"The Realm of Morpheus" 2025
sleep, 4 hours 45 minutes
In my new work The Realm of Morpheus, I continue a radical experiment in deconstructing the connection between viewer and artwork. On screen — myself, asleep. My nearly five-hour sleep becomes an alchemical crucible in which the unconscious creates the piece, while the conscious observes. Yet the viewer only has access to the echo of this communication: fragments of breath, flickers of eyelids, random gestures and poses. Not the dream itself, but its outer shell.
I keep probing the limits of perception, crafting works where the artwork either exists in a state of superposition or within a realm inaccessible to humans. In The Realm of Morpheus, dreaming becomes a metaphor for simulation, and simulation — a question about the nature of existence. What if our world is the dream of some Creator, and my sleep — just another layer in an endless matryoshka of simulations?
The piece also references Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, where reality is the result of computations by a higher intelligence. But I treat "computation" as "dreaming," turning to ancient myths in which worlds are born from a god’s slumber. I ask myself: aren’t all our attempts to understand reality merely interpretations of someone else’s dreams?
The video documentation of sleep, in turn, is my reflection on the elusiveness and inaccessibility of cosmic order. The technology I chose is not only a tool but a metaphor: the digital image of my sleeping body, composed of pixels and code, deepens the theme set by the work. When the final stage of sleep ends and I awaken — the piece vanishes, posing one last question:
"What if our reality, too, can disappear in an instant?"