Research Statement

Research Questions

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, adaption, and the inadvertent emergence of meaning.

A Practice for Surrender is an experimental video essay created as part of my PhD artistic research project at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA). Initially, this research began from scrutinising digital wearable tracking devices in a broader sense. The focus later narrowed onto sleep tracking in particular, since sleep seemed to best serve as a metaphorical device for studying self-surveillance and the redefinition of subjectivity via technology.

At this point, the propelling question or problematic for my research would be: How is the subject (re)defined in digital sleep surveillance? In counterpoint, this question drives my artistic and theoretical demarcation of the gap – or absence – as space for the inadvertent emergence of meaning. What, if anything, is lost between the contours of data? What potential does sleep contain for resistance?

Context

A Practice for Surrender is part of my ongoing doctoral artistic research project Quantifiction of Sleep (working title; the term “quantifiction” is a neologism – an amalgamation of “quantitative” and “fiction”), and an experiment in “writing” more of myself as subject/researcher into the work. I think that the context of artistic research permits a more subjective approach of self-reflection based on my work process. For me, this reflection has come to be grounded in both a series of exhibited art installations and video works.

In form, I’ve found inspiration from works done in a similar vein by e.g. Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, and Adam Curtis, but also from the video essays by the YouTube user/channel Nerdwriter. As a theoretical and philosophical basis for thinking about digital self-surveillance, technological determinism, and capitalism I most often refer to books by Byung-Chul Han, Maurizio Lazzarrato, Jonathan Crary, Mark Fisher, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, James Bridle, Nicolas Bourriaud, Metahaven, Rebecca Solnit, and Oli Mould. I’ve used texts by Micki McGee and Donald Sassoon for reference on the historical development of the modern self-care industry. Authors that delve (in articles) more specifically on the phenomenon of Quantified Self and wearable tracking devices would include Deborah Lupton, Tiziana Terranova, and Chris Till. Poetically and formalistically, the works of Ottessa Moshfegh, Richard Brautigan, Haytham El Wardany, Johanna Drucker, Camelia Elias, Louise Lüthi, and Brian Dillon have had a great influence on my work.

In my artistic research project I endeavour to aggregate such sources into both a formalistic and theoretical blend, exploring digital sleep tracking and its polemics in a self-reflexive, auto-fictive manner, and hopefully developing a new methodological frame in which to tackle these themes for future researchers coming from e.g. the fields of digital humanities and artistic research.

Methods

I have a background in humanities, specifically Cultural Theory, where I received a bachelor’s degree. This background was later entwined with my studies at the New Media curriculum of the fine arts department at the Estonian Academy of Arts. I’ve been working with video for over 15 years, during most of which I’ve worked as a freelance video editor. I view A Practice for Surrender, as well as the video essays to follow, as a sort of artistic amalgamation of what I’ve studied and practiced up to this point.

Outcomes

This artistic research project aims to be a bricolage of theories and artistic means looking into digital sleep surveillance. Hopefully this will amount to a novel academical and artistic methodology, which could inspire future researchers and artists interested in these themes, bridging a gap between (digital) humanities and fine art / artistic research. A Practice for Surrender offers a brief self-reflexive glimpse of my doctoral research project, and is meant as both an introduction into the topic of self-tracking as well as a meta commentary on working as an artistic researcher.

Impact

This video essay has been screened as part of several conferences, art exhibitions and an international film festival: the 13th Society of Artistic Research (SAR) conference MEND-BLEND-ATTEND, and the Visual Research Network conference Encounters with the Urban Night, both in 2022; my solo exhibition A Practice for Surrender in Vent Space Gallery, Tallinn (2022); the group show Agents of Concern: Images and Empathy in PXL-MAD, Hasselt (2023), curated by Toon Leën and Pieter Vermeulen; the film screening Polar Coordinates (2023), curated by Piibe Kolka and Genevieve Yue, as part of the Tallinn Photomonth biennial / Black Nights Film Festival Expanded film programme; and in 2024–2025 as part of the group exhibition Who Claims the Night? at the Estonian National Museum in Tartu.

Another video essay titled Sleep with Pointing (2023, 12’06’’), which was made as a thematic sequel to A Practice for Surrender, continues on the topics of self-surveillance and the quantifiction of sleep, was screened as part of the group exhibition Uneversum, curated by Sandra Nuut, at the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design in Tallinn, in 2023–2024.

In addition, I’ve written several articles dealing with sleep tracking and the materiality of data for various Estonian publications, including Müürileht, Sirp, Vikerkaar, and Eesti Päevaleht – the latter of which won first prize at an opinion piece competition in 2020. (For a more comprehensive list of exhibitions and articles, please refer to this link: https://www.etis.ee/CV/tonisjurgens/eng/)

References

Berardi, F. (2007) Futurablity: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possiblity. New York; London: Verso.

Bourriaud, N. (2015) The Exform. New York; London: Verso.

Bridle, J. (2018) New Dark Age: Technology and the Ends of the Future. New York; London: Verso.

Crary, J. (2013) 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. New York; London: Verso.

Dillon, B. (2020) Suppose a Sentence. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Drucker, J. (2013) Diagrammatic Writing. Eindhoven: Onomatopee.

Elias, C. (2021) [2004] The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre. Eyecorner Press.

Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? United Kingdom: Zero Books.

Han, B.-C. (2017) Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. New York; London: Verso.

How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (Hito Steyerl, 2013, Germany)

Interface / Schnittstelle (Harun Farocki, 1995, Germany)

Lazzarrato, M. (2014) Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Cambridge: Semiotext(e).

