A Practice for Surrender

Sleep has become an ideological field of tension. In the face of digital optimisation, as our once romanticised realm of dreams is fragmented, clustered and sold off as so many units of data, it would seem as if surrender and absence provide the best form of resistance. In a brief paranoid scrutiny of self-surveillance and theories of digital humanities, this video essay is orbited by elements of distraction, adaptation, and the inadvertent emergence of meaning.

The online exhibition shows an excerpt of the film.

A Practice for Surrender is part of Tõnis Jürgens’s ongoing artistic research Quantification of Sleep, which entails thematics of digital sleep tracking and autofiction.