Chinar Shah with Ajit Bhadoriya
In 1963, Andy Warhol made the film Sleep, a looped footage of John Giorno, Warhol’s lover at the time, sleeping. The film runs for 5 hours and 21 minutes, during which Giorno remains asleep, with minimal movement.
This essay emerges from a series of conversations with Ajit Bhadoriya around his growing collection of YouTube livestream channels, his observations, and the work he is developing through this personal archive. YouTube Live, introduced in 2011 with several restrictions, initially limited livestreaming to users with a certain number of subscribers. These restrictions have gradually eased, allowing livestreaming to become a widespread and accessible form of broadcast. At the time of writing this essay, one can go live on YouTube from the smartphone app as long as a channel has at least 50 subscribers. The interface enables interaction via live chat, a like button, and a subscribe button, and displays the number of viewers in real time. These features make visible not only the content of the stream but also its circulation, reach, and the accumulation of attention.
This essay focuses on Bhadoriya’s collection of YouTube livestreams featuring people sleeping in front of the camera, with viewers watching and interacting via the chatbox. There are many sleepers on YouTube Live. The camera is typically set to focus on the sleeping body. At times, entire families sleep in front of the camera. In some instances, the sleeper’s face is covered with a blanket, while in others it remains visible. These streams last for hours. The stage set-up is minimal. A tubelight is often kept on so viewers can see the person sleeping. Bhadoriya notes in his collection that some women put on makeup before going to sleep. A subset of these sleeper videos is recordings of very young babies sleeping, often in prenatal facilities. Another subset depicts a man sleeping while a woman presses or massages his legs live. Rather than offering evidence of a fixed gendered economy of care, these streams open a field of inquiry into how labor and intimacy are staged, made visible, or rendered incidental within platform capitalism.
Between January and April 2026, we examined 30 accounts that use the Live feature to produce sleeping videos. These accounts also generate other forms of content, and part of our research traces their trajectories over the span of a year. While a detailed analysis of these trajectories falls outside the scope of this essay, one notable pattern emerges. Early videos often center on domestic scenes—cooking, introducing children, or presenting aspects of family and home—and are produced with considerable effort. Over time, this labor-intensive mode of production gives way to more passive forms of content, such as sleeping streams.
Another observation is the presence of soft-pornographic content in some channels. The relationship between such content and sleeping videos is complex and cannot be fully addressed here, but it raises important questions around performance, visibility, and audience engagement.
This leads to a more difficult question: that of consent, particularly concerning women who appear in these videos. There are no straightforward answers available through surface-level observation. However, within the accounts we studied, moments of wakefulness, where the sleeping subject intermittently acknowledges and interacts with viewers, suggest an ongoing awareness of being watched. On this basis, one might cautiously infer the presence of consent.
While these videos do not align with a classical definition of voyeurism, where the subject is unaware of being watched, they nonetheless reproduce a voyeuristic structure of looking. This emerges through asymmetries of visibility, the simulation of private moments, and the viewer’s ability to oscillate between presence and anonymity. Through comments, donations, or features such as Super Chat, the viewer can momentarily appear, becoming legible to the streamer and to others. However, this visibility is partial and intermittent. For much of the duration of the stream, the viewer recedes into anonymity, continuing to watch without being seen. The sleeping body, even when knowingly presented to an audience, retains the affective charge of intimacy and ordinary privacy. It is this unstable relation between consent, exposure, and the performance of privacy that sustains the voyeuristic logic of these videos.
In addition to the camera view, viewers can see how many others are watching and participating through the chatbox. These livestreams are often archived and can be viewed after the stream has ended. There are also SuperChat and Sticker Grab options, which monetize the chat; anyone who pays through these features has their chat highlighted or pinned at the top of the chat list. This, in turn, increases the channel’s revenue. Many ‘non-sleeper’ YouTubers actively respond to viewers who subscribe or purchase SuperChat or Stickers, either by addressing their questions or simply acknowledging them during the live stream. These interactions are largely absent from the sleeper’s videos, as there is no active interaction with viewers. Viewers continue to interact with the channel, but the YouTuber is asleep and does not respond to chat messages, leaving many “hi” messages unanswered.
With the rise of online content creation and social media influencers, many channels have developed recognizable themes that structure creators’ personas and outputs. Most such themes involve visible action or performance by the creator. However, in these instances, inaction generates responses, circulation, and engagement.
In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary identifies sleep as one of the few remaining human activities that cannot be fully aligned with the imperatives of continuous production, consumption, and availability (Crary 2013). He writes that “nothing of value can be extracted from it” (Crary 2013, 11), describing sleep as resistant to commodification.
