In his nocturnal history of London, Nightwalking, Matthew Beaumont offers a compendium of the various figures that haunt the after-hours city. From a start point in the medieval era when anyone out after curfew would have been regarded with suspicion and tainted with criminality, Beaumont traces the emergence of a new type of somnambulant for whom the night-time is a source of inspiration. Before the gaslights and electric lights of the 19th century did their best to abolish the night and open it up for approved extra-curricular activity (as well as additional opportunities for commerce and surveillance), a long line of writers – including Shakespeare, Johnson, Blake and, of course, the Dickens of Night Walks and The Uncommercial Traveller – were drawn towards the darkness to help free their imagination from the cares and constraints of the day. Their heirs are the artists, poets, flaneurs and psychogeographers who continue to wander after dark in search of this ‘uncommon’ form of illumination, and often find it on the streets of the city at night. As Beaumont puts it, the nightwalker in his or her wanderings frequently aspires to a kind of fugue state or dream state where, a bit like a sleepwalker, they ‘experience urban life as a form of phantasmagoria, one that they are at the same time utterly immersed in and oddly detached from.’

Suki Chan’s Sleep Walk Sleep Talk (2009) exhibits a similar kind of reflex. A two-screen video projection that combines a series of atmospheric visual tableaux with interludes of spoken testimony from a variety of London residents, it follows Beaumont’s formula in immersing itself fully in the depths of its subject while remaining notably focused and detached. Opening with an overhead vista of London slowly fading into night, the camera circles the small-hours streets like a restive spirit with no place else to go. As part of an evocative, reverberant soundtrack, we hear a background chorus of indistinct, overlaid voices from which we pick out only isolated phrases, rising and falling like the murmurs of an unquiet sleeper turning in their bed. Outside, the city streets are empty, aside from a glimpse of the occasional solitary figure. Nothing breaks the silence or the stillness until, out of nowhere, we suddenly encounter a phalanx of rollerbladers cutting a zigzag path through the metropolis. Moving in concert and en masse, they twist and turn like starlings in an evening murmuration. It is an image that is as startling as it is haunting: a spectre from the unconscious, on the border between waking and dream.   

Sleep Walk Sleep Talk is also a flashback to what, in retrospect, feels like an equally fleeting yet transitional moment. Made at the tail-end of a decade that had already witnessed another wave of urban expansion and regeneration, it came at a point when the aftershocks of the recent economic crash hadn’t fully translated into the strictures of austerity. The capital kept surging ahead, albeit largely on autopilot, even though capital was in crisis. Nonetheless, there are signs of strain. Like a voice from early-morning radio, heard from under the duvet, an urban theorist speaks of the time-is-money pressures of contemporary life, his words counterpointed by cameos of people withdrawing into their own inner worlds: practicing meditation or partaking in what had started to become a new popular penchant for mindfulness. The struggle of the individual to be more than a face in the crowd is part of the never-ending story of the modern city, and nowhere more so than in the Noughties. In a decade where ever-greater swathes of public space were getting privatised and monetised, it was perhaps no coincidence that social space was correspondingly atomised and abstracted.

Sleep Walk Sleep Talk jogs the memory in other ways too. A vestige from an earlier technological era, where powerful smartphones like the iPhone were only just beginning to make deeper inroads into people’s waking lives, it predates some of the increasingly audible panic about the harmful effects of excessive screen time that would start to cause some people sleepless nights. In its intimations of the overstimulated twitchiness of modern life, however, Sleep Walk Sleep Talk is strangely prescient; maybe even an augury of what Jonathan Crary, four years later, would call the ‘post-circadian capitalism’ of 24/7 culture. In truth, the London at the time of Sleep Walk Sleep Talk was often more of a remnant of a 7-Eleven world than a model for a 24/7 one; a place where shopping still had its limits, and where night hawks would have to wait for an irregular night-bus rather than jump on the all-night tube. If the London of 2009 is that future non-stop city in embryo, Sleep Walk Sleep Talk shows it in sleep mode: powered down, but on electronic watch; keeping tabs on the nocturnal heartbeat, alert to anything abnormal or unfamiliar. 

During the months that Sleep Walk Sleep Talk was in production, I would regularly journey back and forth, from home to office, through London Bridge station, past the place where the Shard was about to take shape. Although we never get to see the priapic ‘vertical city’ in the upright (it would be three years until it was completed, and a further year until it opened to the public), Chan does show the enormous, chthonic pit that was dug for its foundations, as viewed from the top floor of one of the nearby high-rise buildings it would replace. In the bare rooms and corridors of the soon-to-be-demolished London Bridge Tower, we meet the night crew keeping watch on the empty premises. Recent arrivals from Nigeria, their first experience of London is not what they had been led to expect. While the security guards rub their eyes and the CCTV cameras stare unblinking, the panoramic view from the top of the building is like a vision of the city itself dreaming, the time-lapsed trails of the lights of trains and cars like brain waves in an MRI scan.

Sleep Walk Sleep Talk presaged a series of moving-image works by Chan that examine the vagaries and complexities of memory, perception and consciousness. Large-scale projection pieces such as Hallucinations (2020) and Fog in my Head (2022) have lit the way for a forthcoming feature-length exploration of dementia, entitled Conscious, drawn from multiple personal perspectives, including those of acclaimed neuroscientist Anil Seth. Often featuring elements of the urban landscape as analogues for the intricate architecture of the brain, these works echo Sleep Walk Sleep Talk in highlighting Chan’s predilection for haunting, visionary scenes combined with individual, personal stories. But rather than the temporary loss of self than ensues from the intoxication of a dream state or a fugue state, they reflect on the disintegration of identity that accompanies the failure of memory. Powerful and poignant, they ponder the mystery and fragility of the psyche with the signature quality of immersion and detachment that continues to be a distinguishing feature of Chan’s ever-evolving artistic practice. 

The shape of the city, like the minds of its inhabitants, is never settled, always changing. It carries traces of its past and sporadic glimmers of its future. But there are parts that still remain dark, just as there are recesses of the mind that are elusive or occluded. The portal of the night-time city continues to be a magnet for aesthetes, wanderers and explorers just as gaining insight into the ‘dark matter’ of the brain is a grail for neuroscientists. As Suki Chan’s work reminds us, these dark spaces, and the promise of illumination they portend, are an infinite source of fascination. The mind won’t rest. The city never sleeps. But both will always be a site of visions and dreams. 

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Steven Bode is the former Director of Film and Video Umbrella.