Thirty-thousand feet over the Pacific, the author and artist Douglas Coupland asked a flight attendant why the airline’s wi-fi was so impressively fast. She replied that it needed to be: being online made time pass more quickly for passengers, and is preferable to sleeping.

Why? Coupland suggests we’ve undergone a neural reconfiguration in the 21st century. In 1019, he claims, humans received three-and-a-half dopamine hits a day. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter nicknamed the Kim Kardashian of molecules by British clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell. It creates feelings of pleasure that motivate a person to repeat a specific behaviour.

“A thousand years later, we receive hundreds, thousands, of dopamine hits a day,” argues Coupland. “The part of our brain that regulates our time perception has been overloaded and exhausted, causing our sense of past, present and future to melt together.”

An urgent new exhibition called 24/7: A Wake Up Call for Our Non-Stop World explores this culture in which we sleep less, consume content via screens at all hours, disconnect from our surroundings and have our every interaction data-mined and predicted.

Fifty artists have been asked respond to the causes and consequences of this culture and how we could combat it. For Jet Slag: Around the World in Seven Sleeps, Alice Vandeleur-Boorer took part in a sleep-deprivation study, living in a lab for 10 days without natural light or knowledge of the time, and advancing her body clock by four hours a night in order to sleep outside the normal 24-hour circadian rhythm. Her photographs and data graphs show the disturbingly disorientating effects the experiment had on her.

As for Coupland, he has produced a series of posters called Slogans for the 21st Century. “Explain clocks to someone from 1304,” goes one. Elsewhere are “Insomnia is bad for business” and “Shopping while sleeping is a fascinating idea.” All are aimed at shaking us from our dogmatic slumbers about how the 24/7 world is changing us.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A poster from the series Slogans for the 21st Century. Photograph: © Douglas Coupland

But why would anyone prefer surfing to sleeping? One reason is that the former is designed to keep us in the 24/7 loop. “Tech companies understand what causes dopamine surges in the brain and they lace their products with ‘hijacking techniques’ that lure us in and create ‘compulsion loops’,” wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks in his article How Evil Is Tech?. In 2017, founding president of Facebook, Sean Parker, told a meeting in Miami that Facebook’s architects exploited a “vulnerability in human psychology” whereby whenever someone likes or comments on a post or photograph “we … give you a little dopamine hit”. But users don’t know when these hits will come, so we compulsively check. Even when we should be asleep.

Such neural hijacking techniques are not new. The makers of slot machines looked to the work of the American psychologist BF Skinner, who found that the strongest way to reinforce a learned behaviour in rats is to reward it on a random schedule. In the show, Mat Collishaw riffs on this idea with a new work called The Machine Zone, in which six animatronic birds move inside “Skinner boxes”, exploring the idea of random reward which underpins the algorithms driving social media interactions. “I noticed that everybody, including me, is on their phones all the time, and how disturbing that is. I couldn’t find a way to show it until I was reading about Skinner’s experiments.”

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Collishaw’s animatronic birds are based on pigeon skeletons but they’re covered in silver to suggest armature. “Essentially, it’s showing how we are or have become machines.” On the walls around this installation are C-print photos depicting birds’ corpses – as if Collishaw is following the consequences of our social media addictions to their logical conclusion … death. The inspiration came from Henry Wallis’s 1856 portrait of Thomas Chatterton , which depicts the 17-year-old poet lying dead on his bed after taking arsenic. “Chatterton constructed these fake identities, such as pretending to be a 15th-century monk, and those identities possibly led to his downfall. For me, the notion of fake identities and performing ourselves online was very resonant.”

