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Here's Visual Proof That Sleep Deprivation Feels Like Hell

Filmmaker Kevin McGloughlin attempts to visualize the restlessness and confusion brought on by anxiety and sleep deprivation.
Images courtesy the artist

Insomnia is one thing. Sleep deprivation is quite another. And when the days of sleep deprivation pile on top of each other, and anxiety mounts, it produces a very surreal hallucinatory state. I underwent roughly a week’s worth of it once, and my sense of time and space collapsed, as did my ability to even process the garden variety reality we all take for granted. Filmmaker Kevin McGloughlin, who regularly bends time and space in his videos, is now exploring this subject in a series of experimental self-initiated works he is calling Cathemeral.

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The first entry, Tram Stop, features an anxiety-producing oscillations between day and night time, as seen from the back of a tram in Poznan, Poland. As he explains, the work creates a visualization of the restlessness and confusion brought on by anxiety and sleep deprivation.

“This video was shot from the back of a tram on a quiet Sunday evening [and] Sunday night,” McGloughlin explains. “The video and audio all come from the original footage shot.”

“The day time footage remains entirely in real-time (both video and audio),” he adds. “Though due to the fact that the trams were travelling at different speeds, the night time footage is time remapped to match the day time footage, thus affecting the audio to become distorted in parts. There is no animation in this video whatsoever.”

The video contains an extreme amount of time variations. Much of McGloughlin’s work involved stabilizing and adjusting the scale of the footage, skewing and stretching to match the underlying video as needed.

“The audio was an afterthought which I hadn't planned for,” McGloughlin says. “It seems to add an extra dimension but in no way was it intended to be melodic. Funnily enough, in parts it does seem a little musical.”

McGloughlin says Tram Stop is also inspired by his twin brother, the artist Páraic McGloughlin, who has been working on a moving image project wherein he photographs his travels down a country road throughout the year’s seasons. Sounds quite bucolic next to the visual and aural stresses of Tram Stop.

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Click here to see more of Kevin McGloughlin’s work.

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