24/7: A Wake-Up Call for Our Non-Stop World review – in search of lost time

There is a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, dated 1782, that looks as anomalous as anything by Magritte. It shows a landscape by night, eerie and dark beneath a clouded moon. But in the distance squats a five-storey building with all its windows illuminated like some modern apartment block. This is Richard Arkwright’s cotton mill in Derbyshire, where the 12-hour shifts ran right through the night, ending (and beginning all over again) at 5am. Arkwright’s machines never stopped.

Our 24/7 society began long ago, with industrialisation. Of course we have always been up through the night, with babies, bedside vigils, illness, anxiety. But the rest of the world mainly slumbered around us. With mass production came the erosion of any distinction between night and day. And now consumption has taken over: buying, watching, playing, tweeting, we are always online.

That, at least, is the premise of this novel and intriguing exhibition, which pairs Wright’s painting with an enormous time-lapse photograph of a London high-rise, by Rut Blees Luxemburg, its midnight windows lit by glowing screens. In Luxemburg’s image (used as the cover of the Streets’ 2002 album Original Pirate Material) the machines on the longest burn brightest; some are never turned off.

The show opens with extreme wakefulness, in the form of a vast grid of lights flickering and blinking and nearly fading to black, but not quite, like the buzzing of the sleepless mind. Round the back, the circuit boards and wiring are exposed, setting each other off like nonstop synaptic crackle.

I took this work, by the NONE collective, to be a version of the human brain, but in fact the machine is in a constant state of stress-testing, monitoring itself quite pointlessly without knowing what its task really is. This is what the anthropologist David Graeber calls the contemporary “bullshit job”: keeping busy just for the sake of maintaining appearances.

A better vision of insomnia comes in the Swiss artist Roman Signer’s video of himself lying in bed as a model helicopter circles noisily above like some infuriating insect, unravelling the bedclothes with its wings. He tries to sleep and cannot, caught in this feedback loop of hectoring consciousness. Tellingly, it is daylight outside.

Insomnia trips itself up. We try to sleep, notice we are not sleeping and remain anxiously awake, longing for those precious eight hours. Sleeplessness, a caption notes, has become a fast-growing business. It is now worth $4bn a year in the US.

In China there is no time to sleep. Alan Warburton’s marvellous Sprites I-IV, one of those lenticular prints that gives the illusion of movement, shows four versions of himself desperately trying to catch 40 winks at his Beijing desk: slumped on the keyboard, coiled on his chair, curled uncomfortably beneath. The artist was working for a video effects studio regularly used by Hollywood for outsourcing. At lunchtime, the 100 Chinese workers would rapidly nap on pillows before resuming work for another eight hours until Los Angeles opened.

Working round the clock: the phrase is telling. Ted Hunt’s Sense of Time presents a series of alternative watch faces showing celestial, seasonal and solar time. Each is ingenious, and each shows time as tyrannically circular, instead of linear, as we experience it. Or do we? Old-fashioned punch-the-clock machines in this show emphasise the terrible repetitiveness of workers’ lives, while the 1909 Empire Clock globe was devised to show the time at every outpost of empire, where the sun never sets. Now we fly the time zones, battling jet lag.

This aptly restless show can’t quite settle on its theme. There are photographs of neon-lit night bars and an airport destination board that ceaselessly clatters up random search terms from round the world. In a Japanese teahouse you’re invited to drink time instead of tea, random LED numbers cascading down the walls. But can time be measured in numbers, as opposed to lived moments?

In Marcus Coates’s film Self-Portrait As Time, the artist’s fingernail appears to edge the second hand ever forwards on his watch. He keeps it up (if you’ve time) for a full 12 hours, second by second, as if he had the measure of time. But of course it is all an illusion: we are not in control. The watch ticks all by itself.

One gallery seems quite disapproving: “24/7 life has programmed us never to turn off, to be intolerant of waiting and to be more likely to shout online than listen quietly”. An installation by Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos shows 15 pairs of hands, cast in white plaster, all texting on invisible phones like mute white birds. Showing what happens when we have lost the power of speech, it is drily titled 15 Pairs of Mouths.

But we still speak on those phones, and nor has the written letter died out. One young artist, who spent six months without the internet at Somerset House, received many beautifully written letters from friends. And a very entertaining installation by Tega Brain and Surya Mattu, titled Unfit Bits, offers devices to thwart those insurance companies who insist on digital data: metronomes, adapted wheels and executive toys that swing your Fitbit to simulate the motion of walking.

Although 24/7 takes off from the book of the same name by Jonathan Crary, in which the US author argues that sleep is now the last bastion against raging capitalism, this exhibition doesn’t touch much on politics. Nor does it dwell upon zero hours, the gig economy or the way that machines have taken over the jobs of sleep-dependent people, running all the way back to Arkwright’s water frame and the spinning jenny.

But it does offer Benjamin Grosser’s hilarious satire on 24/7 overlords, specifically Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Grosser has cut together what he pithily calls “a few words from Zuckerberg”, in which the zillionaire with the medieval haircut keeps repeating his favourite words: millions, billions, faster, greater, wider and, of course, more, more, more.

After all its coruscating multimedia visions, this show eventually drifts towards sleep. Although there is a wonderful recording of people around the world simultaneously humming Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah as a kind of lullaby, the art begins to peter out. There are designs for pillows to be worn like hats, a copper blanket and some of Susan Hiller’s 70s dream maps tacked to the wall. What they really needed here was Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho.

But the final work is a sound piece by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, in which you can hear the dawn chorus of old, before the electronic night was bright as day and London’s birds were not confused. Chiffchaffs, robins and redstarts soar in full throat, their song startlingly clear and beautiful but now generated, alas, entirely by computer.

• 24/7 is at Somerset House, London, until 23 February 2020