Demand Full Laziness | A five year plan

Demand full laziness, today.
A five-year plan for the dull automation of the art production.
A project by Guido Segni

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. Started on early 2018, for a period of 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.

Demand full laziness is not just about new ways to produce images neither it is just not another bunch of machine-learning algorithms applied to painting, photography or video.

It is more like a durational context, a time span where to rethink and explore new relationships between automation and leisure time, artistic gesture and digital production, human imagination and algorithmic muse.

The results of the automated process - images, books, objects, whatever - are distributed to all the supporters of the project with very affordable prices. Depending on their economical effort, art collectors, fans, friends, artists, and public of all sorts contributing to my Patreon have the opportunity to receive a real fully fabricated and authenticated artworks made by the machine while I was resting.

Productive laziness automated process.

Lot no. 2018/000001 | Series: The machine is learning, the artist is resting

2018, year one of five
The machine is learning
The artist is resting.

Started on early 2018, during its first year, I performed rest and laziness in order to create a custom dataset of images taken from my private moments of leisure.

Then, through the use of semantic segmentation and machine learning techniques I used the dataset to train some GANs (Generative Adversarial Network) in order to make unique representation of myself while laying in bed reading, sleeping or simply enjoying spare time.

By doing so I like to think I have, somehow, taught the machine how to rest.

Finally, after a few months I altered some some parameters of the generative algorithm which started producing lots of abstract and hallucinated images inspired by the visual elements learnt during my lazy time.

Below you can see a selection of the images generated by the automated process.