Lazy!
Leisure, Automation and Attention in the Work of Guido Segni

by Sara Molho

Fig. 1: Guido Segni, still from The Machine is Learning, the Artist is Resting, Lot No. 2018/000001 (Extract), 2018. Courtesy the artist.

The Artist is Resting

A digitally generated video depicts a human figure lying down, gradually emerging from stains of colour. The man portrayed, probably asleep, is Guido Segni himself¹ holding a book on his chest. The video features music by Fabio Angeli and was made with technical support by Michele Toni. It belongs to The Machine Is Learning, the Artist Is Resting, the first series within a larger body of work produced entirely through automation as part of Segni’s five-year plan Demand Full Laziness (2018–2023).² In the plan, Segni delegated the production of still and moving images to an artificial intelligence system while devoting himself to inactivity. Departing from this extended project to investigate some aspects of Segni’s production between the 2010s and the early 2020s, this essay will follow an undulating rhythm, gradually unfolding some aspects of the artist’s research, namely digital exploitation, the attention economy, and authorship, through performances that often take place online.

Automation, workers’ conditions, duration, and the refusal to work within the digital economy constitute the core themes addressed by Demand Full Laziness. Moreover, the project, with its aspects related to a critique of artistic labour, resonates with historical precedents of refusal in visual art—from Gustav Metzger’s Auto-destructive art to Stewart Home’s Art Strike (1990–1993)—aligning with anti-artistic strategies that have recurred throughout art history since the historical avant-gardes.³ At the same time, Segni resituates these strategies within the logics of algorithmic culture and machinic authorship, here intended as a way to delegate the actual production of artworks to automated systems. Moreover, attempts to translate strikes and sabotage into artistic practices had already entered the digital realm decades earlier. In Italy, some of the first “net strikes” were organized as early as 1995 by the collective Strano Network, whose actions aimed to disrupt targeted websites by overwhelming them through online traffic.⁴

In preparing Demand Full Laziness, Segni trained a generative adversarial network (GAN)⁵ using a personalized dataset. In the training, he adopted a semantic segmentation dataset,⁶ dividing his self-portraits into colours depending on the different parts of his body, and training the algorithm to recognize them thanks to colour distinction. The training material consisted of previously recorded contents that depicted Segni in moments of what he describes as “performative rest.”⁷

Fig. 2: Guido Segni, Semantic Segmentation Dataset, images No. 00021 and No. 02599, 2018. Courtesy the artist.

As an artist working extensively on and with platforms, Segni presented the project to his Facebook contacts as follows:

“For the next 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 […].

Did you ever give your economic contribute to an algorithm in order to support the artist’s right to be productively lazy and get real artworks as reward?”⁸

As suggested, the artist arranged a way for his friends, comrades, and followers to economically support the project, which will be discussed further on. After the first year, when Segni trained “a neural network […] on deep learning and on how to rest in order to produce unique portraits”⁹ of himself, he solicited content from friends and colleagues in order to further train the algorithm to generate new images derived from previously recorded material.¹⁰The durational and collective preparation that both informed and anticipated Demand Full Laziness was thus grounded in staged actions performed for the mechanical gaze of the camera: in other words, the performers recorded themselves in order to produce contents for the algorithm, and no spectators were involved at this stage. Moreover, the project unfolds as a long-term performance mediated by artificial intelligence, which assumes the role of author.

Questioning Accelerationism

The title of the five-year plan references Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), in which the authors—a scholar in digital economy and a political theorist working on digital media and society—advocate full automation and a universal basic income as means to end workers’ exploitation. In particular, the title of the plan mimics the motto on the cover of the publication, which is “Demand full automation / Demand universal basic income / Demand the future”.¹¹ The book is also referenced in the video: in the original picture from which it was taken, the book in Segni’s hands is the Italian translation of the publication.¹²

Srnicek and Williams’ position can be described as accelerationist and may appear technologically optimistic, as Inventing the Future envisions that technologies will reduce human labour and enable a universal income. In this sense, they argue that “automation and the replacement of human labour should be enthusiastically accelerated and targeted as a political project of the left”.¹³

However, this perspective often fails to sufficiently account for the forms of exploitation embedded within the productive processes behind the machines we rely on to work in our place, effectively displacing rather than resolving the problem. Srnicek and Williams already engaged with accelerationism in their #ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (2013), in which they state: “To generate a new left global hegemony entails a recovery of lost possible futures, and indeed the recovery of the future as such”.¹⁴ In order to achieve this, in the Manifesto they invite the broader political left to embrace technological and social progress rather than leaving automation in the hands of capitalist forces.

