Sleep Economy

2013 DisSentience exhibition, Tin Sheds Gallery, International Symposium of Electronic Arts 11 June – 19 July​

​The idea of sleep as the last refuge from the world is held up for question. Even during sleep, our bodies become resources for the demands of a global networked data economy. The body in sleep is no longer a rest state, but a site of processing and exchange. From its original purpose of physiological recuperation, it has become another processing unit in the relentless cycle of computational production. The body is the next frontier in the recent emergence of citizen science and parallel computing, where citizens donate their spare computer processing time to large-scale science projects requiring massive amounts of computation that can be distributed over a network. But what exactly, are we connecting to?

Credits
Artists: Garth Knight, Lian Loke, Louis Pratt
Live performance: Lian Loke
Epoxy resin, steel, foam, graphite, electrical cabling
Video: Paul J Warren