Awards: C/Change R&D Lab Award from Goethe Institut SF and Gray Area
Berkeley Center for New Media Seed Award

Other team members:
Asma Kazmi, artist
Kathy Wang, designer

Work in Progress

Missing Objects Library (MOL) is a curated, web-based repository of handmade 3D objects that are designed with an intersectional, feminist lens. MOL is displayed as both a physical video installation and a web-based, free model library. MOL offers an alternative to commercial, status quo storefronts that provide digital assets for game design and special effects. Objects sold in these spaces are typically devoid of provenance, and they continually reinscribe false notions of neutrality while privileging a white, cis, heteronormative dominance. In contrast, MOL is an open platform with downloadable models that accurately represent the world we inhabit. MOL disrupts historical gatekeeping performed by “neutral” marketplaces by offering 3D modeled objects that span a wide range of identities, abilities, and affinities. In addition to critiquing existing 3D model storefronts, MOL builds community by offering an economic system of reciprocity, where technological representations of things are exchanged to produce meaningful relations and effects.

Current themed cabinets being developed with MOL include: cloud server farm infrastructures, extinct plant specimens, hidden hygiene objects (tampons, hospice care supplies and equipment, artificial limbs, chest binders, etc), and non-Western display and presentation furniture. MOL creates and amplifies objects that have been ignored, dispossessed, or refused representation in emerging 3D spaces. Each theme’s objects are housed in a custom cabinet designed to be in conversation with its contents.

This project is in development and will launch in late-Fall 2023 with an exhibition at Gray Area in San Francisco.

Made in collaboration with Asma Kazmi.

Carbonivore is a video installation that speculatively and playfully visualizes invisible infrastructure of the global internet and communications technologies. While drawing on the same carbon resources, Carbonivore functions as a parasitic agitator that critically represents the web of tangled coaxial cables, air conditioners, computer servers, water pipes, electricity, minerals, and metals that make up the relentlessly material Cloud.

Carbonivore includes a vibro-haptic bench of animalistic, organic, and mechanical sounds that reference California's ongoing ecological crises: a discordant symphony of growling Grizzly Bears, a bubbling stream, floppy disk drives--a nod to Silicon Valley's beginnings, electricity, wind turbines, and air conditioners.

Special thanks to Virginia Vassilakou for audio engineering and Quincy Paulos for 3D modeling.

Exhibited at:
More Than Meets AI Exhibition at the Worth Ryder Gallery
and
Internet Tour: Invisible Infrastructures and AI Hallucinations organized by Mario Santamaria

(50 Alternate Album Covers to Thrash and Burn)
2023

PRESS: Artnet // Billboard Magazine // Boing Boing

ARTIST BOOK

NFT drop with TAEX

I recently discovered that an indie musician from Los Angeles named Ariel Pink had used an unauthorized photograph of me on one of his album covers. The record, titled Thrash and Burn, was released in 2006 and remastered and reissued in 2013 by German record company Human Ear Music. Both printings feature my face on the cover without my consent.

Ariel Stinks (50 Alternative Album Covers to Thrash and Burn) is a series of 50 alternative album covers I’ve made in response to the Thrash and Burn cover emblazoned with my unauthorized image. Working in collaboration with artificial intelligence software, I’ve created a series of images that use humor and parody to address the original cover’s violations to personal rights and offenses to good taste. I leave the words “ARIEL STINKS” but swap the original cover for 50 different versions that feature Ariel Pink, rather than me.

Ariel Stinks (50 Alternative Album Covers to Thrash and Burn) is an alternative to litigation. Launching in January 2023, the series will be available in three ways:

1. An NFT drop curated by Margarita Kuleva through the curatorial forum TAEX

2. A photography book with an essay and 50 images of the alternative album covers

3. A free digital album cover to replace the existing cover on your electronic music platforms.

Dog Pack is an augmented reality environment that uses the Institute of Contemporary Art SF as a site for exploring Dogpatch neighborhood lore in a fantastical and fabulative way. The work combines virtual objects with the physical space to create a hybrid ecosystem where visitors engage in a participatory artwork.

The ICASF is a new museum space in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. Drawing on urban legends about the origin of the Dogpatch name, Dog Pack is a site-specific project that explores and embellishes local lore about wild dog packs roaming the neighborhood, feeding off of slaughterhouse scraps from 3rd Street processing plants. These dog packs purportedly “ruled” Bayview and Dogpatch neighborhoods from mid-1800s for the next century as the neighborhood shifted from rural to industrial. While there are three competing stories about the origin of the Dogpatch name, this work focuses on one: wild dogs.

