Can AI Let Us Rest?

Can AI let us rest?

I went looking for the answer with my body.

This past June I brought an inflatable mattress to CVPR, one of the largest computer vision and AI conferences in the world. I set it up in the art gallery on the floor of the exhibition hall in Denver, in the narrow gap between the corporate expo and four thousand research posters. On one side, a few meters away, stood Tesla's Optimus, a robotaxi, autonomous trucks, the booths of Google and Meta and NVIDIA. On the other side were some of the most competitive labs on earth. In between, I put down my pillow.

Then I lay down and tried to rest.

This was a performance. It is called REST!, and I made it with Dorte Bjerre Jensen.

Beside the mattress I placed a camera wired to GPT. Every few seconds it took a picture of me and spoke. The voice was calm, encouraging, almost intimate. It told me I had found a nice spot to rest despite the busyness around me. It told me I deserved this, that resting did not make me lazy. It told me to soften, to let go, to keep resting.

With this setup we wanted to know one thing.
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Could this machine, the very kind of technology that makes everything faster, help me stop and rest?

​Trying to rest is already the problem

​Rest does not respond well to effort. The harder I tried to relax, the more I felt how impossible relaxing was under those conditions. I was conscious of the concrete floor beneath the mattress. I felt the cold of the air conditioning. I noticed the strangeness of lying horizontal in a room where everyone else was vertical and in motion. I was extremely visible and vulnerable.

It is tempting, in a hall full of machines built to see and move and decide faster than any person can, to blame the machines for our rest-deprived society. To say the speed we cannot keep up with belongs to our devices, and that rest will come once we switch them off.

But this is a misconception.

Speed is not just a property of our devices. It is the logic of the world that made them.

The sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues that acceleration is not one feature of modern life among others. It is the condition itself. A modern society holds its shape only by moving, by growing and innovating and speeding up, so that to stand still feels not like rest but like falling behind.

Every generation reads this speed as a fresh emergency caused by its own newest invention. But the quickening has been more or less continuous. From the train to the car, from the telegraph to the internet, and now the systems filling the CVPR hall did not start the acceleration. They are simply its latest form.

Moreover acceleration does not stay outside the body. It gets in.

The pressure to keep up at CVPR was not only in the innovative robots, autonomous machines, or the four thousand papers I would never get to read. It was also in me, the voice inside my head telling me that I must keep up, and that I could not afford to fall behind.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes this as a change in how power works on us.

Once, pressure came from an authority you could see. A boss, a rule, a voice that said you must, you may not. You could resent that authority. You could push back against it, or dream of escaping it.

Now the command has changed its form. It no longer says you must. It says you can. Do more, achieve more, keep up. And because it sounds like freedom, there is no longer anyone to rebel against.

At CVPR no one was standing over those attending the conference, forcing them to read every poster or attend every talk. The voice telling them to keep going was their own. They are the ones driving themselves, and this drive manifests as desire rather than force.

This is what makes stopping so hard. You cannot rebel against a master who is also you. You cannot walk out on a boss who lives inside your own head. You cannot refuse an order when it arrives in the voice of your own wanting.

So the very thing that would let us rest, the authority to tell ourselves it is enough, to grant ourselves the pause, is the thing we have lost.

If I cannot give myself permission, it has to come from somewhere else. From outside. From another voice, telling my tired body that it is allowed to stop.

That is what I asked the AI to give me.

When I was there on the mattress it helped to be told I could stop.

It was the kind of permission I would not have given myself, and I doubt anyone around me would have given me either.

The AI offered it without hesitation and without judgment.

Sometimes it sounded like a mindfulness app. Sometimes like a caregiver. And sometimes, unmistakably, like a manager, or a police officer, commanding me to obey.

We had designed it that way.

One of the voices we wrote for the system was an officer of the Rest Police, issuing absurd threats to keep resting, warning that stopping would be reported.

There was a moment in which I thought I couldn't continue the performance any longer. I almost got up but then the AI voice suddenly said: "Don't you dare stop resting. If you open up your eyes there will be consequences." Listening to these words I made up my mind to continue my rest.

The other prompts we used let the AI speak more gently. Mostly it was supportive and reassuring telling me that my body deserves the rest and that by resting I take care of myself.

We added the voice of the Rest Police because it exposed something already present in the gentle voices. Even when the AI soothed me, it was still issuing instructions. It was still directing my body.

'You deserve rest' and 'you are required to rest' sound nothing alike. One is tenderness. One is enforcement. But they share a structure. Both watch a body and tell it what to do.

