Livia Foldes is a Brooklyn-based cultural worker traversing the latent space between art, design, technology, and activism.


Her work asks how and why machines are taught to understand and misunderstand our bodies and identities, and explores the radical potential simmering in the gaps.


Interiors

2014–2023

Work that looks inward to examine my place in large-scale systems, and understand how they link me to others.

Collaborating with software, interfaces, and networks.

Coded Portraits
Mixed media, workshops
A personal framework for talking back to computer vision and classification.
Two identical black and white photos of me looking calmly into the camera, each with a different set of hand-drawn annotations in neon colors.
A grid of six identical black-and-white portraits of me, each with a different hand-drawn annotation in neon colors.
Two screenshots from computer vision software show my face segmented with colors and cut into sections. A screenshot of code for reading a person's expression.

What do I look like to a machine? Computer vision algorithms “see” me as a series of boxes that can be recognized and named, a group of points whose relationship to one another predicts my emotional state, and so on.

A series of self portraits attempts to reclaim my image from this reductive algorithmic gaze, while prompting additional questions: what ways of knowing are illegible to a machine? In what ways do I want to be known, to myself and to others?

15 people sit around a circle of tables, with laptops and art supplies strewn around them.
Two black and white images, one of a couple and one of a baby, with different hand-drawn annotations.
Looking over the shoulder of a workshop participant as they annotate a printed image. Workshop participants sit gathered before a large screen, where a slide displays a quote by the author Melissa Gira Grant:

In a series of public workshops, I lead participants through my own process of analyzing the ways a computer vision algorithm “sees” my personal photo and creating an image in response. Participants discuss seeing themselves analyzed, and reflect on how different forms of marginalization impact or change the experience.

Credits

Workshop photos by Barak Shrama.

Workshop commissioned by Gray Area / Goethe Institut.

Related events

Gray Area Festival, “Coded Portraits: Policing Images from the 1500s to Today,” October 2, 2022. Workshop was preceded by Gabriella Garcia lecturing on histories of mass media, commercial sex, autonomy, and surveillance.

Exhibited in “Mixed Messages,” The New School, School of Media Studies, 2021.

Traces
Installation, custom software, thermal printer
An interactive photo booth that reveals traces of its past users.
Against a stark white background, the faces of two people overlap one another, their eyes and mouths doubling uncannily.
A woman, dramatically lit by spotlights, interacts with the photo booth installation with an outstretched arm.
Two faces overlap against a stark white background, one dramatically larger in the foreground, the other framed by its shape. A man's head overlaps itself many times, abstracting his and repeating his features as his head moves in an arc.
A rough, black-and-white print of a two overlapping faces, their hair and eyelashes mingling.
An enlarged detail of the previous image shows doubled eyes and the rough, pixelated texture of the print.

How do networked technologies create shared histories? In this installation, participants move their hands to reveal and conceal the visitors who were there before them. At the end of the session, the booth prints an oversized memento: your portrait overlaid with traces of previous users. The grainy print on fragile receipt paper provides an uncanny physical record of an ephemeral experience, at once disposable and precious.

Credits

Created with Rachel Ng.

Related events

Exhibited at Gray Area Showcase 2018.

Intimacy Chat
Custom software, web app
A chat app for creating psychic alignment for two people.
A grid of screenshots, each with two overlapping faces expressing a range of emotions and actions, from contemplative to playful.

Intimacy Chat tweaks the standard video chat interface to facilitate an awkward, playful, and tender interaction. After generating a URL from the Intimacy Chat website and sharing it with a partner, both participants’ chat windows merge in a single overlapping video feed. Together, they click through a series of intimacy and embodiment-enhancing prompts:

“Align your eyes with your partner’s eyes to establish a personal connection.”

“Exert your realistic presence to your partner.”

“Maintain a three-dimensional sense of your partner’s presence.”

The prompts’ language is adapted from a 1980s sales brochure for high end business video conferencing. I began researching the history of video chat during New York City’s Covid lockdown, when I suddenly began communicating almost exclusively over software, like Zoom, built for power-tinged business encounters. Intimacy Chat foregrounds and exaggerates the uneasy merging of closeness and control.

Credits

Software development by Casey Hunt.

Related

Be THERE Now,” an essay I wrote on related research, was published in Adjacent Issue 8: Disembodiment, 2021.

Memory Metadata
Web-based visual essay
A visual essay exploring the slippages between how I remember a moment, and how the machine that captured it does.

