Italian Artist Guido Segni Launches AI-Powered 5-Year Art Strike

Italian artist Guido Segni has initiated 'Demand Full Laziness,' a five-year project (2018–2023) that delegates his artistic production to a deep learning algorithm. Inspired by the accelerationist text 'Inventing the Future' by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, the project is a 'automated performance' where an AI observes Segni resting, sleeping, reading, and enjoying leisure time, then creates portraits of him. The resulting works are offered to patrons via Patreon subscriptions. The project revives the concept of Art Strike, first proposed by Gustav Metzger in the 1970s (1977–1980), later echoed by Stewart Home in 1987, the Alytus Biennial in Lithuania in 2008, and the Claire Fontaine collective's Human Strike. Segni's work also references Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio's 1959 'Manifesto of Industrial Painting,' which envisioned a society without traditional labor. The project critiques productivity ethics and automation fears, using AI not to replicate style but to generate art from idleness.