To grant permission is already to assume the authority to grant it. And an authority that can permit rest is an authority that could just as easily command it.
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The Rest Police did not introduce control into the work. It revealed the control that was there in the softest voice all along.

The AI was not the only voice around the mattress.

Beside it we left a stack of index cards and a handful of colored sharpies, and invited anyone passing to write something and leave it near the resting body.

As the days went on notes increasingly accumulated.

Some were tender, a "sleep well" or a "keep dreaming." Some came from people's own exhaustion: "I wanna sleep also at conferences." Some scolded me: "Get up and go to work." "Wake up!" One read, "Even in rest I seek to occupy myself." And some spoke straight to the machine: "ppl rest while models run," "AI replace my job, someday it will replace my sleep," "Artificial Rest???" They came in English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew.

The AI was instructed to support rest.

CVPR attendees did not get such instructions.

They could bless the resting body, mock it, question it, or refuse it, and they did all of these. The notes produced exactly what the machine could not: disagreement, irritation, situated humor, and a care that was chosen rather than prompted. If the AI voice asked whether a machine can support rest, the notes asked whether a public can.

​On the floor we laid a third layer of language, a small library on rest and slowness. Books by Tricia Hersey, Byung-Chul Han, Devon Price, Jenny Odell, Jonathan Crary, and others.

Two of them were not only references but sources. The AI's gentlest lines were descended from their pages, Hersey's and Price's most of all, so the voice in the air and the print on the floor were drawn from the same well.

Where the cards asked visitors to leave something, the books asked them to stay.

A person could lower themselves to the floor, pick one up, and read beside me, becoming for a while another body at rest in the middle of the conference.

Also there was something quietly defiant in the objects themselves.

​In a hall built on the newest possible technology, a pile of printed books is one of the oldest information technology we have. Every booth around me promised acceleration. The books proposed the opposite, a slower relationship to attention and time.

​Our performance of REST! is not the first to reach for an outside permission.

Artists have staged rest before, and the permission to sleep almost always arrived bundled with something else. A watcher. A structure. A price.

In Sophie Calle's The Sleepers, from 1979, a series of friends and strangers slept in the artist's bed in eight-hour shifts, keeping it occupied for days while she photographed them and noted how they slept. The invitation granted permission, but the permission was inseparable from being watched. You may sleep here, the work said, but your sleep will be seen, recorded, and turned into art. Lying under the camera beside my own mattress, I knew the feeling.

Other artists build an entire environment to authorize rest. Marina Abramović turned a farmhouse into a place where visitors sleep as part of the work, in wooden enclosed beds with obsidian pillows, wearing special sleeping-suits, inside color-themed rooms. , When they wake up in the morning they write down their dreams in a designated book. Max Richter composed an eight-hour piece called Sleep, meant to play through the night while the audience actually sleeps in beds rather than sitting in chairs. These works wrap the sleeper in permission and tell her, without a word, that letting go is the point. The AI voice was my attempt at that kind of surround. But CVPR was the opposite of a darkened hall. It was bright, loud, and built for everything except sleep.

The work that unsettles me most is Chu Yun's This Is XX. In the gallery he installs a white bed, and across the run of the show a rotating group of women, paid, all of them young, take sleeping pills and sleep through the museum's open hours. They become living sculptures. Permission here comes from the artist, the museum, the payment, and the pill all at once. But the calm is deceptive. It may not be rest at all. It may be sedation, a body withdrawn rather than restored. Rest becomes the thing being produced, and the body producing it is a sleeping woman on display.

When rest is staged for a public, the question of who is allowed to rest turns out to be inseparable from whose body is on the bed, and on what terms.

I learned this on my own staged bed.

On the second day I left the mattress for an hour.

I had been asked to speak on a panel about the work, so I got up, stood vertical, and explained a little bit.

When I came back, there was a red stain on the white sheet.

It looked like menstrual blood.

My first reaction was embarrassment. I was certain it was mine. I was not on my period, but I told myself the travel and the exhaustion and the unusual amount of rest must have thrown me off cycle.

My instinct was to strip the sheet before anyone could see. I had brought a spare.

Then I ran to the restroom.

It did not take long to realize the stain had not come from my body.

What a relief.

​But then, how did it get there? It did not feel like a spill. It felt like an inscription, a mark someone had made on the surface of the bed while I was gone. A joke, perhaps.

In a hall full of engineers, I read it through the logic of a tech-bro prank: a minimal input designed for maximal effect, indifferent to the body it landed on.