The authors propose a way to construct a new, globally coordinated, and technologically informed post-capitalist future. They state that “true transformative potentials of much of our technological and scientific research remain unexploited”¹⁵ as we cannot fully imagine a subversion of capitalist strategies:

“Given the enslavement of technoscience to capitalist objectives (especially since the late 1970s) we surely do not yet know what a modern technosocial body can do. Who amongst us fully recognizes what untapped potentials await in the technology which has already been developed?”¹⁶

In Inventing the Future, the two scholars recall the idea of a leftist consensus concerning the trajectory and objectives of a post-work society, driven by automation and accompanied by a substantial reduction in working hours and the implementation of a universal basic income, to overcome the work ethic¹⁷ (they focus on the United States in particular) and eventually gain “the right to be lazy”,¹⁸ a direct point of reference for Segni’s art practice. Even if his project does not seek to demonstrate the feasibility of non-capitalist algorithmic modes of production, nor does it directly engage with the concept of hegemony, it nonetheless opens a conceptual and digital space for imagining the figure of a post-work artist, in consonance with Srnicek and Williams idea of a post-work society.¹⁹ In this way, the artist is able to employ algorithms in a “do it yourself” manner while fully relinquishing the productive dimension of artistic labour to automated systems.²⁰

Fig. 3: Guido Segni, Portrait from Demand Full Laziness, 2020. Courtesy the artist.

Online Work, Refusal, Failure, Duration

Segni had already addressed the condition of workers within digital environments in earlier projects. One of the most significant examples is Work Less, Work All. We Are the 99% on Fiverr.com (2015).²¹ For this exhibition, Segni published a gig on Fiverr.com, a marketplace for freelance digital labour, inviting platform users to perform short messages related to labour rights movements. Paid five dollars each, these performances stage both the annihilation of the worker’s agency and the failure of past struggles for labour emancipation.

The work consists of a series of short video messages—ranging in duration from 17 seconds to 2 minutes and 24 seconds—and, according to the material currently available online, a single photograph. Formally, the project and its homemade videos adopt characteristics associated with what has been described as “digital folklore,”²² referring to user-generated content and vernacular online video culture and aesthetic. At the same time, it engages the theme of bodily exploitation in exchange for money, an issue central to other works in contemporary art history, as described by Claire Bishop in the context of “delegated performance”.²³

Work Less, Work All can be read in continuity with Segni’s earlier project Proofs of Existence of a Cloud Worker (2014), in which the artist asked temporary workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk (a platform which connects workers and businesses) to re-enact “a clip found on YouTube titled ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ in front of their webcam”.²⁴ The resulting videos were displayed on personal computer screens placed on the floor at Pavilion Social Kunstverein in Lucca.²⁴

All the Times That I Missed Your Call and I Probably Refused to Work (2017) addresses similar themes.²⁶ It consists of an online counter that remains accessible, although it has ceased updating and is currently fixed at 4,630. The website explicitly defines itself as a “performative refusal to work”.²⁷ Unlike Segni’s projects that engage other forms of digital labour, this work focuses ironically on the artist’s own laziness and on the material possibility of eluding work through the repeated act of not answering phone calls, translating this form of refusal into an online representation. This work in particular underlines another aspect, also shared by the five-year plan: it unfolds online over an extended period of time, changing alongside the artist’s actions. In other words, the durational dimension is often a distinctive element of Segni’s projects, as he observes:

“In my works, the performance element does not lie so much in the uniqueness of the hic et nunc, as used to be the case, for instance, with performances in the 70s, but rather in their being part of a mechanism which doesn’t end with the final outcome nor with the chosen medium (web page, video), but which inserts itself in time and triggers various kinds of interactional dynamics”.²⁸

Segni frequently refers to these works as performances and seems to position himself as a mediator rather than a producer or performer. Reflecting on another project, A Quiet Desert Failure, exhibited in (in)Exactitude in Science, part of The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale, curated by Kamilia Kard and Filippo Lorenzin,²⁹ he observes that the work

“can be identified with the website and with the archive images of the Sahara desert which I arrange on a public Tumblr blog. The meaning of the work lies in the time period it covers – 50 long years to complete the mapping of the entire Sahara – and in its relationship with the technological infrastructure it is based on, and the attempt to show the limits imposed by technological obsolescence”.³⁰

Moreover, Segni states that “net.art in all its forms […] has always had a strong performance cast”.³¹ If processuality, from the artist’s perspective, has always been fundamental to digital art, Segni goes further, and Demand Full Laziness ultimately functions as a narrative device: Technology emerges as both the narrator, the character, and the object of the story.³²

In similar ways, other works (such as A Quiet Desert Failure), function as narrative devices that live through different platforms and media. They address, confront and imply digital communication technologies, all at once.

Fig. 4: Guido Segni, Portrait from Demand Full Laziness, 2020.

Thematizing the Digital

Exhibited for the first time on the occasion of #LAYERS, a group show curated by Fabio Paris, Demand Full Laziness insists on themes that recur throughout Segni’s practice, including the management and politics of free time, leisure, and creativity.

The exhibition was produced by Link Art Center³³in collaboration with iMAL (Art Center for Digital Cultures and Technology) and took place at La Raffinerie in Brussels (Charleroi Danse) between 10 April and 26 May 2018. The catalogue opens with a series of quotes addressing contemporary art and the constantly evolving media landscape to which it responds; the first of these is drawn from Claire Bishop’s Digital Divide, an essay originally published in Artforum in 2012, wherein the scholar addresses “the appearance and content of contemporary art” that apparently “have been […] unresponsive to the total upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution”.³⁴ Bishop asks:

“While many artists use digital technology, how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? How many thematize this, or reflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence?”³⁵

Indeed, Domenico Quaranta, curator, scholar, and one of the founders of the Link Art Center, previously cited these lines and offered a considered response to Bishop’s essay in his book Beyond New Media Art, first published in Italian as Media, New Media, Postmedia (2010) and later revised and published in English under the aforementioned title (LINK Editions, 2013). In the latest edition, Quaranta engages Bishop’s position more directly, as his book seeks to bridge the gap between institutionalized contemporary art and practices occurring online or engaging with emerging technologies.

Disordered Attention, recently published by Bishop, provides commentary on themes closely related to those of her earlier essay in Artforum.³⁶ In the book, the author reflects on artistic strategies that emerged with the advent of the Internet in the 1990s. While she considers works that do not necessarily engage digital media at first glance, she emphasizes that the “perpetual oscillation between here and elsewhere, consuming and commenting, is central to how we look at art and performance today”.³⁷ This dispersed, transmedia experience of spectatorship, fractured between online and offline contexts, could apply to the work of Guido Segni and precisely to his five-year plan, as he encourages a distracted spectatorship through multiple media. Moreover, Segni interrogates an additional layer of distractedness and ubiquity: specifically, the one associated with authorship. Somehow, he tries to position himself elsewhere, while an algorithm works for him.

Rather than attempting to resolve the historiographical tensions that have delayed a more equitable reading of technologically mediated art within the broader field of contemporary art, it is worth noting that the REFRESH exhibition series—including #LAYERS as its second group show—sought to address exactly this persistent marginalization of technology in contemporary art discourse. So, both the catalogue and the exhibition featured a range of contemporary Italian artists whose work engages specifically with technological processes and media.

