Screening Bedtime

Stephen Burstow, Screening Bedtime, 2018, three-channel screen installation, b&w, sound, 10 min 17 sec. Performers: Kristina Chan and Timothy Ohl. Sound Designer: Daniel Jenatsch.
Exhibition: Sydney College of the Arts, Graduate School Gallery, University of Sydney, February 2018.

The bed: a shelter from the turbulence of public life, or a raft adrift on a sea of data?

The three-channel installation, Screening Bedtime, charts the restless transitioning between work, leisure and sleep that is enabled through those portals of hyperconnectivity: our smartphones and tablets.

In the Screening Bedtime installation the centre video is projected at 1:1 scale on a bedsheet, draped over a mattress that is placed centrally in the exhibition space. The left and right videos are projected, at approximately the same size as the central image, on the two walls facing the centre image. While the centre video maintains the same framing of the couple in bed throughout, the side videos show montages of close up shots of eyes, faces, and other areas of the body, with all three videos playing synchronously to a commissioned soundscape. The glow of the bodies, and the thermal traces they leave behind, were generated by a camera recording in the body heat range. The hazy pulsing of the sleeping bodies, radiating beyond cutaneous barriers, visualises the dissolution of distinctions between self and world, self and other: a permeability that can also be glimpsed as the body falls into sleep or is aroused into waking. On the two side screens the habitus of life in bed with screens is given an ocular focus through the use of the elliptical vignettes.