The earliest work in the show is Joseph Wright of Derby’s 1797 painting Arkwright’s Cotton Mills By Night, one of the first depictions of the 24/7 living that arose with the Industrial Revolution. Workers were required around the clock. Arkwright’s mill was not so much the cradle of the industrial revolution as the hand that rocked us out of our cradles and into sleeplessness.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night by Joseph Wright of Derby. Photograph: (Joseph Wright)

Coupland says he sleeps for nine-and-a-half hours a day, and feels the benefit. “If I’ve accomplished anything in this world, it’s most likely because of my rigid adherence to getting uncompromised nightly down-time.” But he is increasingly unusual in this. Consider the white-crowned sparrow. So impressed by the fact that the little bird can stay awake for two weeks during migration, the US department of Defence funded a study of the bird’s natural alertness mechanisms. The goal of the research was to produce a soldier who can stay awake for seven days. Art historian Jonathan Crary, whose book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep inspired the show, wrote: “As history has shown, war-related innovations are inevitably assimilated into a broader social sphere, and the sleepless soldier would be the forerunner to the sleepless worker or consumer.”

Crary’s sense is that sleep is the final redoubt, the last zone in our lives that hasn’t yet been exploited for profit. “The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism.” Nature abhors a vacuum; capitalism abhors economic dead zones, so it has prodded us awake.

But that isn’t the whole story. Having rudely awoken us to profit from sleeplessness, capitalism – with its shameless sense of irony – sold us ways of sleeping better. In Why Can’t We Sleep?, psychoanalyst Darian Leader describes an advertisement asking viewers if they find it difficult to concentrate during the day or have trouble remembering things. “Rather than seeing this as the consequence of modern life, long commutes and an unbearable exhortation to maintain a positive image during working hours,” wrote Leader, “it is declared the sign of a poor mattress.” Everything in 24/7 culture is a business opportunity; every moment ripe for shopping.

We need more than lavender slumber sprays. Helpfully in the show, several artists offer life hacks, to escape the tyranny of 24/7 connectedness, incessant monitoring and sleeplessness. Australian artist Tega Brain’s Unfit Bits tricks fitness monitors into believing users have done more exercise than they have. How? By attaching a fitness tracker to an electric drill, turning the latter on and watching your steps accumulate while you lie on the sofa sipping cocktails and eating crisps as nature intended. Or connecting it to the spinning wheel of an upturned bicycle, or to the pendulum of a metronome. The aim, according to the Unfit Bits blurb, is to “produce data to qualify [users] for incentives from employers or insurers, even if they can’t afford a high exercise lifestyle”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shroud Chrysalis I, 2000, Catherine Richards. Photograph: David Barbour/Catherine Richards

Catherine Richards’ Shroud/Chrysalis 1 invites visitors to wrap themselves inside a copper blanket. They’ll still be able to see and hear through the fabric, but will be protected from any electromagnetic signals, not least all the incoming blah of social media. I suspect there will be a queue, given the chance her piece offers for social media junkies to catch up on sleep. The same goes for Tatsuo Miyajima’s meditative isolation chamber, entitled Life Palace (Tea Room), which visitors can climb inside, from where to follow the blue glow of blinking LED numbers showing the passing of time.

Indeed, the curator of 24/7, Sarah Cook, is heroically bold in offering visitors so many opportunities to sleep during the show. Hyphen Labs’ booth confronts visitors with pictures of people yawning and, if they can’t resist following suit, they will be captured mid-yawn.

More ingeniously sleep-inducing still is Tracking Transience, Hasan Elahi’s decade-long project to bore viewers with data. It originated when Elahi was wrongly identified as a terrorist and submitted to a six-month FBI investigation. “Viewers can see exactly where I am and what I’m doing, not to mention all sorts of details such as my telephone calls, my banking records, my flight data, as well as a few more things of a personal nature that I feel I should disclose to the FBI so they can know me a little better.” Time-stamped photos flash by on screen showing half-made beds, every toilet he’s ever used, every meal he’s ever eaten. It’s like being cornered at a party by someone without an edit function.

There are 70,000 images to explore. “After all, the FBI wanted to know everything about me and I’m all about full disclosure,” Elahi says. In an age where privacy cannot be allowed, Elahi has brilliantly turned the tables on the data miners. At the same time, he has found what we need more than anything in our sleepless age: a surefire cure for insomnia.

• 24/7 is at Somerset House, London, 31 October to 23 February.



