Night Colonies. Screen recording of one visit, uncut, with sound, at real speed, 27 September 2026.
Night Colonies
Fourteen nights of the artist's sleep, kept by a machine as a laboratory diary about ‘Subject 01’. Each night grows one petri dish, drawn from a written description of that night's numbers.draft
Night Colonies turns a sleep watch export into a laboratory diary in which the artist is the specimen. Over fourteen nights, 15 to 29 August 2026, six readings were taken each night. For every night the machine writes a note from a fixed vocabulary, by rules only, and an image model grows one petri dish from a written description of that night's numbers: a picture of a description of a night. Eighty-three colonies grew out of a possible eighty-four.
The diary sets each plate beside its readings and a bar of the night's sleep stages, and closes with a report. It notices, for example, that in ten of twelve pairs of consecutive days the busier day was followed by less REM sleep, and it is careful to say that this shows a difference, not a cause.
The artist is not the author of the diary and is not quoted in it. A line under every dish states that the plates are generated. The diary opens with the machine's own account: it asked her twice what was troubling her, she did not answer, so it began measuring.
Made with Claude Code. Plates generated with Gemini.