My first week in New York, a few months before Covid emptied the city, I took a photograph of my sister holding my niece. Later, I returned to the photograph and the memory it evoked, tracing its digital footprint through ever wider networks of data, money, and power.

A warm snapshot of a mother and her toddler with facial recognition annotations superimposed; a text overlay reads,

In an experimental visual essay, I reflect on the relationship between a memory, its digital representation, and the far-reaching data it generates: “My memory, in the moment of its capture, was at once flattened and augmented, made both less and more.” From the color values of its pixels to its location in the world, what metadata does this intimate image carry — and what can it teach me about the drive to render our world machine readable?

See Memory Metadata ↗

Credits

Thanks to Shannon Mattern for a generative prompt and generous feedback.

Press

Real Life, “Screen Memories: Screenshots as much as snapshots are the vernacular photography of our lives,” Kelly Pendergrast, January 14, 2021.

Art in America, “Better Realities, Continuous Engagement, and New Essay Design,” Brian Droitcour, August 7, 2020.

With Whose Blood
Video with stock 3D models
A CG reflection on perspective and the power to see.
Against a flat red background, a dramatically lit, 3D modeled head lies severed, as if an ancient statue. Against a flat green background, a disembodied clenched fist floats in space.
Letters have grown glassy, spiked extensions, glistening through a foggy grayscale void. The same spiked letters, their appendages grown and overlapping.
Against a flat blue background, a disembodied head and fist overlap, their center obscured by a glowing spotlight. Sharp, classical lettering spells the word 'crafted,' floating in the center of an eclipse.

With Whose Blood moves through a sparse digital space populated with stock body parts and spiky, generative text. The camera’s omniscient eye evokes a surveillance drone or control center, foregrounding and implicating 3D imaging technologies’ military origins and ongoing uses.

Related events

Exhibited at Digerati Emergent Media Festival, Denver Digerati, 2022. 

Terms of Access
Custom face filter
A narrative face filter that asks you to perform emotions to grant personal access.

How much access to yourself will you allow? In this experimental narrative face filter, a disembodied voice prompts you to set up facial recognition, requesting your confirmation at each step with increasingly pushy exhortations to ‘turn your head’ or ‘smile.’ As you mime movements and emotions, your image comes more and more clearly into focus.

Credits

Created with Lillie Bahrami.

Dear Rachel,
Customized large language model, AI-generated messages, website
An experimental narrative publication with AI-generated marketing emails.
Simple white lettering on a dark gray background spells out a message that begins,
Simple white lettering on a medium gray background spells out a message that begins,
Simple white lettering on a medium gray background spells out a message that begins,

In March 2020, when most of the country stopped, the marketing emails kept coming. In this time capsule from the first months of the Covid-19 lockdown in the U.S., a series of AI-generated emails — trained on the corpus of increasingly frantic communications in my inbox — become a meditation on labor, corporate language, and the narrative ruptures of late stage capitalism.

See Dear Rachel, ↗

Credits

The model that generated this email text was trained on Open AI’s GPT-2 language model. GPT-2 was trained on non-consensually scraped text from millions of websites.

I fine-tuned the model using Max Woolf’s gpt-2-simple.

Related

Acquired by Rhizome’s ArtBase, 2021.

Rebuilding histories

2020–2024

Work that engages archives and histories to ask how systems of power shape our worlds, how we talk about the past, and how we imagine the future.

Collaborating with archives and media.

NSFW Venus
Altered archival material, lecture/performance
An intervention in the dataset of a nudity detection model.
In a blown-up, low-resolution jpeg, erased traces of a backside and the curve of a back blend into the busy pattern of a sofa.

prefix_GantMan_8A202B14-D0AB-4789-A882-196EDF98D7A9
EXPOSED_BUTTOCKS
EXPOSED_GENITALIA_F
EXPOSED_GENITALIA_M

Erased traces of a body sit on a kitchen counter, glowing in the light. The distorted traces of an orange armchair and blue shag carpeting mingle with the erased contours of a figure.

