In the middle of our conversation (held virtually, fittingly), Dejha pulls out a card from Brian Eno’s deck of Oblique Strategies, the only one sitting on her desk in Boston while the rest were stacked together in Berlin: it reads “BE LESS CRITICAL MORE OFTEN.” Laughing, Ania quickly adds, “but that doesn’t apply today.”
In fact, the LA- and Berlin-based artist duo Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti are critical quite often: their “fleshy” experiential work that interrogates the relationship between humans and extractive technologies has earned them the 2020 ADC Award for Experiential Design and the BCS Immersive Environment Award at the 2021 Lumen Prize Awards – accolades that reflect the resonance of their work. Drawing upon their backgrounds in human-computer interaction, choreography, and gender studies, the couple creates immersive experiential art that challenges our all-too-passive encounters with technology and magnifies our everyday, seemingly innocuous decisions that fuel the unfettered power of Big Tech.
“A lot of melting smiles”
The notions of surveillance capitalism and extractive technologies that Ania and Dejha have been working with since 2016 as art house Operator have become more mainstream over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, which tilted our world so heavily towards the digital sphere. In 2019 – in that era of mask-free interaction and shameless selfies at the Museum of Ice Cream – their seminal installation On View played with the audience’s desire to be the subject of an artistic experience. After signing a “Terms and Condition” data release at the beginning of the experience, viewers moved through a series of digital interfaces and facial recognition scans, physically bending to the artists’ will through predictive choreography in order put themselves “on view” as the ultimate artistic subject – in a gold frame, no less.
“And then people asked to have the photo,” they explain, “‘Is there a QR code? Where can I get the photo?’ And we said, ‘No’ … We decided to not give out the photo as a power move to just display that, at the end of the day, everything that’s being gathered about you doesn’t belong to you – an image of you doesn’t belong to you. We flipped the narrative: they felt powerful and suddenly they realized there is a greater power at work that just hasn’t cashed in yet.” Significantly, Ania and Dejha made use of a closed network to ensure that the data they collected throughout the project stayed secure, only “mimicking the problem that’s happening as a way to expose it.”
As in their entire body of work, On View challenged audiences to grapple with their real versus perceived sense of power at a moment when technology presents itself (with an insidious wink) as entirely at the disposal of individuals and their desires. Living out their fantasies of hyper-visibility, participants held pre-planned poses for an absurdly long fifteen seconds while their photos were taken, gradually recognizing themselves as wilting puppets rather than puppet-masters. The artists shared that, over those fifteen seconds, “there were a lot of melting smiles.”
“Now I’m more skeptical of being seen”
In emphasizing the connection between individuals’ physical bodies and their digital presence or “data bodies”, Ania and Dejha reintroduce us to the often-forgotten – and very manipulable – shadows that haunt our daily digital activities. Their upcoming project Soft Evidence (2021) explores this theme further in terms of synthetic media (so-called “deepfakes”), which most often make use of publicly accessible datasets to maliciously depict women in non-consensual pornography. In deciding to create their own ethically sourced dataset for Soft Evidence, the artists make a statement: data is not detached from human bodies, nor from questions of representation and social justice – “data is sometimes just another manifestation of those issues that happens to feel more abstract, often be free, and sound apolitical.” The data we leak or willingly share online can be easily weaponized with very real consequences; in the context of deepfakes, then, visibility can be equated with vulnerability – and invisibility understood as the greatest power.
Taking this notion to its fashionable extreme is the artists’ signal-blocking trench coat I’d rather be in a dark silence than (2020), complete with military-grade fabric pockets that keep devices off the grid. They insist that the piece is not to be taken as a solution in itself to the ills of ubiquitous computing; instead, it serves to provoke thought about human agency under today’s digital regime. Ania says, “the idea was to make it so the human was choosing to do something that might give them more power in an environment that is a little vicious and has its own agenda.” Drawing a connection between their works, Dejha adds, “it’s almost as if the protagonist of On View graduated to I’d rather be in a dark silence than. Like, ‘I went through the installation and now I’m more skeptical of being seen.’”
“Why spend so much time just talking shit?”
However, Ania and Dejha’s artistic vision cannot be reduced to a simple doom and gloom critique of today’s digital landscape. After all, they did meet – and fall in love – on Instagram: its algorithm brought them together in an ecstatic moment of Frankensteinian irony. As they say, “it would be really boring if we just made a whole practice around critiquing technology, it’s like, why spend so much time just talking shit? In the end, our practice is more motivated because we think technology can be done better. We think that it has a lot of potential for connection, creativity, social change, efficiency… it has a lot of positive transformative potential.”
A kind of cautious optimism and self-aware utopianism informs their approach to the future: “technology doesn’t just grow out of soil, it’s built and designed by humans. We talk a lot about the idea of innovation. We don’t all agree on what we want to get to – not everyone might think that innovation means getting to Mars, maybe people think that innovation means everyone’s basic human needs on the planet are met?” They ask the urgent question: “what are we innovating towards?”
What Ania and Dejha are innovating towards might be found on the level of their artistic practice, which is, to a certain extent, informed by their identities as queer women. In widening the lens of immersive digital art beyond its typical association with the masculine spectacle, they choose to work towards providing their audience with an intimate experience that is “generous and open, allowing for pauses and uncertainty.” Recognizing that “it takes time to crossfade someone into the world that you have created,” they ground their practice in a certain nuanced intentionality, a respect for total sensory immersion, and an understanding of the power of durational work.
“Well, that was a feeling”
What makes Ania and Dejha’s work so piercing is its salient emotional register. While theoretical concepts of power, embodiment, and agency doubtlessly fortify their work and invite pressing socio-political commentary, through it all, they are ultimately artists seeking to inspire an emotional response. Among their favorite reactions to their work occurred when “a group of friends got out [of On View] and one of them looked really creeped out and she was like, ‘Well, that was a feeling.’” Sometimes that’s all it takes, they explain: “we can learn a lot through emotions and feeling states about what might be going wrong – or going right – in our world.”
While there may not be a lot going right in our world, Ania and Dejha’s work challenges existing digital architectures to innovate towards a more ethical and transparent future. Their practice flies in the face of deeply entrenched power structures: “since most of our projects are essentially critiquing companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon – on top of being women who don’t get big funding and aren’t trusted with technology – we have alienated ourselves from the financial streams that basically pay for a lot of this work to exist by being vocal and speaking out against it.”
Their critique goes beyond simply getting the right people at the decision-making tables of Big Tech: “we need new tables,” they insist, “it’s not enough to put the right people at the wrong table – some tables just shouldn’t exist.” The artists enthusiastically advocate for greater decentralization in the tech industry: “power no longer sitting with a company like Facebook or Google or Amazon – this is the shift that needs to happen.”
Shortly after On View had gone live, Facebook approached Dejha to take on a leadership role in their experiential division. Already familiar with those terms and conditions, she opted out.
CREDITS
Photography: Evelyn Bencicova
Concept: Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti
Creative Producer: Hermione Flynn
Art Department: Miriam Woodburn
Beauty: Anri Omori
Location: Operator