In this context, Segni’s five-year plan is described in detail: “During the first year the machine will be trained on deep learning, and on how to rest and make unique portraits of myself […] in bed, reading, sleeping, or simply enjoying my spare time”.³⁸ The plan is supported through a page on the platform Patreon, where people were able to fund the project through monthly donations, starting at 1 euro.³⁹ The supporters who accept to fund the artist and the algorithm through Patreon could be rewarded with “editions of authenticated artworks made by the machine”.⁴⁰ The artist’s text finishes with the motto: “Demand dull automation. Demand full laziness. Now”.⁴¹

Although it is unclear whether crowdfunding materially supported the artist or significantly influenced the development of the project, the solicitation of economic support via Patreon and Facebook highlights Segni’s tactical use of digital platforms. As the term suggests, tactics adapt and reinvent themselves depending on context and broader strategies. In the context of media activism and art that critically engages with media communication, the concept of tactics derived from The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel De Certeau and was further elaborated by activists and scholars Geert Lovink and David Garcia in The ABC of Tactical Media (1997),⁴² referring to the use of communication technologies in creative, unpredictable, and grassroots ways. While the term has been in use since the 1990s and can now appear obsolete, it remains valid to frame the specific attitude concerning media adopted by Segni. Moreover, while a narrative of defeat recurs throughout Segni’s work over the past decades (the idea of a very slow, unfinishable work is clear in A Quiet Desert Failure, for example) this does not prevent him from undertaking actions that provide critical commentary on media in potentially “disruptive”⁴³ ways, as observed by the Italian activist and scholar based in Berlin Tatiana Bazzichelli.

The five-year plan has been exhibited on multiple occasions and in various configurations.⁴⁴ It was finally displayed at SMDOT Gallery in Udine for the solo show Non volevo fare assolutamente nulla [I didn't want to do anything at all],⁴⁵ which, as we will see, marks a turning point for the whole project.

Self-sabotage, Authorship, Attention Economy

Guido Segni is one of several pseudonyms adopted by Clemente Pestelli (born in 1979), an Italian artist and activist whose practice is situated within the political and aesthetic genealogy of Italian hacktivism—a milieu that has historically negotiated the intersections of technological innovation, collective authorship, and cultural subversion.⁴⁶ As shown, his work interrogates the conditions of digital labour, the ambivalences of disconnection, and the algorithmic reconfiguration of artistic agency, articulated through both collaborative and individual interventions. An early project examined by Tatiana Bazzichelli, Seppukoo (2011), created in collaboration with Gionatan Quintini under the name Les Liens Invisibles, circulated widely online and received an honorary mention at transmediale in Berlin. The project operationalized a form of “digital suicide” by providing software that allowed users to delete their Facebook accounts.⁴⁷ In line with the idea of a “collective ‘exodus’ from the capitalist agony”⁴⁸ recalled by the activist and thinker Franco Berardi and Geert Lovink when referring to protests against financial markets, the work’s title also evokes the ritual dissolution of the collective identity Luther Blissett, which has been an emblematic gesture of symbolic self-annihilation in the history of Italian media activism. Indeed, Pestelli himself adopted Luther Blissett as a pseudonym.⁴⁹ Although Seppukoo may initially appear distant from Demand Full Laziness, the trajectory connecting these projects is coherent, as the five-year plan had effectively faltered well before its intended conclusion in 2023. In fact, by 2021 Segni experienced significant “digital fatigue”,⁵⁰ which prevented him from continuing to coordinate the AI and advance the project. Thus, he ultimately sabotaged his own plan and, after the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated lockdowns, he seemed to experience what Geert Lovink described years earlier as “the expansion of storage and the compression of time” that make “online work so stressful,”⁵¹ drawing on Berardi’s prior theories.⁵² Disengaging from his own work, Segni addresses the concept of “attention economy,” which Claire Bishop defines as “the monetization of our limited capacity to absorb information”.⁵³ Before Bishop, following Berardi, Lovink critiques the label of “attention economy” by emphasizing the lack of viable alternatives to participation in regimes of networked attention extraction.⁵⁴ Segni’s practice directly engages with this economy of attention, simultaneously challenging the monetization of his own artistic labour and the commodification of time spent online: the artist is scrolling.⁵⁵

