Lethargy and the Art of Being Unfit

In his Academy project, Hu plans to articulate the ambivalence of being caught inside digital systems of surveillance and algorithmic control. “What is it like to work within a digital system that is all but impossible to refuse or opt out of?” he asks. “What does it mean to be politically active when political speech simply becomes another form of feedback for tuning marketing algorithms?” Hu terms this kind of feeling “lethargy,” which captures both a user’s disengagement from digital systems, and the sense that one can never entirely disconnect from them. Just as bodily fatigue epitomized the effects of industrial capitalism, lethargy is emblematic of a new stage of “communicative capitalism,” in which we, as digital consumers, are constantly asked to interact with our digital sponsors—for example, by casually scrolling through Facebook. To explore the “lethargic” state, Hu examines a set of digital artworks that take the position of an “unfit” user—for example, a person too lazy to relate to others. While such artworks are often dismissed by critics as boring, passive, or apolitical, Hu notes that traditional avant-garde gestures—attention-seeking, loud, rebellious—are too often co-opted by communicative capitalism. Instead, he turns to more reticent artworks, which do just enough to satisfy the injunction to communicate. “Lethargy,” Hu argues, “is often a self-sabotaging tactic, but in an age where our digital selves are continually asked to ‘speak up’ and perform their subjectivity, this tactic may well offer an alternate route to the political.” In Berlin, Hu plans to interview media artists, and to collaborate with scholars of media archaeology.