Martin Dörr, Body without Narrator, saasfee*pavillon, 2025. Exterior view. Photo: Studio replica.

June 26, 2025

Fakewhale in Conversation with Martin Dörr: Sleepwalking Systems

We have been closely following Martin Dörr’s interdisciplinary practice, which weaves together installation, media art, and systemic thinking into complex, original constellations. His work, often engaging with non-human agents and speculative infrastructures, challenges traditional narratives by constructing alternative systems of interaction. With his recent exhibition Body without Narrator, Dörr reimagines the act of sleep as a form of collective resistance. We at FakeWhale had the pleasure of speaking with him, exploring the deeper structures and processes that shape his artistic vision.

Fakewhale:Your practice often explores complex systems and collective structures. In today’s landscape, what transformative potential do you see in interactions between human, non-human, and digital agents?

Martin Dörr: No entity exists in isolation; we live within interdependent systems. I am interested in this entanglement and explore it through experimental setups in which agency is distributed across hybrid constellations rather than centred on the human subject. This redistribution of agency has the potential to rewire our sense of togetherness, especially at a time marked by fragmentation, isolation, and the exhaustion of both the individual and the planetary.

Collaborating with non-human and digital agents that act alongside, with, or even independently of us carries poetic and political charge. Letting go of control is the most uncertain gesture, but it could also be one of the most transformative. This process forces us to reconsider not only what agency is, but also who or what can hold it and how they navigate toward other possible worlds.

Throughout your work, the notion of systemic structures plays a crucial role. How do you balance working within existing infrastructures versus inventing entirely new ones?

I don’t think it’s possible to start from outside existing infrastructures. All spaces are biological, informational, corporeal, social and political, whether they are physical or digital. They embody rituals, performative actions, material flows and cultural expectations.

In my work, I explore ways to reroute established system logics by introducing parasitic elements, unfamiliar materials, or strange agents that destabilise, overload, or digest the structure gradually from within; a form of infrastructural détournement, in which the system is used to expose and/or transform itself.

One recent source of inspiration is Michel Serres’s notion of the parasite not only as a leech of power, but also as a disruptive signal or unexpected guest that redistributes it. I try to inhabit systems in ways that modulate their behaviour and motion, allowing them to morph into something else. It’s about exploring the alternative paths a system could take: a system that is dazzled or one that has just started walking, letting the parasite do the steering – a sleepwalking system.

In Body without Narrator, sleep becomes a shared, infrastructural resource. How did the idea of linking rest to a narrative of resistance first emerge for you?

The idea developed during the time of the pandemic and the period that followed, shaped by isolation and a viral, omnipresent sense of exhaustion, both personal and global. I started to notice how sleep, which was often considered to be private or escapist, was becoming increasingly public and infrastructural, systemically tracked, optimised and metabolised by technological and economic forces. My research explored how our private rest was transforming into a performative resource within late capitalist narratives, embedded in a global ecosystem that shapes and cultivates our everyday sleep.

This led me to ask: what if this cultivation/production site could be reclaimed by a different kind of actor – a parasitic, collective one? How could this ecosystem be inhabited differently?

In Body without Narrator, I introduced Latent Entity: a shared digital organism simulated in a game engine, activated, kept alive and controlled in real time by sleepers distributed across time zones. Here, sleep is not an isolated act governed by individual self-optimisation, but rather a planetary ritual and a form of systemic resistance that sustains a non-productive collective digital body, one that grows outside the bounds of conscious/solitary agency and human-centred narration.

Latent Entity presents a digital organism activated and shaped by participants’ sleep cycles. Could you walk us through the technical and conceptual challenges you faced in developing such a hybrid entity?

With a background in art but also in game design, where interaction is usually driven by conscious, goal-oriented human input and attention, I was inspired to experiment with self-governing systems and the concept of unconscious, embedded participation. My aim was to create a system that did not rely on visible agency or feedback loops, but instead processed the passive, autonomous activity of sleep. What would happen if the body became an autonomous actor within it, a player without a (waking) mind’s command?

Sleep always operated on its own; a black box that held narratives that rerouted the waking world in strange, often uncontrollable ways. A physical state that occupies our bodies for 1/3 of our lives. In that sense, sleep itself is parasitic: it hijacks our time, alters our daily rhythms, and reprograms both our real and imaginative systems. However, it is also a fragile, vulnerable state, hiding from our own consciousness.

Connecting to and narrating that black box is an endeavor that sleep science and medicine are recently doing. With the help of technology, those internal processes become observable, measurable and translated into data. Working with sleep and appropriating these technologies introduced a range of technical and ethical challenges. Sleep data is (and should stay) highly sensitive and personal, and its collection is subject to different, strict regulations. It is also unpredictable and difficult to access, particularly in real time.

I wanted this parasitic system to operate mostly autonomously, non-intrusive, something that could nest quietly inside everyday life without demanding active labor in the traditional sense. Participants weren’t asked to act; they were simply asked to sleep as usual. Their sleep autonomously became input for the organism’s metabolism. The resulting digital entity therefore wasn’t a product of conscious interaction, or valuation, but a collective, cohabited host system that embedded and transformed the sleeping selves and autonomous actions of its participants. Yet to activate and sustain itself, Latent Entity relies on being invited. It depends on internal or external human motivations to connect to its sensing infrastructure.