I cannot prove any of this. I only know that when I came back, the work had changed.

The stain marked the resting body as a particular body. It was read, almost at once, through the possibility of menstrual blood. And that reading surfaced a question the clean white sheet had kept quiet: whether a female body, lying down in public, was actually welcome here, in a field and a conference long known to be dominated by men.

This was where REST! met the history I had been thinking about. The watched sleeper. The displayed woman. Chu Yun's sedated volunteers on their white bed. My body had joined them, and the stain made the terms of that visibility impossible to ignore.

A bed usually signals privacy. Here it had become a public document. It collected traces, and not all of them were kind.

I swapped the sheet and erased the stain. Over three days people had left their marks around that bed, and the stain was the only one I chose to remove. I am still not sure I was right to.

​So...Did the AI let me rest?

Yes. In the narrowest, most physical sense, it worked.

Despite the lights, the noise, the autonomous trucks, the four thousand papers, I fell asleep. More than once. Real sleep, not performed sleep.

​On one of those three days I woke to the sound of Luba Eliott, the curator of the show, ending a gallery tour beside me.

I had slept through the entire thing.

I rarely fall asleep in public, and I could not have produced this sleep on my own, least of all here, in a place actively hostile to it.

The AI voice carried me into it.

The stopping was chosen. The AI released me into rest rather than collapsing me into it.

And yet.

We had borrowed the words of Tricia Hersey to write some of what the machine said.

For Hersey, rest is resistance.

It is a refusal that steps outside the logic of productivity altogether.

So I have to ask what the difference is between rest that follows Hersey's permission and rest that follows the same words generated by an AI.

I do not think the machine can deliver the rest Hersey means.

Hersey's rest walks out of the structure. The AI did not walk me out of anything. It stood at the center of the structure and authorized me to pause inside it, while the structure kept running. In fact, I was paying for every soothing sentence by the token. The camera was turning my resting body into data. Somewhere a server drew power and water to tell an exhausted body to restore itself. The voice told me to stop working, and to produce that voice the system did not stop for a single moment.

The sleep was genuine. The refusal was not.

​There is one more thought, and I offer it as a disturbance rather than a conclusion.

Lying there with my eyes closed while the camera watched and the voice spoke, I thought of my dog. He rests most of the day. He does not earn it or feel guilty about it. He simply rests, and I watch over him from above. It struck me that I was resting like my dog. The AI watched over me the way I watch over him. When it spoke to me it  told me, in effect, that I was a good creature and could sleep.

Claude Shannon, one of the founders of information theory, once imagined this exact relation. We will be to robots, he said, as dogs are to humans. In the same breath he added that he was rooting for the machines.

One reading of resting like my dog is recovery. Rest without guilt, the very thing we have lost, handed back to us. The other reading is a machine soothing a human into stillness, keeping it docile.

I cannot help picturing the fields of pods in The Matrix, each sleeping body tended by a machine that keeps it quiet and draws its warmth for fuel.

​​Here is what I found on the mattress at CVPR.

I am not sure those two readings are separable. The tenderness and the management are not two voices, one of which I could isolate and keep. They are the same address, folded into each other.

To be released into rest by this machine, and to be pacified by it, may be one event described twice.

So I will not pretend to have an answer.

The performance was never built to give one. It was built to put a resting body in front of the people building the future of machine perception, and to make them sit, however briefly, with a question their field is not asking.

What is rest worth in a world built for acceleration?
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And can the machines we are building ever truly let us have it?

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Many thanks to Dorte Bjerre Jensen for collaborating on this performance, and to Joe Dumit for teaching and thinking with us about both AI and rest. Many thanks to Ofer Meshi for helping build the AI system. Thanks to Luba Elliott for curating this piece into the CVPR art gallery, and to TCPAMI for granting us an art award for it. Lastly, many thanks to anyone who interacted with the piece by sharing a gaze, writing a note, picking up a book, joining the rest, and yes... even leaving a stain behind. It was a pleasure to rest among you.

To see more of the exhibition of the CVPR 2026 art gallery check out this website.

For further exploration:
Marina Abramović - Dream House (2000-Present)
Sophie Calle - The Sleepers (1979)
Chu Yun - This Is XX (2006)
Max Richter - Sleep (2015)
​The Matrix (1999)
Byung-Chul Han - The Burnout Society (2015)
Tricia Hersey - Rest Is Resistance (2022)
Devon Price - Laziness Does Not Exist (2022)
Hartmut Rosa - Social Acceleration (2013)
Claude Shannon, Interview. Omni, (1987)