prefix_GantMan_8A202B14-D0AB-4789-A882-196EDF98D7A9
EXPOSED_BUTTOCKS
EXPOSED_GENITALIA_F
EXPOSED_GENITALIA_M

prefix_GantMan_3B3A4B03-2673-4DCD-8289-EA7AA4E97977
EXPOSED_BELLY
EXPOSED_BREAST_F
EXPOSED_BREAST_F

Against a bright blue field and faint traces of two figures, partially erased white text says,

prefix_GantMan_7D06A294-55DF-4D30-886F-D98BA6F0B357
EXPOSED_BREAST_F
EXPOSED_BREAST_F
EXPOSED_BREAST_F

An erased image of a person's upper torso and legs partially obscure a metal chair standing in a flesh-toned room. Traces of butter yellow venetian blinds and beige basket-woven texture overlap in an abstract collage.

prefix_GantMan_8AE9152D-1EF2-42AD-911E-6DEE122847C3
EXPOSED_BELLY
EXPOSED_BREAST_F
EXPOSED_BREAST_F

prefix_GantMan_8E7D87DA-D3BE-4AFC-AD7A-C0D9CBF8BE92
EXPOSED_BELLY
EXPOSED_BREAST_F
EXPOSED_GENITALIA_F
EXPOSED_GENITALIA_M

A lumpy. gourd-shaped blur rests on a dimpled quilt, in a room whose colors range from flesh-toned to bright orange and deep burgundy. A glowing white orb rests theatrically against a deep green backdrop whose edges are indeterminately blurred.

prefix_GantMan_51B35E4A-F4BF-48F5-901F-82187CB43880
EXPOSED_BELLY
EXPOSED_BUTTOCKS
EXPOSED_BREAST_F
EXPOSED_BREAST_F
EXPOSED_GENITALIA_F

prefix_GantMan_0542A06E-DE13-47CC-BABF-75C93E2D3BAF
EXPOSED_BELLY
EXPOSED_BUTTOCKS
EXPOSED_BREAST_F
EXPOSED_BREAST_F

Heavy, peach and pale pink draperies cover a window beside a decorative gilt frame topped with a yellow and pink bouquet, all interrupted by slashes of distortion.

prefix_GantMan_8CBA4A17-5FCB-42CE-868B-3BA9FA64ECB7
EXPOSED_BUTTOCKS

Faint traces of a head, a torso, rumpled sheets can be seen in a largely off-white color field, interrupted by distorted purple text spelling Traces of a blurred and erased figure sit on a bed covered in a beige quilt, pushed against a mottled, off-white wall punctuated by a framed abstract painting made of dark, gestural slashes.

prefix_GantMan_8E40AA63-89C0-4BD3-B7BB-A7E2834A176F
EXPOSED_BELLY
EXPOSED_BREAST_F
EXPOSED_GENITALIA_F

prefix_GantMan_0DD44440-02A9-43D1-8294-B44FAFB7844E
EXPOSED_BELLY
EXPOSED_BUTTOCKS
EXPOSED_BREAST_F

A collage of glowing roses and butterfly wings borders a photo of an office chair in a blank waiting room, its contents distorted and obscured.

GantMan_AA0F4C92-1588-49C9-8B9B-51C7AEDC8CDE
EXPOSED_BUTTOCKS

For NSFW Venus’ archival interventions, I downloaded 20,000 stolen images — a sliver of the training data used by NudeNet, a nudity detection algorithm. NudeNet and its algorithmic kin use millions of scraped intimate images to train their AI models to “see” nudity, and to classify images as either pornographic or non-pornographic in response. 

From phrenology to sexology, NudeNet is only the latest imaging technology employed to sort our complex identities and behavior into rigid categories of race, gender, and obscenity. Its stolen training data constitutes a new kind of photographic archive with familiar aims — surveillance, censorship, and control. 

To NudeNet and its creators, the individuals in their datasets matter only in aggregate. NSFW Venus seeks to acknowledge and address the people in the images without reinscribing the violence of their theft. In dialogue with Stephanie Syjuco’s Shutter/Release, which uses Photoshop’s “healing brush” to remove subjects from prison mugshots in colonial archives, I digitally obscure individuals’ features, shielding their identities while foregrounding their individuality.

Press

Zahra Stardust, Indie Porn: Revolutionary Promises, Regulatory Fantasies and Resistance Politics, Duke University Press, 2024. (Forthcoming)

Related events

Presented at Princeton, “The Automated Condition. Manifestations and Narratives in Art, Literature and Culture,” May 12, 2022.

Presented at University of Westminster and The Photographers’ Gallery, “Photography in Virtual Culture,” May 14, 2024.

Moving Image Machine
Video with trained GAN models
Composite portraits that traverse archives’ latent spaces.