When designing the Sleep Station and remote Sleep Kits, how did you approach the balance between the participants’ sensory experiences and the digital-visual aspects of the installation?

Together with designer Kathrin Baumgartner, I approached the ecosystem surrounding Latent Entity as if it were a production studio, a self-governed corporation, diving into the ritualistic architectures of sleep and its playful oddities.

At the heart of the installation stood the Sleep Station: a kind of oversized console, a hybrid between sculpture, altar, and server. It housed six sleep cabins on its back and a large display of the entity’s real-time behaviour.

The Sleep Kits sent to participants worldwide functioned like starter inventories or loot boxes. Each contained individual sponsorship items, biometric tracking gear, a unique login for their Sleep Seed (their digital alter ego that grows in response to their sleep data, transforming the collective cluster) and a designed certificate acting both as an entry token and a collectible, transferable artifact.

We were interested in creating a tactile and narrative continuity so that participants would feel part of a shared, living, playful system, rather than just data sources, which was important as a sustaining motivator to participate in the parasitic host structure.

Your work often reappropriates surveillance and tracking technologies. How do you see the artistic hijacking of these tools opening up new poetic or political possibilities?

Surveillance and tracking technologies are often framed as extractive systems that quantify bodies, behaviours, and environments. Yet, they are whole sensory systems embedded within infrastructures that perceive, decide, and shape. Often operating silently in the background, they govern the interactions of both human and non-human actors, molding space, bodies, and systems alike.
The critical question is, who steers/occupies the sensing body? Who is granted the power to sense? For what purpose do these systems perceive? And crucially, how does the act of sensing transform the object under observation?

Consider the intimate, internal processes of sleep, once hidden and inward for millions of years, now observed, consumed, and metabolically digested by a vast global infrastructure. How does the act of observation open the system to docking, parasitic infrastructures that shape our everyday rest?

In my work, I engage directly with these sensing infrastructures. I inhabit them with new, troubling agents, parasites, companion characters, speculative listeners, that feed from and modulate the system. They do not operate as instruments of control but as metabolic participants, dis- and reconnecting sensory pathways, revealing, centering and modulating the system’s logic from within. What speculative outcomes can those altered metabolic systems generate?

Looking back also at other projects like Maps*Mists*Making Predictions and Conductive Pathways, your practice seems deeply invested in the entanglement of natural and simulated phenomena. How do these two realms converge in your working methodology?

I see both nature and simulation as part of a shared sensorium, with each one abstracting, exposing or intensifying patterns in the other. Weather systems, neural networks and game environments are speculative and real at once.

My methodology often begins with identifying where these structures fold into one another, where natural phenomena become living data or simulations begin to act on their own. I search for moments when these folds overexpose, when they misalign or create gaps, allowing new agents or forms of knowledge to emerge from them. Moments of abstraction that act as passing points to invite new readings, behaviour models and modes of inhabiting or navigating a system.

Which artists, theorists, or movements have significantly influenced your approach to artistic practice and systemic experimentation?

My recent practice is shaped by thinkers like Michel Serres, whose idea of the parasite as a transformative force influences how I approach interference and relation. Donna Haraway’s situated knowledge and Karen Barad’s intra-action help me frame agency as something that emerges between things. Artists like Ian Cheng and Pierre Huyghe inform my interest in self-organising, mutating systems, artworks that behave beyond control.

Beyond those classic references, I’m also driven by out-of-discipline collaborations and the messy movements of internet and DIY culture, its fail states, empty and self-playing games, game worlds that end, tangled cosplays, badly coded bots, the live circles of bed & netbugs. I’m also inspired by exploring more than human alliances, working with my collective Blockadia*Tiefsee & its worm colonies, hot compost piles, the (cultural) commons and pen and paper roleplay with my extended family in a more private setting.

Looking ahead, are there new fields of research, projects, or directions you are currently exploring or planning to delve into?

I’m currently growing the ecosystems around Latent Entity (Body without Narrator), exploring how it might migrate to, adapt to, or transform other environments. One upcoming iteration embeds the organism within Twitch’s I’m Only Sleeping category, where people livestream themselves asleep to generate income. I’m curious what it means for a non-human agent to occupy that space: to become a sedative host. Could it form rituals, attract followers, negotiate sponsorships, and redirect its income back into its participatory structure?

I’m also prototyping a companion app that allows users to create and cultivate their own Sleep Seed, an entry point for becoming a Sleep Cultivator in future clusters. (For those interested, there’s more information and a registration link at: www.martindoerr.de/bodywithoutnarrator)

Finally, I’ve been thinking a lot about the consumable itself, what it means to be devoured. If consumption is inevitable, can we reroute a system from its inside? Can the parasite become a site of resistance or mutation? That’s where I’m headed now: becoming devoured, embracing the consumable as a tactical position, a starting point of change and resistance from within.