Lupton, D. (2016) The Quantified Self. Cambridge: Polity.

Lupton, D. (2013) ‘Understanding the Human Machine’. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. 32 (4).

Lüthi, L. (2011) On the Self-Reflexive Page. Rochdale: Roma Publications.

McGee, M. (2005) Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Metahaven. (2018) Digital Tarkovsky. Moscow: Strelka Press.

Mould, O. (2018) Against Creativity. New York; London: Verso.

Moshfegh, O. (2018) My Year of Rest and Relaxation. London: Penguin.

Sassoon, D. (2005) The Culture of the Europeans: From 1800 to the Present. New York: HarperCollins.

Solnit, R. (2003) River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. London: Penguin.

Terranova, T. (2000) ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy’. Social Text. 11 (2).

Till, C. (2014) ‘Exercise as Labour: Quantified Self and the Transformation of Exercise into Labour.’ Societies.

Wardany, H. El. (2020) The Book of Sleep. Kolkata: Seagull Books.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books Ltd.

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response to what follows:

Review 1: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

A Practice for Surrender is an enjoyable and engaging film about how one sleeps and/or gets ready for sleep (or ‘surrenders’). It weaves together original and found footage, as well as various titles and a prominent voiceover, in order to convey in particular the experience of seeing the light and shadow created by passing cars dancing across the ceiling as one lies in bed. It’s a beautiful notion, here pursued elegantly and thoughtfully – with some inventive uses of models and photocopiers/scanners being adopted here… with the film also documenting to a large degree the relentless interiority of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conceptually, there is perhaps a little of bit of confusion. The film says at about the 11-minute mark that ‘absence’ is the guiding theme, being more important than surrender – only for the voiceover then to say at 11m25s that ‘surrendering’ is the ‘implicit issue’ – i.e. is the guiding theme (and thus more than ‘absence’). All the same, the tone and pacing are more ‘meandering’ than is fitting for such pedantry, and the film wears well its points of inspiration (Farocki/Steyerl/Nerdwriter). (Howard Hawks is mis-spelt in the credits.)

The statement is potentially a bit vague. This reader is in particular interested in a fuller explanation of ‘quantifiction’ (is it a mis-spelling of ‘quantification,’ or is some sort of engagement with ‘fiction’ to disrupt a society of ‘quantification’?). But this also is fitting not just in terms of the author still being in the process of working out what their project is, but also in terms of its ‘meta’ approach, whereby it reflects perhaps precisely on the ‘aimless’ sense of much (artistic) research. In this sense, the vagueness is even a benefit… but, again, one might reflect more proactively on how the work is more about generating questions than answers.

One wonders, finally, that more is to be made of both headlights and surrender as ideas. How does this search for sleep relate to the petropolitics of the car? And how is it also about an engagement with illumination? That is, we turn off our ‘headlights’ (our eyes), but the cars do not… or do both get turned off? Meanwhile, is to surrender linked to the idea of rendering, a kind of over-rendering (sur-rendering) that is typical of the digital age (and its render-times, its extraordinary renditions, and so on). Put differently, if in its found footage A Practice of Surrender offers up its renditions of Barfly, The Big Sleep, etc, then are these renditions also sur-renditions? I am not sure where these questions lead. But it struck this viewer/reader that they might be worth pursuing.

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

The current submission (and its accompanied statement) shows great potential and unfolds a wide range of filmic and philosophical possibilities. Out of the gate, the crab-version of Plato’s allegory of the Cave nicely articulates the audio-visual philosophical scope, once dismantling and disfiguring the core of human subjectivity (through the eyesight and the inward perception of the crab). This investigatory technique corresponds with what Rancière conceptualizes as “film fable”, and exposes—through the Platonic Crab metaphor—the many dimensions of this enterprise. I cannot but recall a similar effort to reconfigure perception and subjective experience in the recent My Octopus Teacher (2020). While a comparison is worthy of further exploration, it is evident that neither a crab nor an Octopus are match for an intentional attempt of a deliberately insomniac philosopher who tries to dismantle and then recreate a solipsistic conceptual framework (while surrendering to the audio-visual gaze, as if it was “… a room turned into a camera obscura”.) 

Once establishing the main thesis and expository technique, the piece moves to encounter the main conceptual constructs and dichotomies of the designated worldview. The concepts which furnish this worldview—most notably sleep and awakening, presence and absence, and control vs. surrender—are challenged through various audio-visual devices and metaphors, most notably the eye, the window, the screen, and the scanner. These devices have found a similar metaphoric role in previous instances of cinema. For instance, the eye (and its gaze) makes the beginning of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958); the window stars in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Rope (1948); the screen in the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999); and the scanner in Fincher’s Fight Club (1999). It might also be worth mentioning that the sleeplessness motif is present in at least three of the five aforementioned films, and nicely corresponds with the main theme of the current work. Adding an inference to Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946) and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000) and commenting on Schwarzenegger’s ridiculous advice to “sleep faster”, makes it all the more sustainable.

A nice addition to the overall quality of the piece is the slightly too-marginal focusing on digitization, the YouTube GIF phenomena, and the COVID lockdown. These, in my mind, should be further examined, as manifestations of breakdown, vulnerability, endlessness and repetition (especially the GIF loop), glitches and errors (as in the case of Barfly), etc.

Overall, both the piece and the accompanied research withstand a high quality, are well organized and structured, and are worthy of publication and further discussion among artists and scholars.

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response.