What if we didn’t need to sleep ?

СВАЛЬБАРД /Svál’bard/ Conterfactual story of a sleepless archipelago is a fiction narrated in 3D.

Archives (composed of drawings, diagrams, plans and diegetic objects) tell the story of Svalbard, an isolated archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, where people stopped sleeping to adapt to their environment in the 1960s.

The archives explore the consequences of the modification of sleep on this society, from citizen’s behaviours, to their house planning, food or means of transportation. The extreme scenario tends to question the notion of «enhancement» and the implication of designers towards it.

СВАЛЬБАРД is the story of a black and white archipelago in the North Pole called Svalbard. It’s a place mostly inhabited by Norvegian and Russian people. Coal and snow are the daily reality of its 2509 inhabitants and its five hundred bears. There the sun doesn’t rise from october to february and there is no sunset from april to august. Carrying a gun is obligatory and people usually suffer from insomnia and depression.

СВАЛЬБАРД brings back evidence of the fictional measure the Svalbard governement could have taken in the 1960s. Citizens had the possibility to modify their body for them to fully adapt to the extreme conditions of their land. The Split-Brain Sleep Project as it was called consisted in cutting the corpus callosum linking the two hemispheres of the brain and inducing a unihemispheric sleep (the kind of sleep dolphins or migrating birds have).

Everybody could stay awake 24 hours a day : use their left hemisphere for 8 hours, then use their right hemisphere for 8 hours and finally enjoy a total awake state for the remaining 8 hours. Being awake with the right hemisphere allows oneself to be creative and contemplative whereas the left brain is used for complex language and rational activities. This new rhythm of existence turns out to affect every aspect of society from objects, activities, spaces, to exchanges, humor, clothes...

(For the diploma, I was only able to treat the transportation, house and food aspect of this world.)

Cities, transportations, food, bodies, relationships, language and even death...no aspect of life seems to be free of the design phenomenon.

The way people are born, grow, think, feel, talk and act seems to be taught them through design. Spaces and objects used to result from their needs or uses. Today their uses and needs are created by objects and spaces themselves. People have been educated and led to sleep horizontally 4 to 9 hours, assimilate «work» to «labour» and shop twice a month or once a week, depending on the size of their fridge, itself related to the distance existing between the grocery store and the place they can afford.

I am considering how objects and spaces could be (or already are) responsible for human evolution and how they could be (or are) designed for people to use the right hemisphere or left hemisphere of their brain.

This fiction was a way to consider how modifying one simple aspect of life (sleep) would change every aspect of society and how design would help induce, if not initiate, thoses changes. I wanted to question design as a vector of totalitarianism.

The project began with a deep scientific research on human sleep, unihemispherical sleep (observed among dolphins and migrating birds) and brain's hemispheres. I talked with several scientists (Dr. Perrig, Dr Iren Tobler...). A fourty minutes interview with the Dr. Lampros Perogamvros from the Laboratory of Sleep of Geneva helped me define my scenario (9 minutes of this interview were available for consultation in my diploma's display).

I based the story on real scientific facts that I subtly extrapolated for people to wonder if and when this scenario would eventually happen. For example, transposing dolphins's sleep into human society led me to imagine new physical postures : if the left hemisphere of the brain was asleep, the right eye of the person would be closed. And vice versa. I also used and caricatured phrenology's principles (that is a distinction made between left and right hemispheres in the 18th century) even though it is now criticized. The alien hand syndrome (which was observed in the 1980s after surgeries on epileptics) was also one medical fact i added to the scenario.

I chose the archipelago of Svalbard which shelters the Global Seed Vault today because I needed a strong political context for the fiction. When, writing my master thesis in November 2012, I studied existing projects that all lacked a strong context. This thesis, untitled Design + Cognitive dopage & Bioarchitecture, was already dealing with the way environments can/could be designed to influence people's cognitive capacities.

For this project, I worked as an anthropologist who brought back elements from this sleepless society. The idea was not to tell a story but to depict a world, an entire system, using space, archives, objects. The scenario was written in small characters for people to read it with magnifying glasses. This way the visitors were forced to adopt the posture of a citizen from the story.

Each detail/aesthetic aspect of СВАЛЬБАРД has a reason to be (see Pdf). It is composed of two panels with half of a brain printed on each side of them. The separation between the two hemispheres spread the idea of a surgical intervention on brain. It is 12 cm wide (that corresponds to the size of the corpus callosum of this printed brain). This 12cm gap can also be seen between the feet of the long light table behind the pannels. The shape of the table is inspired by the white icy landscape of Svalbard. It holds pieces of archives (graphics, propaganda illustrations...) which aesthetic is a reference to the MRI-medical imagery (as people in the fiction get their corpus callosum cut off).

A lot of people (architects to scientists) have shown a lot of interest to this project, whether it was for the way the fiction was narrated (through space), its content or both.

In fact, this narration in 3D can continually be nourished with new archives items.
Using the display, the universe of the fiction can be completed without following a linear time (in contrary to a book or a short movie which would have needed a tome 2 or a next part).

This project tends to question the practice of design and the way designers, consciously or not, nourish the dictatorship of performance. It is a unpretentious byroad that allowed me to broach the topical and political subject of transhumanism, a few months after Ray Kurzweil had become Google's director of engineering.