La Grande Vacance

For ten years I have been exploring our relations with the images we watch and produce, on- and offline. The Great Vacancy was born of my discovery of ‘‘Sleep Stream’’ videos, in which streamers film themselves sleeping, and invite their viewers to wake them up by sending them cacophonous sounds, in exchange for financial donations. This practice of digital torture seemed to me to condense several aspects of our contemporary lives: the generally unhealthy relationship that many of us have with our bodies and their needs; the exacerbated precariousness of part of the population, which leads us to try to monetize even our sleeping time; and the apparent cruelty of the spectators who lend themselves to the game. Realizing that this spectacle of individual exhaustion was also based on a progressive depletion of the planet’s resources (streaming being one of the most energy- intensive online practices), I decided to set my research in a near future, and imagine what might be left of these audiovisual flows in two or three generations’ time – and the profound incomprehension with which, I hope, our descendants will perceive these remnants of our mediated fatigue. The Great Vacancy recounts this critical and optimistic investigation through what may remain from our exhausted times.