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Sleep is quite a popular activity, indeed most humans spend around a third of their lives asleep. This condition however is one that is relatively unattended to in terms of cultural, political, or aesthetic thought, which tends to remain largely concerned with the interpretations and actions of waking persons. How to Sleep argues that sleep is a complex vital phenomena with a dynamic aesthetic and biological consistency, and complements biopolitical accounts of sleep, which conceptualize it as exhausting if understood as a space of recuperative passivity disrupted and capitalised upon by media systems, work and commodification. Arguing through examples drawn from contemporary, modern and renaissance art; from literature; film and computational media cultures, and bringing these into relation with the history and findings of sleep science, this book argues for a complex interplay between biology and culture.

Through philosophical aphorisms How to Sleep builds on the interlocking of theory, experience and literature in books such as Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse and Walter Benjamin's One Way Street so that the text, like the art, biology and culture of sleep is a lively articulation of bodies, organs and the arrangement of the aesthetic systems that interact with them. This book won't enhance your sleeping skills, but will give you something surprising to think about whilst being ostensibly awake.