How To Give Your Best Self Some Rest

A video tutorial introducing the “aesthetic of detachment”, published as a standalone website. Strategically underperform as a vacuum cleaner robot, smart lock, delivery robot, or AI assistant.

Inke Arns about the piece:

Do you also have to be productive all day and deliver top performance? If you follow Sebastian Schmieg, AI could offer a remedy – but in a different way than expected! The artist describes ‘intelligent’ machines – such as vacuum cleaner robots, smart locks, delivery robots and digital assistants – as “strategic underperformers” that we should take as an example. How? By, for example, pretending that an email was not written by you, but by a digital assistant, and apologizing for it in the email signature: “This email was written by my AI assistant – bear with it, it is doing its best.” If you don’t feel like leaving the house, you just claim that the smart home won’t let you out – based on your health data. Bottom line: we only have to be as good as the smart devices, which, he says, “strategically underperform.” Sebastian Schmieg calls this the “aesthetics of detachment”.

Commissioned by Goethe-Instituts of East Asia and Haus der Elektronischen Künste Basel for the online exhibition “Hybrid by Nature: Human.Machine.Interaction“.