As anticipated, the exhibition Non volevo fare assolutamente nulla traced the shift from accelerationist enthusiasm for automation to a deliberate refusal of screen-based labour and constant exposure to digital technologies.⁵⁶ Thus, the figure of the artist emerges as exhausted, unwilling to comply with the imperative of productivity and asserting instead a desire to do absolutely nothing: self-sabotage becomes an act of disengagement from the attention economy.

To conclude, by substituting computational processes for human intentionality, he exposes both the persistence of labour within presumably autonomous systems and the precarious status of authorship as a conceptual category. His work foregrounds a critical paradox, questioning whether automation of creativity enables an emancipatory politics of non-work, or it simply reproduces the imperatives of productivity under the guise of technological liberation. This tension raises another query: in performing radical laziness, is the artist acting for the surveillance of the electronic gaze (and ultimately producing value), or does he achieve genuine disengagement from systems of productivity? Without answering this question, Segni situates himself at the juncture, as demonstrated by All the Times That I Missed Your Call and I Probably Refused to Work and by the extensive five-year plan Demand Full Laziness. In the works recalled here, the artist displays a way to engage with the digital domain: within a space that demands restless attention, he creates opportunities for withdrawal and detachment.

Sara Molho is a PhD candidate in Visual, Performative, and Media Arts at the University of Bologna, under the supervision of Prof. F. Spampinato. Her research focuses on relational practices, media, and technologies in Italy during the late twentieth century. In 2024, she was awarded a Getty Research Library Grant. From 2022 to 2025, she served as tutor for the course Phenomenology of Contemporary Art at the University of Bologna. She has published in journals including L’Uomo Nero and Piano B. Arti e Culture Visive and has presented at international conferences, such as the XI Media Art History Conference in Manizales (2025). Molho is a member of the editorial team of Piano B. Arti e Culture Visive and participates in the graduate student workshop AVEC (Art, Visuality, and Electronic Culture) at the University of Bologna, which recently published the book Seamless (edited by F. Spampinato, NERO, 2025).