By situating the audience-participant in both a virtual environment and a physical space, Dog Pack blurs the boundaries between the real and the imagined, the historical and the present. The work grounds itself in the conceptual art of the 1960s, a time when questions about the nature and necessity of the physical art object were primary. The project nods toward modern-day artmaking, where semiological questions about the nature of art have new meaning as technology has advanced and AR objects are both “here” and “not here” simultaneously.

Dog Pack is a collaboration between Jill Miller and Melody Chang, with Yuting (Kathy) Wang as the Project Technical Lead. Dog Pack is embedded within the existing gallery installation by Chris Martin - any black and white texts in these images belong to him. Special thanks to Paxton Paulos and Adam Huth for some on-the-fly design work.

2005

Waiting for Bigfoot was a performance-installation that was located in the Sierra Nevada remote wilderness while simultaneously projected into a gallery space in Norwich, England. The campsite was situated in a geographical area with a high incidence of Bigfoot sightings. Throughout the 6 week performance, a live feed of the campsite could be viewed both in the gallery and online. Participants from around the world tracked the feed and reported possible sightings in a citizen science fashion. The artist consulted a cryptozoologist who helped create a reading list and advised the artist on ways to habituate a Bigfoot as Jane Goodall had done with the chimpanzees. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) connected the artist with people who had experienced Bigfoot sightings. 

More details and full statement HERE.

EAST International exhibition, Norwich Gallery, England

work in progress!

Using plant samples from the UC Berkeley herbarium and digital databases across the world, the artist meticulously reconstructs extinct flora species using 3D rendering software and “plants” them into the precise site where they were last documented in the wild. Building on Donna Haraway’s theory of partial reconciliation or “getting on together,” this augmented reality project folds extinct species into contemporary places where natural ecosystems have been disrupted by human industry and culture.

This project is not about choosing between utopian visions or dystopian nightmares; it imagines an imperfect but sustainable future-possibility. A place where there is an intricate web of multi-species narratives, where speculative fabulation thrives.

2014-15

Unsung Hero is a video that uses GoPro cameras and the company's own marketing videos to challenge gender stereotypes and heroism. GoPro's slogan is Be a Hero, yet the videos on their YouTube channel feature men  engaging in extreme sports (motocross, surfing, snowboarding, etc) and women wearing mermaid tails in the ocean. Unsung Hero humorously splices mothers performing domestic duties and childrearing into the company's videos.

Go Pro videos are shot and edited to give us multiple perspectives, reinforcing a scopophilic effect. You get to be the watcher and the one who is watched. You are the primary actor who delights in the feeling of being adored while simultaneously adoring the actor. Further pulling us into identification with the masculine gaze is the fast paced editing sequences, all set to an ejaculatory, frenetic pace.

This video is one in a series of 3.

The FAB Gallery, University of Alberta, Edmonton
2016

2004

A feminist mash up of John Baldessari's classic 1971 video, "I am Making Art."

In the collection of The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Reinking Collection, and CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo.

2004

The artist posted a craigslist ad, "I'm making a video portrait of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres' Les Grandes Odalisques. Please contact me if you can be my odalisque." The ad also included a photograph of the original painting. 

After documenting dozens of participants, the result was a video installation of 20 video portraits. The videos were synched so that models turned and looked past the viewer and at each other. Participants included: a bartender, a retiree, a woman who survived breast cancer, an Intersex person, a stay-at-home mom, a fashion designer, a nudist, and more. 

New Wight Gallery, UCLA
Wind Tunnel, Art Center College of Design

2018

When people put on an AR/VR headset, they expect to be entertained. This project is a refusal. The Liar environment dynamically surrounds the AR participant with a circle of disembodied female hands pointing at them. The hovering, uncanny hands intermix with the real visitors within the gallery space, creating an unstable landscape. No matter where the participant turns or moves, the disembodied pointing fingers emerge and follow. Do they adore or accuse? Over time, the playful attention begins to suggest something more sinister, provoking discomfort. Inspired by the #MeToo movement and the countless women who weren’t able to come forward and tell their stories.

Worth Ryder Gallery
UC Berkeley 2018

2013-15

Body Configurations is a series of photographs that respond to the confinements of domestic space. Inspired by Valie Export's photographic series by the same name, this work brings the camera into familial quarters and physically manifests the burden of primary caregiver.

Sesnon Gallery, UC Santa Cruz

2007

After 6 months of training with a private investigator, the artist surveilled multiple Bay Area art collectors' homes and vehicular activity. The result was hundreds of photos and hours of surveillance video which formed an installation modeled after FBI profiling boards. A tabloid designed after The Enquirer was available for sale at the exhibition.

2nd Floor Projects, San Francisco, CA