Guido Segni
6° WINNER
Interview
In 2018 I started “demand full laziness”, a five-year plan dedicated to automation and laziness. It was a story that I thought interesting and important to tell and re-humanism represented a context in which to tell it.
I started working in the field of the so-called net art towards the first half of the 2000’s with the Les Liens Invisibles collective together with Gionatan Quintini. At the time we tried to apply the concepts of psychogeography to the new spaces defined by digital platforms. Once in 2009 we even mobilized 20000 people to commit a virtual seppuku on Facebook: a suicide of honor that was in the cancellation of their account and that more than glory only made us a nice complaint from Zuckerberg himself.
Then the rest is history, we lost. Social networks and large digital corporations have colonized and normalized the utopian imaginary of the network.
As long as it lasted it was fun.
The laziness I speak is for me only to be understood as an tempting polemical expedient. It should not be taken literally. Talking about full laziness is a way to highlight how work – intended today as a form of necessary and inevitable sustenance – is today a convention and a conviction that needs to be rethought.
To the technological changes that are increasingly imposing on the global level we must not react with neo-luddite approach against robots that “steal” our work, but induce to rethink our social organization according to the new possibilities offered by technology that in fact will always be more able to grant free time and get rid of work.
I’ll play hide and seek with my kids (I have four! ), I will prepare new dough and new pizzas, I will try to listen to those around me Peace, love, laziness.
Guido Segni - Demand full laziness - ReHumanism Art Prize
Biography
With a background in Hacktivism, Net Art and Video Art, Guido Segni, aka ClementePestelli, (b. 1980, Italy) lives and works somewhere at the intersections between art, pop internet culture and data hallucination.Mainly focused on the daily (ab)use of Internet, his work is characterized by minimal gestures on technology which combines conceptual aproaches with a traditional hacker attitude in making things odd, useless and dysfunctional.In quite recent years he moved from an identity to another producing works, actionsand interventions under pseudonyms, collectives and multiple names (Dedalus, Clemente Pestelli, Guy McMusker, Angela Merelli, Anna Adamolo, Guy The Bore,Umberto Stanca, Silvie Inb, Fosco Loiti Celant, Guru Miri Goro, Leslie Bleus, Luther Blissett). Co-founder of Les Liens Invisibles , he exhibited in galleries, museums (MAXXI Rome, New School of New York, KUMU Art Museum of Talinn) and art & media-artinternational festivals (International Venice Biennale, Piemonte SHARE Festival, Transmediale).Recently he has been shortlisted for the art division of the 20th Japan Media ArtsFestival (2017), has been finalist at Prize Arte Laguna (2016) and got an honorarymention at Transmediale (2011) with Les Liens Invisibles.Currently he teaches at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Carrara, directs the imaginary REFRAMED lab and he is directing the online Green Cube Gallery.
Website: guidosegni.com
"Demand full laziness, today."
Description of the work
In times of obsession for work, fear of the robots and strong technological acceleration a new hype is haunting collective imagination: the hype of dull automation and full laziness. Demand full laziness is a five-year plan and a durational performance about art, labour, self sustenance and laziness. For the next five years (2018 – 2023) I’m going to delegate and automate part of the making of my artistic production by the use of a bunch of deep-learning algorithms in order to increase production, to overcome labour in art and to increasingly get abandoned to laziness.
The dull algorithms and I can be supported by a distributed cluster of patrons through the patreon.com online platform: art collectors, fans, friends, artists, and public of all sorts are able to economically sustain my personal attempt to be productively lazy just by crowdfunding my patreon account. Depending on their economical effort, all the people contributing to my Patreon have the opportunity to receive a real fully fabricated and authenticated artworks made by the machine while I was resting (see the Patreon website for details). During the first year (2018) the machine has been trained on deep learning and on how to rest and make unique portraits of myself while laying in bed reading, sleeping or simply enjoying spare time.
http://demand-dull-automation.work
http://demand-full-laziness.today