Rosaline Dou
Bedrotting Performances Reveal An “Unprocessed” Artmaking?
Screenshot of an Instagram direct message
from a friend sharing a post by @welcome.jpeg.
Screenshot of an Instagram post by @pippyhousesworthgallery and @qualeasha.
Screenshot of an Instagram post by
@welcome.jpeg.
Earlier in February, I attended an exhibition opening where artist Alison Long also staged a bedrotting performance. Curious about the apparent similarities, I looked further and discovered that artist Qualeasha Wood performed a similar bedrotting work in 2025, which triggered a controversy over who is the original and who is the copycat.
Three artists producing nearly the same performance is by no means a mere coincidence. As many users commented on Redditor’s viral post, I share the doubts about whether bedrotting can count as art, or whether it just seems lazy. A more compelling question for me is why more than one artist arrived at almost identical bedrotting performances in the first place. Does this collective impulse to present everyday life as-is through performance, or what I call the “unprocessed,” signal a new condition of contemporary artmaking?
Before getting there, let’s define the terms. Bedrotting began as a TikTok trend and was added to Dictionary.com in 2024, referring to spending extended periods in bed as a voluntary withdrawal from activity or stress, usually accompanied by snacks and electronic devices. Coined in 2018, doomscrolling originally described compulsively consuming negative online news but has since become more generalized to mean passively spending excessive amounts of time scrolling through digital content. Standing in 2026, it is clear that bedrotting and doomscrolling have not escaped our lives; if anything, they have become more normalized. Together, these two terms explicate what all three performances entail: spending prolonged hours in bed scrolling endlessly on phones. But are these performances actually different from one another, if at all?
Qualeasha Wood’s performance Attention Economy was first presented during the private viewing of Malware, her second solo exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London, and later at the V&A South Kensington in April and September 2025. Surrounded by large-scale tapestries depicting selfies, memes, and desktop screens, Wood is lazing on a cream-colored shaker bed for two hours, scrolling, taking selfies, messaging, eating Lorenz Crunchips, and drinking white wine as though no one else were present. Beside her, a monitor displayed an enlarged mirroring of everything happening in her phone, while another phone in front livestreamed the performance on TikTok, collapsing private and public, virtual and physical space in a way that reflects how internet culture mediates the construction of identity.
For the exhibition Come Rot In My Bedroom at Accent Sisters in New York, co-curated by Alison Long and Ahzel, Long transposed the art space into her bedroom. During the opening on February 27, 2026, she spent five hours bedrotting, scrolling Instagram and replying to DMs projected onto the wall behind her bed. The floor was scattered with books, clothes, pill bottles, takeout containers, crumpled napkins, and a stuffed cat. Visitors were invited to send her Instagram Reels or offer her takeout food. In an Instagram DM interview with VICE, Long described the work as a way of deferring her inability to confront personal crises through dysfunction.
Aphex Redditor’s BedRot took place at a small Montréal art space, Eastern Bloc, from 7 PM March 20 to 7 PM March 21, 2026. For a full 24 hours, the artist slouched on a white mattress on the floor, continuously scrolling Instagram Reels, with a live content feed projected on the backdrop. McDonald's takeout and Doritos surrounded the mattress, while a DSLR livestreamed the performance on Twitch. In an interview with CBC News, Redditor explained that the work sought to observe how social media algorithms train themselves through user behavior.
Although the three performances have their discrepancies, they share extreme similarities. Each features a bed or mattress, endless scrolling, food and drinks within reach, a mirrored phone feed, and a livestream. The devices differ, the snacks differ, and the duration varies, but the act itself remains fundamentally the same. I do not think these artists are copycats of one another, but rather copycats of what daily life looks like.
The reason Redditor’s performance went viral is that people recognized themselves in the bedrotting. I certainly did, guilty as charged. But what makes these works so similar is that they are not imitations but literal republications of life. Lying on your side, flat on your back, or on your stomach, holding the device close to your face and swiping upward with your finger. This is exactly what real-life bedrotting looks like. Apart from relocating the activity into an art space that signifies it as artwork, there is little aestheticization to transform this everyday experience into something artistic or visual. In this sense, the work is left “unprocessed.” The performance feels less like an artistic interpretation of daily life than a direct extraction of it. The experience is presented almost untouched, as if copied and pasted from reality.
My sample size is far too small to make a claim, but the fact that these three artists (and perhaps more I have yet to encounter) have independently chosen a similar strategy for presenting bedrotting so close to life raises an alarm. Does this point to “unprocessed” as a new condition of contemporary artmaking? Is aestheticization no longer necessary? Is simply presenting the raw material of everyday life enough? Are we eating up this bland diet?
And the issues coming with it… If artwork becomes increasingly “unprocessed,” how can we distinguish works made from the same everyday materials? This may explain why debates over originality surfaced around Wood and Redditor. As art draws more directly from ordinary life with minimal transformation, artists increasingly work with the same standardized cultural material. At the same time, our behaviors have become more homogenized, and are largely shaped by Internet culture. If both artistic material and the experiences that produce it are increasingly uniform, then artworks may inevitably begin to look alike. In that case, how could we identify originality anymore?
A useful counterexample is Josiane M.H. Pozi’s Rhythmic Stimming (2025), on view at her institutional solo exhibition In Pursuit of Feeling at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In a pitch-dark room, a video is projected onto a sloping screen, showing Pozi in a top-view lying in bed, wearing wired headphones and looping TellaX’s Alienz vs Monsterz, while rhythmically moving with the music. Pozi is also presenting bedrotting, yet the work feels fundamentally different. Part of that difference comes from its medium, a video installation instead of a live performance. More importantly, it feels more processed, and therefore more artlike. Her specific song choice, bright pink bedsheets, camera angle, and installation all create distance between the viewer and the everyday act, making Pozi’s bedrotting distinct.
By comparison, Wood, Long, and Redditor all rely on choices that seem default: scrolling social media, white or cream-colored beds, generic snacks, mirrored phone feeds. Their performances intentionally remain lifelike, but in doing so, they become more indistinguishable. They present intimate moments publicly, yet almost nothing makes them feel deeply personal.
Of course, each artist conceptualizes their work differently. Wood discusses identity, Long on dysfunction, Redditor on algorithm. But looking only at the performances themselves, can we actually perceive those differences? For me, it is more that the act of bedrotting itself contains a multitude of discussions, rather than the artists spotlighting the focus they have named. I find myself relying on artist statements, interviews, and exhibition texts to understand what each work is supposedly about. The concepts do not emerge clearly through the work itself. Instead, I feel responsible for assembling the meaning afterward, connecting the artist’s explanation with what I have seen.
To be honest, I only see some bedrotting happening.
Screenshots of comments by @yattakhoury and
@stowney to @welcome.jpeg’s Instagram post.
Opening performance at Accent Sisters,
New York. Photo: Rosaline Dou.
New York. Photo: Rosaline Dou.
Josiane M.H. Pozi, Rhythmic Stimming, 2025.
Installation view, American Academy of Arts and
Letters, 2026. Photo: Steven Probert Studio.
Installation view, American Academy of Arts and
Letters, 2026. Photo: Steven Probert Studio.