Rosaline Dou
2025
Full video and essay are available upon request
In an Airbnb-turned-study, we perform as intellectuals: reading, discussing, and writing, while eating, excreting, sleeping, and having sex. Through a deliberately unserious essay-writing process, we challenge the stereotype of the “serious” intellectual and ask: can the unserious also produce knowledge? The four-channel video splits into two parts: a screen recording of Google Doc essay-writing, disrupted by daily needs and desires documented in three security camera feeds. The essay, structured as a Reddit-style forum discussion, blends Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, and Cantonese, and incorporates sources ranging from academic journals to unverified wikis and memes, defying conventional academic formats. Through performance, writing, and self-mockery, Embed in bed explores how the image of the intellectual is maintained by rituals of seriousness and productivity. Can knowledge be produced in distraction, in leisure, in pleasure? Must the intellectual always appear busy?