemingly non-technology enabled public space to engage citizens into the concept of a Smart City?

Sleep in the City

In science we know of five main brainwaves that our brain emits all the time. These brainwaves are active at different rates according to our states of consciousness: wake, sleep etc. Sleep is something we do because we have to, once we wake up, we forget all about it and get ready for the day. Sleep takes time from our work time and leisure time. Insomnia, unsatisfactory sleep, lack of sleep and stress is a 21^st century problem. We know however that scientifically sleep is one of the states of consciousness that is most healing, creative, and productive.

The artists' aim is to sensitize people to the profound importance of sleep through performance, interactive art and network. The idea is to connect city sleep with networks and open data in order to create interactive poetic videos projected all around the city in real time during the participants’ sleep time. They want to create a dream atmosphere in the city at night by projecting videos of the city taken during the day but transformed, translated, and deformed by people’s sleep brainwaves. Virgile Novarina will perform the opening night. For the following nights there will be several participants from the city.

Walid Breidi & Virgile Novarina

Walid’s work is mainly concentrated on the question of artist-spectator relationship and narrativity through spontaneous gestural interactivity using digital techniques. The gesture of the spectator or the actor then becomes the source of a visual, sound, and narrative universes. Walid’s work has been shown in Europe, the United States, Canada, Africa, and Singapore.

Virgile has devoted himself to the artistic exploration of his own sleep through writings and drawings. He has published six books entitled \"Ecrits et dessins de nuit\". During the “En Somme” series of performances, he sleeps publicly in shop windows, galleries or museums. Virgile has exhibited his work in France, Germany, Portugal and the United States.

http://wbreidi.wixsite.com/walidbreidi

See Profile

Walid Breidi’s work is mainly concentrated on the question of artist-spectator relationship and narrativity through digital techniques, while Virgile Novarina has devoted himself to the artistic exploration of his own sleep through writings and drawings. Sleep is something that, once we wake up, we forget all about and get ready for the day. But insomnia, unsatisfactory sleep, lack of sleep and stress is a 21st-century problem. Scientifically speaking, sleep is one of the states of consciousness that is most healing, creative, and productive. The five main brainwaves emitted all the time by the brain show different rates according to our states of consciousness: wake, sleep etc.

Sleep in the City aims to synthesize the profound importance of sleep through performance, interactive art and network. With Aarhus City Lab as tech partner, Sleep in the City connects city sleep with networks and open data in order to create interactive poetic videos projected all around the city in real-time during the participants’ sleep time. A dream atmosphere takes over the city at night by projecting videos taken during the day by participant citizens. Those videos are transformed, translated, and deformed by people’s sleep brainwaves, as well the ones from Virgile Novarina, who performs with voluntaries citizens that share their brainwaves.

Residency Mid-Term Video

Personal and the collective are linked in Sleep in the City. The artwork enquires how personal reads the collective and how it can invest public space. Data is used through the network as an inclusive experience between citizens by sharing one of the most universal of human action that is sleep, alongside city data, to recreate our vision of digital city space. The seven nights performance in Aarhus was an overcoming challenge for the artists. They got their way through new ways on city data and found new approaches for it Sleep in the City.

Performance during Aarhus IoT Week - June 2019

Read the final report