In March of 2017 I got a job at Google. It was a contract role, no benefits, and I was one user experience designer on a large team in an even larger division. It was the most money I had ever made, and the seemingly benevolent tech company supplied me with free food, a gym, and a promise that if I did well, I would be offered a permanent place at the company.
After a year or so, the appeal of working for a large multinational monopoly was wearing off. I had seen too much; I was lost and disillusioned with some unethical shit I thought the company was doing and feeling very alone in that knowledge.
One evening my friend invited me to Zinc Bar on West 3rd Street for a poetry reading. At some point, the poet CAConrad addressed the Google workforce directly, thanking those of us who were protesting recent contracts with the Pentagon. They said: “There is room over here, on the side that doesn’t make bombs.”
After this, I wrote: “I was just there to hear some poetry. I thought I was invisible in both worlds. At the intersection of art and technology, I didn’t expect to be addressed by the poet.”
In their simple invitation, I found a new sense of clarity. I quit two weeks later. I came out of this experience with the belief that what we do for work—and how we engage with it—matters, especially now.
As an artist, I employ an inquiry-based practice to investigate questions around labor, technology, and socioeconomic conditions through solo performance, immersive installations, and socially engaged projects. All of my work draws on my experiences of solidarity and alienation as a worker under late stage capitalism. Investigations into upward mobility and redistributive practices in my practice are based in my positionality as a white American tech worker from an affluent background. Through vigorous inquiry and illustrative conceptual frameworks, my work intends to stir a form of creative class consciousness in its audience. My work is always site-specific and informed by a process of co-creation with the particular community I am engaging with. As well, my artistic methods of ideation and collaboration are informed by design thinking methods sourced from my day job, including brainstorming, group facilitation, prototyping, and more. Not only are these works site-specific, but they are also what Tania Bruguera calls Political Timing-Specific, a term signaling that an artwork is deeply rooted in a particular political moment. While these works are highly personal to my experiences of alienation and solidarity in the workplace and the world, they also speak to a collective desire for community ideation and co-creating an equitable future together.
My work is grounded in an ongoing practice of performance, often both conceptual and durational. In 2019, I began to question the working conditions and mythos of my industry. First, I walked around Times Square in office drag with a banker’s box of personal effects every Friday at 5pm for many months (Layoff, 2019). Next I investigated the commonly held beliefs around industrious tech leaders. Naturally, I became the CEO of my art (CEO Performance, 2019). Months before, I had turned down a permanent job offer from Google. Simultaneously, community organizers and tech workers were protesting the proposed building of Amazon’s HQ2 in Queens, not far from where I lived. They created a petition called “No Work for Amazon HQ” in which hundreds of tech workers pledged to never work for Amazon in solidarity with the movement to keep the company from gentrifying Queens. Inspired by their successful collective refusal and my own individual one, I decided to start applying to jobs I didn’t want so I could turn them down. As an ongoing performance, I continuously apply to and interview at companies I refuse to work at on ethical grounds in order to ultimately decline their job offers (Withholding labor, closing doors (Open Cover Letters), 2019 - present). So far, declined companies include: Google, Amazon, Meta, Morgan Stanley, Palantir, Raytheon, and others. This continuous practice of refusal grounds my work by acknowledging the leverage and limits of my own worker power.
Collective power is also an important theme in my work, and much of my inspiration comes from the tech worker labor movement. In November of 2018, 20,000 Google workers walked off the job to protest a $90 million buyout of the founder of Android after his multiple instances of sexual harassment. It happened just one week after I quit, and I found the action and rhetoric of the walkout organizers so inspiring that I decided to commemorate the occasion. On its one year anniversary, I traced the path of the walkout on my bike with a portable karaoke machine strapped to the back, singing karaoke requests from my former coworkers inside the Google NYC office building (Solidarity Karaoke, 2019). This individual performative action was also a form of collective self expression shaped by the input of my comrades stuck working inside the building.
Currently, my primary interests lie in how resources are distributed through individual and collective means, and how socially engaged art can provide material access to resources and reframe them in a creative way. This ongoing artistic research is inspired by the concept and praxis of mutual aid as well as examples of solidarity economies globally. As governmental aid is revoked and infrastructure crumbles around us, it feels imperative and urgent to me to build systems of care outside of institutional models of support. Art is one means to do so. For example, in 2021, 40% of CUNY students reported having low or very low food security. Responding to this and inspired by the burgeoning community fridges in my neighborhood, I started a community vending machine at my school (Community Vending Machine, 2021-2023). Over the course of two years my project provided students, faculty, and staff with hundreds of free items–snacks, drinks, art supplies, tarot readings, Plan B, notes of encouragement, and more. Through a process of soliciting suggestions, the vending machine became a public fixture and a means for participants to express themselves around my framing question, “What is missing?” Through this process I deepened my practice of co-creation by directly incorporating the feedback of my community into the work itself.
All of this leads to my current collective coworking project, a participatory, socially engaged artwork that compensates people for creative time, exploring experimental forms of patronage as well as what it means to use time creatively (Wages for Art(work), 2023-present). During the hours that I am at work, participants are invited to book an hour-long session to “work” alongside me. They can use that hour to make art, write, sleep, take a walk, call a friend—anything that is creatively generative for them. Participants are then compensated for this time at the rate of $25 an hour, 50% of my hourly wage. Participants are also asked to share a snapshot of their creative time for the project archive. This project is inspired by the 1970s feminist movement Wages for Housework, whose political demands asked to be paid for the unwaged work of cooking, cleaning, childcare, and domestic life in general. Wages for Art(work) follows the same political logic, but focuses on creative time and uses compensation as a form of acknowledgement. I am interested in creating artwork out of work, so this project leverages my own labor power to create art through others, and ultimately give creative time back to people, one hour at a time.
Continuous education and connection with other artists feeds my practice. The critical discussion, studio visits, access to facilities, and potential artistic collaborations would be invaluable for this stage of my work and development of new ideas. During my MFA, many CUNY faculty left their mark on my practice and thinking, including the teachings of Dave McKenzie on experimental performance, Daniel Bozhkov on collaborative making, Paul Ramirez Jonas and Claire Bishop on art in public/private space, Mary Mattingly on creating platforms for others, and Chloë Bass on the many ways in which we work. In turn, pedagogy is a nascent but natural extension of my practice. Recently I have taught seminars such as Socially Engaged Art and Digital Practice and Your Day Job: The Realities and Ethics of Working in Tech in NYU’s ITP department. My teaching thus far is based in moderated group discussion and interactive exercises while creating a constructive space for participants to share their perspectives. Currently I am designing an experimental curriculum for what I call “Tech Worker Ethics,” which intends to fill an educational gap for those who go on to build technology to think critically about the ethical implications of their work. Through these educational pursuits I will continue developing a framework to deepen my artistic research, create a strong teaching philosophy, and pursue my interest in alternative pedagogies as both a practitioner and participant.