1 Guido Segni, “The machine is learning, the artist is resting | Productive laziness automated process. Lot no. 2018/000001 (Extract)”
https://vimeo.com/26529033 All websites accessed December 19, 2025. The author thanks Guido Segni for sharing documentation and for the generous dialogue that informed this text.
2 The web pages directly associated with Demand Full Laziness are now accessible after a period offline: “Guido Segni, Demand Full Laziness, 2018,” https://demand-full-laziness.today/;
http://demand-dull-automation.work. See also the preliminary website, which has been available throughout.
3 On these connections, see Valentina Tanni, “Il diritto alla pigrizia. Artista si fa sostituire da un software di intelligenza artificiale,” Artribune, 22 June 2018, https://www.artribune.com/progettazione/new-media/2018/06/artista-software-intelligenza-artificiale/. On “anti-art” see Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965).
4 See Strano Network, Net Strike – No Copyright – et (-: (Bertiolo: AAA Edizioni, 1996).
5 On GAN in visual art, see Alice Barale, ed., Arte e intelligenza artificiale: be my GAN (Milan: Jaca Book, 2020); see also A. Barale, “Arte e intelligenza artificiale. Origini e sviluppi di alcune pratiche contemporanee,” in AVEC, Seamless. Arte, visualità e cultura post-pandemica, ed. Francesco Spampinato (Rome: NERO Editions, 2025), 238–47. 6 With technical support by Michele Toni. 7 https://guidosegni.com/wwworks/. The work was reviewed or quoted several times: e.g. Fabrizia Carabelli, “Demand Full Laziness,” Insideart, 5 July 2018, link. 8 Guido Segni (@GuidoSegni), Facebook post, 23 May 2018,
https://www.facebook.com/guidisegno.
9 Ibid. 10 Andrea Tinterri, “Ozio performativo,” La Foresta, no. 2 (2019): 10–1. Among the participants in the “Laziness Network” was also the artist Giacomo Verde (correspondence with the author, 17 December 2025).
11 Further elaborated by the authors in the paragraph Full Automation: Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London, New York: Verso, 2015), 109–14. 12 Srnicek, Williams, Inventare il futuro, Rome: NERO, 2018.
13 Srnicek, Williams, Inventing the Future, 109. See also footnote no. 9, 215.
14 Srnicek, Williams, “#ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” 2013, https://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/.15 Srnicek, Williams, “#ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” 2013. 16 Ibid.
17 See Srnicek, Williams, Inventing the Future, 128.
18 Ibid., 123.
19 See in general the chapter “Post-Work Imaginaries”, in: Ibid, 107–28.
20 See Ibid, 123.
21 Conceived for his solo exhibition at Link Cabinet, a web-based platform for site-specific projects active between 2014 and 2019 and curated by Matteo Cremonesi. See: Guido Segni, Work Less, Work All, http://work-less-work-all.online/ and Link Cabinet. Online exhibition platform: https://linkcabinet.eu/. 22 See at least Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, eds., Digital Folklore (Stuttgart: merz & solitude, 2009). For a broader perspective, see Gabriele de Seta, “Digital Folklore,” in Second International Handbook of Internet Research, ed. Jeremy Hunsinger et al. (Cham: Springer Nature B.V., 2020), 167–83. 23 See Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London, New York: Verso, 2015), 219–23.
24 Filippo Lorenzin and Andrea Tinterri, eds., Guido Segni. I Think It Was Internet Art but I Was Just Typing. Works 2012–2016 (Massarosa, Lucca: Grafica77, 2016), 10. 25 Giacomo Verde, Documentation of the installation view for Proofs of Existence of a Cloud Worker, YouTube video, posted by Guido Segni, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqaNc_Zm6Mw. 26 “Guido Segni, All the Times I Missed Your Call and I Probably Refused to Work,” http://all-the-times-i-missed-your-call-and-i-probably-refused-to.work/. 27 “Guido Segni,” https://www.guidosegni.com/wwworks/. 28 Elena Giulia Rossi, “Interview: Guido Segni,” Arshake (December 22, 2015), https://www.arshake.com/en/interview-guido-segni/. 29 The Wrong Biennale, 2015-2016,” https://thewrong.org/2015-16 and “The Wrong Biennale (in)Exactitude in Science,” Galerie Charlot, link. 30 Elena Giulia Rossi, “Interview: Guido Segni.”
31 Ibid.
32 See Guido Segni, “interview by Giovanna Marroccolo,” menelique, no. 1 (2019): 126–30.
33 Curatorial platform founded by Lucio Chiappa, Fabio Paris, and Domenico Quaranta, later joined by Matteo Cremonesi, active between 2011 and 2019. 34 Claire Bishop, “Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media,” Artforum 51, no. 1 (September 2012): 436. 35 Ibid.
36 Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (London; New York: Verso, 2024).
37 Bishop, Disordered Attention, 7.
38 Guido Segni, refresh 02_#LAYERS, ed. by Fabio Paris (Milan: Link Art Center, 2018), 65.
39 Guido Segni, “Patreon page,” link.
40 Segni in refresh 02_#LAYERS, 65.
41 Ibid.
