FACT is really awesome you know. In addition to a bunch of my family working there, they have the best cinema venue in Liverpool, and regular art & digital media exhibitions, of which the quality is steadily improving.
Last weekend I went to Dream Director, which our Michael has already written a nice long piece on. To paraphrase, we slept over at FACT, with a couple of presentations in the evening, and breakfast in the morning. When we were asleep, we got incidental sounds pumped into our sleeping booths based on when sensors detected us to be dreaming. My own thoughts are much the same as my little bro’s, but I’d like to add that the quality of the talks was really high. Luke Jerram is a very lucky man to have had the opportunities to produce some stunning creations and have people view and interact with them outside of traditional gallery / exhibition venues. The ‘Sleep Science’ talk from Chris Alford was even better – I had such a poor grasp of the subject beforehand and learnt a lot about how and why we sleep. An account of sleep paralysis, something I occasionally suffer from, was particularly good – did you know that many cultures think a little demon is sitting on your chest?!?!?
As part of the piece, we had to record our dreams from before (the night before in my case) and the morning after the FACT sleepover. I won’t go into detail about the one before (was a nightmare involving an ex) but the one that I had after being played sounds of open spaces all night was kind of humourous! I was up in the admin section of FACT (where we’d had the presentations) and the artist and I had a row about Dream Director! I kept saying it wasn’t working, and he became incredulous and full of disbelief. Eventually he stormed out. I later discovered that in reality, I had been played more sounds than anyone else that night, but I don’t remember them. How odd.