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Jeanyoon Choi (b.1999) is a Computational Artist researching in interconnectivity and complexity through Multi-Device Web Artworks.

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jeanyoon.ch@oi /oi % cat resting-is-part-of-the-data-resting-is-part-of-the-art

Resting is part of the Data - Resting is part of the Art

2025-02-07

Hyper-personalisation can mean reducing a person to a point in a vector space. Like a personality type, a diagnosis or a category of legal case, that point becomes a way for a system to recognise and handle an individual through accumulated data.

The more thoroughly everyday life enters networked services, the more material becomes available for that classification. Connected devices extend the process into areas once treated as private, including sleep and rest.

Rest is supposed to be a break: go offline, stop working, withdraw. Yet leisure is also part of economic circulation and data production. Sleep technology and personal assistants offer to optimise it. We begin asking—or are encouraged to ask—what the optimal way to rest would be. Even contemporary art can extend its claim into spaces that once seemed outside the work.

I propose a resting area made from a beanbag, monitor, camera, computer and speakers, with the digital components initially as unobtrusive as possible. A tired exhibition visitor approaches what seems to be a break from art. The work incorporates that break.

Before someone sits, the screen is black and the speakers silent. A few seconds after a camera detects their presence, a welcome begins. The participant may be puzzled, mumble or say almost nothing. Unlike a conventional assistant waiting for a clear request, this system leads the exchange and maintains its own conversational context.

An engaged visitor’s responses feed the wider system. A disengaged visitor is offered resting or sleeping imagery. After two or three minutes, the service asks whether everything is all right, with the solicitous manner of a restaurant checking on a customer.

Meanwhile, the proposed work records and analyses the resting visitor—eyes, mouth and expression become parameters. Andy Warhol’s Sleep is a reference for attending to that apparently uneventful duration.

Both engagement and refusal generate something. Rest becomes data; hesitation becomes data. The participant’s attempt to step outside the exhibition becomes another part of the artwork and its system.

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