While Jonathan Crary positions sleep as a limit to 24/7 capitalism, the livestreams in Bhadoriya’s collection suggest that this limit may no longer hold in the same way. In these videos, sleep does not fully interrupt production or circulation. The sleeping body withdraws from conscious labour, yet remains embedded within a platform infrastructure that records viewership, enables interaction, and accumulates value. Sleep, here, is neither fully resistant nor fully outside capitalist time. Instead, it occupies an unstable position, partially withdrawn and partially productive, shaped by the platform’s technical and economic conditions. The unconscious body remains at work, both through intentional labor and through its availability to be watched. Sleep, rather than existing outside the labor market, becomes entangled within a network of actions and interactions that collectively produce value.
Crary’s emphasis on sleep as withdrawal can be read alongside Allan Sekula’s writing on photography and the archive, in which visibility is never neutral but is always tied to systems of power, classification, and value (Sekula, 1986). In the context of YouTube Live, the sleeping body becomes an image within a constantly updating archive, exposed to viewing, commentary, and circulation. What is at stake is not only attention, but the conditions under which bodies are made visible, stored, and rendered productive within a platform economy.
An extreme manifestation of this form of sleep capitalism appears in a livestream that Bhadoriya encountered, in which the video feed was disabled. The message on the screen read, “I am going to sleep y’all goodnight 🫶, interact with each other and be positive.” At the time Bhadoriya captured this image, five people were watching the livestream, and the video had received nineteen likes. The YouTuber’s absence did not suspend engagement; rather, it revealed how interaction could persist independently of the visible body, sustained by the platform’s infrastructure. What is at stake, then, is not only the visibility of sleep, but the forms of participation and contribution through which these streams are sustained.
This raises several questions about the design of YouTube Live’s interface, which enables a highly specific form of labor interaction in which both the sleeping YouTuber and the viewer are put to work. By engaging with the channel, the viewer, too, adds value to the stream, increasing its visibility and popularity and thereby contributing directly to its monetization. This complicates the question of where labor resides in these livestreams: with the person being watched, whose bodily presence is rendered productive even in sleep, or with the viewers, whose attention, affective engagement, and interaction sustain the stream’s circulation. The livestream interface itself mediates and organizes these relations, enabling multiple, overlapping forms of labor that ultimately serve the platform. Read through Jodi Dean’s account of communicative capitalism, these livestreams exemplify a condition in which participation itself becomes labour: viewers are not merely spectators but contributors whose clicks, comments, and sustained presence are folded into circuits of value extraction (Dean, 2009). The livestream interface mediates and captures these contributions, ensuring that communication, affect, and attention, regardless of intention, ultimately serve the platform.
One further aspect of the interface is what it makes possible to produce and consume. Within the boundaries of the YouTube Live interface, nothing seems out of place, odd, or even non-narrative. Everything lends itself to narrative possibility, even if that narrative begins and ends with sleepers receiving empty “hi” messages. The interface, though largely invisible, creates space for new forms of entertainment and visuals that, until recently, did not enter mainstream or popular visual culture. Now, however, they find an audience and sustained engagement. When Bhadoriya removes these visuals from their original context and relocates them within his artistic practice, they acquire a different mode of viewership: one that resists passive consumption and repositions the viewer not as a participant in the stream’s circulation, but as a witness to its underlying economies of attention and extraction.
Returning to Andy Warhol’s film Sleep (1963), which records John Giorno sleeping for over five hours and similarly foregrounds duration, stillness, and bodily inactivity as cinematic material. The visual language of 1960s avant-garde film sought to suspend spectacle and narrative, testing the limits of attention and endurance rather than producing consumable entertainment. While Warhol’s film resisted narrative, productivity, and entertainment, YouTube Live absorbs sleep into an economy of continuous contribution.
References
Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso.
Dean, Jodi. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sekula, Allan. 1986. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter): 3–64.
Warhol, Andy. 1963. Sleep. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 321 minutes. Produced by Andy Warhol Films.
About the Author
Chinar Shah is an artist based in Bangalore whose work explores documentary practices through the screen, using it simultaneously as a tool and a site of photographic inquiry. She is the founder of Home Sweet Home Studio, a research and publication platform dedicated to investigating self-organized, artist-led, and curatorial projects across India. Shah is the co-editor of Photography in India: From Archives to Contemporary Practice (originally published by Bloomsbury, UK, 2018; now available through Taylor & Francis) and currently teaches as an Assistant Professor at Vidyashilp University, Bangalore. She is one of the curators for the Student Biennale at the Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2025 – 26 edition.
Ajit Bhadoriya
This issue of Purée Mag was made possible through the support of the Generator Cooperative Art Production, 2025-26.