About us
Lullaby Machine is a digital rest-stop dedicated to sharing lullabies in a world where it can be hard to fall asleep. Growing from the idea of lullabies as portals into dream and potential tools for collective care, the site hosts a library of .mp3 lullabies and a quarterly e-magazine featuring meditations on lullaby, rest, dreams, grief, capitalism, ecology, and the internet.
Lullabies have long been ways of sharing myth and opening doorways into dreamworlds. Our hope is to open such a portal on the internet——a liminal place that can also feel like a dream. We imagine Lullaby Machine as a site of emergent conversation on radical rest amid capitalism——a small but public network of sonic gift-giving that we hope informs embodied life in digital and AFK spacetime. Our growing collection of sonic, written, and experimental contributions explores the lullaby as a form with an expansive definition. We’re excited by submissions that span genres, geographies, languages, and production methods to offer creative forms of online witness.
Lullaby Machine is an associative project that follows citational trails and referential rabbit holes toward themes of liminality, digital nostalgia, cyberfeminism, glitch ecology, posthumanism, and mutual aid. Most directly, the project cites feminist and womanist writers and artists including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Fae Heaselgrave, Jenny Odell, Jia Tolentino, Legacy Russell, Meredith Monk, Mindy Seu, Octavia E. Butler, Pauline Oliveros, Tamara Kneese, Tricia Hersey, and Ursula K. Le Guin. As a collaborative project, Lullaby Machine emerges through and alongside the work of many others, including nonhuman collaborators, who are partners in our web of evolving interrelation, even in its digital form.
This project is a labor of love shared between Maia Sauer and Olivia Q. Pintair. Drawing its title from Maia’s 2023 dance work and arising from spirals of late-night conversations spanning the better part of five years, Lullaby Machine represents our commitment to the lullaby as a potentially radical form. We’re grateful to collaborators near and far who continue to offer their time, skills, and care toward making this strange, digital dream tangible.
A lullaby is a suspension of time.
A lullaby is the release of ambition.
A lullaby is attention to a body.
A lullaby is the sound of a tideline.
A lullaby is a doorway to dream.
A lullaby is a disarming.
A lullaby is déjà vu.
A lullaby is a welcoming of night.
A lullaby is a mother at the end of the world.
A lullaby is proof that someone else is there.
Team
Editors: Maia Sauer, Olivia Q. Pintair
Maia is an artist and writer exploring how rest and deep listening sustain presence amid constant change. Her works have been supported by MOtiVE Brooklyn, Movement Research, Middlebury College, and the Vermont Arts Council. // maiasauer.com
Olivia is a writer and artist whose essays, interviews, and articles have appeared in Rain Taxi, The Rumpus, and Tricycle Magazine, among other outlets. In writing and in general, she is curious about human relationships with death and thresholds of crisis and change. She likes caves and stories about shapeshifting. // oliviaqpintair.com
Graphic Design: Cheryl Engmann
Cheryl is a designer and dancer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is inspired by movement, music, and cultural storytelling, using design to humanize and celebrate untold stories. She currently works as a Production Artist for Mickalene Thomas. // cherylengmanndesign.com
Contributors: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Amanda Hawkins, Bailey Sneed, Benjamina Bornstein, Bobby Lussier, C Green, Corttney Feldman, Jacqueline Enderle, Jane Schoenbrun, kai velázquez, Scott Li, L.N. Sauer, Lucy London, Maria BC, Mary Eliza, Moon Clemetson, Natalia Schwien Scott, Saba Keramati, Martha Langford, Malena Ordnung, Zev York