Labor of Sleep, Have you been able to change your habits?? examines the status of sleep within the tempo of present-day capitalism. The work consists of a series of short video clips commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art that plays out over nine days on the museum’s website—exclusively during the brief periods of sunrise and sunset—and critically engages the rhetoric of self-improvement apps. Labor of Sleep highlights the fact that sleep has become the newest frontier for gathering behavioral and biological data, with the intent of optimizing sleeping patterns, thereby turning the time our bodies use to rest and replenish into laboring hours devoted to data extraction. Sleep, once understood as the last frontier of resistance to productivity—the ultimate refusal to work—is today treated as yet another temporal and physical management task from which value can be extracted. Labor of Sleep, Have you been able to change your habits?? has been later presented in a longer version as a video installation and a video projection.

Labor of Sleep is the second installment of a trilogy exploring how labor and care are reframed by digital economies and artificial intelligence; the precended and subsequent pieces are Technologies of Care (2016) and Cleaning Emotional Data (2020).