Somerset House, London, until 23 February 2020
Canongate
IN THE darkened entrance, an array of blinding lamps switches on and off, and from a video wall projection you can hear a remote-controlled helicopter hovering noisily above the head of a sleeping artist covered in blankets.
Walking past this work – Bett by Roman Signer – you come to a room behind black curtains. In the darkness, footage plays on another wall, featuring reams of wires and computer hardware bathed in red light. There was a background techno drone with occasional tappings and whispers. This is art duo s Chinese Coin (Red Blood), a depiction of our new industrial revolution – the “mining” of the cryptocurrency bitcoin in China.
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Moving on, you find watch faces: a display of small watches in a work called Sense of Time by Ted Hunt, and a wall-sized screen shows Self -Portrait as Time by Marcus Coates, a wristwatch face looming while the artist’s giant finger traces its ticking second hand. Nearby, a video (Order of Magnitude by Benjamin Grosser) shows Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. “More”, he says. “More,” and “much more”, “another billion”, “another 2 billion”, “more”. Zuckerberg and his incantation are on an endless loop. To which circle of hell have I descended?
All this during my early morning visit, under a cold, blue light resembling the moon. It is too much. But my initial disquiet is what the curators of 24/7, a new exhibition at London’s Somerset House, want with their disturbing, thought-provoking venture.
“Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appears. ‘More’, he says, ‘much more’, ‘another billion’”
“We have made the exhibition deliberately immersive, with moments that have quite strong resonance you should feel in your body,” says curator Sarah Cook, professor of information studies at the University of Glasgow, UK.
Works like Chinese Coin, says Cook, aim “to disrupt your sense of time”. While the first section of the show, called “Day and Night: The wreckage of the day”, certainly is dislocating, the next four take us on a sensory journey that plays with time, rest and activity, with our relationships with technology, work and play, with each other and with the natural environment.
The show’s inspiration comes from a 2013 book, 24/7: Late capitalism and the ends of sleep by art critic Jonathan Crary, which explores the relationships between always-on culture, consumption and sleep. This tension is brilliantly captured by Microserfs author Douglas Coupland in Slogans for the 21st Century (pictured), and Alan Warburton’s series of 3D-scanned self-portraits, Sprites (below), which show him imitating work-time naps of his colleagues in a Beijing visual effects studio.
With no natural light, the gallery cleverly harnesses artificial light to bolster the themes in each section, and their sensory and psychological impact. From the moon’s cold light, we move through functional strip lighting of a working day, to the warm glow of afternoon and sunset.
After the deliberately fraught start, visitors enter a zone that explores our relationship with rest. Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima’s Life Palace (Tea Room) is a welcome change. Visitors are encouraged to “drink time rather than tea” in this meditative isolation chamber, dark except for the random appearances of blue, alarm clock-style LED numbers, which blink on and off and seem to float around in the darkness.
Another section reminds us that we are subject to constant surveillance – not a new concept, as philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century designs for a Panopticon prison remind us. There is even surveillance nostalgia, with the original “diary room” chair and footage from the first series of the groundbreaking reality TV experiment Big Brother.
In the next zone, the blurring of work and leisure is central to Tega Brain and Surya Mattu’s Unfit Bits, a humorous take on how you might trick a wearable device into recording more exercise than you have taken (to reap employer or insurer benefits). Fitbits swing on metronomes and smartphones rock in desk cradles. This reminds me of a friend, who, when she was low on her day’s step-count, would strap her smartwatch to her toddler and let him run about.
Enjoyment of the final section, called “Reset”, is enhanced by a warm sunset glow. Here, we are encouraged to think about our 24/7 lifestyle and its effects on others, from family to other species. One highlight is Daisy Ginsberg’s Machine Auguries, a 10-minute dawn chorus of natural and AI-generated birdsong.
The work is her response to the effects of 24/7 life, as urbanisation and light pollution change the way birds communicate. Ginsberg says some birds start the dawn chorus 23 minutes earlier near airports. Her exhibit is a dark room that lightens to dawn with the rising song. It is still a restful reminder of our relationship with nature.
But why do we find nature restful, and what does rest even mean in a frenzied world? Such questions take us to Claudia Hammond’s new book The Art of Rest, a counterbalance to 24/7. Rather than exploring lifestyles, it is a treatise on the need to take rest seriously, what that means and how to get it.
For Hammond, rest really matters: “Like sleep, rest is not a luxury. If we are to live well and flourish, rest is essential.” She draws on the world’s largest survey on this issue, of 18,000 people in 134 countries who took part in a project called The Rest Test, funded by the Wellcome Trust and involving researchers from Durham University, UK. Two-thirds of respondents felt they weren’t getting enough rest. Perceptions of rest were related to well-being. The well-being scores of the “rested” were twice those of people lacking in rest. Exploring the importance of rest neatly divides the book into chapters of the top 10 things people said helped them achieve restfulness.
Some are no surprise – being in nature, having a hot bath – but others seem counter-intuitive. How do people find strenuous activities like boxing or endurance running restful? Neuroscientists have shown that neural patterns of elite distance runners at rest resemble those of experienced meditators. Bodily exertion, explains Hammond, might allow “the brain to rest, allowing the brain’s chatter to quieten down”.
“Why do we find nature restful, and what does rest even mean in a frenzied world?”
There is a chapter devoted to TV. As a slightly ashamed, avid viewer, I found it heartening to find someone looking for positives. After all, there is a wealth of research examining the negative effects of watching television, but almost none on its restful benefits. With 3.5 billion hours of TV watched globally per day, surely there must be some?
Not only is The Art of Rest an enjoyable read, touching on scientific evidence in a light, accessible manner, it delivers on its promise too. It gives pause for thought on how rest – a need many of us feel guilty about and consequently neglect – may be as important as sleep for well-being.
Reading, according to Rest Test participants, is one of the best ways to rest. So if you want to change your 24/7 lifestyle, opening The Art of Rest may well be a good start.
