Gospel According to Yawn
Bespoke photo booth using the phenomenon of contageous yawning to capture london mid-yawn.
Gospel According to Yawn (2020) is a multichannel “yawn zone” exhibited at Somerset House in London as part of the group show 24/7. The installation reminds visitors that corporations—like Netflix—frame sleep as their competitor, and proposes rest as a vital act of resistance within late capitalism. At the entrance, a free photo booth anchored the experience: guests stepped into a soft, plush pink enclosure where a video prompted contagious yawns while a machine-learning algorithm captured and classified each one. By the end of the exhibition, every visitor’s yawn became part of an ever-growing collective archive displayed in the final gallery.
We were also asked to design the flag that flew above London during the duration of the show, sleep as a symbol of the freedom.
Inspired by Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7 and his writings on the commodification of sleep, the work imagines yawning as a social connector and sleep as our last form of rebellion—an unruly dreamworld we access for free, even as our waking hours are endlessly monetized.
Team
Hyphen-Labs, Dan Moore , Nick Ryan, Romy Gad el Rab