42 First published in French in 1980 and then in English in 1984: Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. See: David Garcia and Geert Lovink, “The ABC of Tactical Media,” Nettime, May 16, 1997, https://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html and Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 2002).
43 On the term, see Tatiana Bazzichelli, Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking (Aarhus: Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, 2013). 44 Following the Brussels exhibition, where it was presented solely through the video component, the five-year plan was displayed during the first edition of the Re:humanism Art Prize at AlbumArte in Rome, where Segni was selected among the ten finalists. See Daniela Cotimbo, “The Artist and the Algorithm,” NERO, May 7, 2019, https://www.neroeditions.com/the-artist-and-the-algorithm/. Later, the project was presented at Adiacenze in Bologna, as part of the solo exhibition Fino alla Fine [Until the End], curated by Alessandra Ioalè and Marco Mancuso (February 1st–March 16, 2019) Specifically on this exhibition, see the review: Valentina Tanni, “Arte e intelligenza artificiale a Bologna. Le immagini della mostra di Guido Segni,” Artribune, February 4, 2019, link; see also Federica Fiumelli, “Guido Segni. Fino alla fine,” Juliet, March 8, 2019, https://www.juliet-artmagazine.com/guido-segni-fino-alla-fine/. Among the international exhibitions, the group show Hyperemployment in Ljubljana is notable for the more complex installation of Demand Full Laziness (November 7, 2019–January 19, 2020, MGLC – International Centre for Graphic Art, Ljubljana, curated by Domenico Quaranta. See Hyperemployment, Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2019, https://aksioma.org/hyperemployment-exhibition. For a panoramic on exhibitions featuring Segni’s work, refer to the artist’s website). This included a bed draped with a printed fabric depicting the artist (from the first series of works created for Demand Full Laziness), a personal computer placed on the bed connected to two pairs of headphones, two fans animating the flags (recurring in the various layouts), and four AI-generated printed artworks. 45 April 16–May 22, 2021, with a text by Stefano Monti. See “Non volevo fare assolutamente nulla,” SMDOT Gallery, Udine, 2021, https://www.smdot.net/exhibitions/non-volevo-fare-assolutamente-nulla/
46 Arturo Di Corinto, Tommaso Tozzi, Hacktivism: La libertà nelle maglie della rete (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2002); Tatiana Bazzichelli, Networking: The Net as Artwork (Aarhus: Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, 2008).
47 See Bazzichelli, Networked Disruption, 212–7. On this work and other digital suicides, such as the ones by Cory Arcangel and Moddr_Lab, see Loretta Borrelli, “The Suicide Irony. Seppuko and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine,” Digicult, no. 52 (March 2010), https://digicult.it/digimag/issue-052/the-suicide-irony-seppuko-and-web-2-0-suicidemachine/. 48 Franco Berardi and Geert Lovink, “A Call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software,” Nettime, October 12, 2011, https://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1110/msg00017.html.
49 As he states on his website.
50 Correspondence with the author, 17 December 2025.
51 Geert Lovink, Networks Without a Cause: Critique of Social Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 26.
52 See Franco Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody (London: Minor Compositions, 2009).
53 Bishop, Disordered Attention, 28.
54 Lovink, Networks Without a Cause, 28.
55 From the title of a work currently not available online: “Guido Segni, The Artist is Scrolling, 2017,” http://theartistisscrolling.com/. On the project The Artist is Typing by Segni and on tracking online presence, see Elena Giulia Rossi, “The Artist Is Typing,” Arshake (September 27, 2016), https://www.arshake.com/en/guido-segni-the-artist-is-typing/. 56 Within this framework, Segni dedicated a video work to Byung-Chul Han: The Han Collection (or how we got wired, tired and fired), 2021. Han’s thought also surfaces in the exhibition’s critical text, authored by Stefano Monti, owner of SMODT gallery: Stefano Monti, “Stanco!,” SMDOT Gallery, https://www.smdot.net/exhibitions/non-volevo-fare-assolutamente-nulla/. See also Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford: Stanford Briefs, 2015).

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Lazy! Leisure, Automation and Attention in the Work of Guido Segni

Fig. 1: Guido Segni, still from The Machine is Learning, the Artist is Resting, Lot No. 2018/000001 (Extract), 2018. Courtesy the artist.

Fig. 2: Guido Segni, Semantic Segmentation Dataset, images No. 00021 and No. 02599, 2018. Courtesy the artist.

Fig. 3: Guido Segni, Portrait from Demand Full Laziness, 2020. Courtesy the artist.

Fig. 4: Guido Segni, Portrait from Demand Full Laziness, 2020.

Lazy!
Leisure, Automation and Attention in the Work of Guido Segni