I trained two AI models on databases of images depicting power and privilege: the “Shirley cards” historically used to calibrate skin tones in 35mm film; and 5,000 years of carved busts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection.

The generated composite portraits move in and out of legibility, traversing the AI models’ “latent space” to reveal gaps and distortions within the data. By placing historical archives in conversation with AI training data, I explore the encoding of long-standing hierarchies into new forms of intelligence.

Credits

The models that generated these videos were trained on custom datasets in conjunction with StyleGAN, a generative adversarial network released by Nvidia in 2018.

StyleGAN, the first generative AI model capable of producing convincing human faces, was trained on a dataset of 70,000 faces scraped from Flickr, and was assembled and “cleaned” by humans working for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service.

Sex Workers Built the Internet
Website, events
An internet history that centers sex workers’ stories of innovation, organizing, and community.

Web publication

In a screenshot of a website, a navigation bar reads
A website screenshot shows a vintage advertisement that reads A 1990s-era web browser displays a vintage webpage title
A website screenshot shows a large, bold title reading A screenshot of a website shows text with the heading,

Sex workers were pivotal in making the early internet desirable, accessible, and profitable. But in contemporary internet histories, their criminalized and stigmatized labor is unacknowledged. Building on sex worker-led scholarship, I researched, gathered, wrote, and designed a resource for artists, designers, and technologists to engage with this history, and learn about how to support the activists leading the fight against online censorship and discrimination today.

Oral history roundtable

A photo of Sinnamon Love shows a Black woman with chunky, tortoise shell glasses frames that echo a bold, graphic shirt. A photo of Gabriella Garcia shows a woman in a green satin shirt open to the waist, tucked into snakeskin pants, and topped with an off-white jacket. A photo of Tina Horn shows a woman on the beach, her blue eyes echoed in a denim shirt and the ocean behind her.

Sex Workers Built the Internet – Oral History Roundtable

Sinnamon Love, Gabriella Garcia, and Tina Horn, presented by The New School for Social Research, April 20, 2022.

With a launch event, I invited prominent voices in sex work activism to “talk back” to my visual research, centering their experiences and voices in a history that’s still being written.

Credits

This project grew from Trains, Texts and Tits: Sex Work, Technology and Movement, a series of classes organized by Hacking/Hustling.

It developed in close conversation with my fellow Decoding Stigma co-founder Gabriella Garcia’s thinking, writing, and research.

Website development by Andrew Lux.
Research assistance by Sarah Epstein.

Many thanks to advisors Danielle Blunt, Panteá Farvid, Jamie Lauren Keiles, Clarinda Mac Low, John Sharp, and the workers past and present whose words, experiences, and analysis are the core and heart of this project.

Related events

Presented at Design & Technology Symposium, Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY, May 19, 2022.

Sex Workers Built the Internet,” presented by The New School for Social Research, April 20, 2022. Hosted by Decoding Stigma and Hacking//Hustling, sponsored by the SexTech Lab (SPE), and funded by the NSSR Dean’s Office.

In community

2020–2024

Work that looks outward to collectively imagine different ways of living, working, and creating. Making spaces to amplify the stories and experiences of others.

Collaborating with people and communities.

Browser Histories
Workshops, website, installation
A collective memory space, stewarded by sex workers, documenting intertwined histories of sex work & technology.

Installation / activation

In a gallery installation, a cloth banner printed with a logo spelling
A closeup of the banner shows it's covered in draping colored strings, one with a yellow tag covered in handwriting tied to it. A stack of cards shows a meditation printed on light pink paper.
A group of people gather around the banner, and one person ties a card to the dangling strings.

Browser Histories installation view, Center for Art, Research and Alliances, New York, NY, 2023.

Workshops

A flyer reads, A flyer reads,

Workshop 1: Foundations

A world-building exercise inspired by a 1995 Prostitution Education Network interview with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Mike Godwin.

Workshop 2-3: Community

Reflecting on personal experiences of when a memory collection space made each of us feel “in community.”

A slide shows a vintage nude photo next to text that says, A vintage photo of a placid lake sits next to text that reads,
Next to a densely interconnected circular diagram, text reads,
Next to a vintage television set, text reads, Next to a photo of a carved wooden knot, text reads,

Workshop prompts. Words by Gabriella Garcia.

Archive website

In a screenshot of a website, a headline reads,
In a website screenshot, a headline reads, In a website screenshot, a pull quote reads,

The archive’s design incorporates organic, historic, and symbolic imagery. By foregrounding technology’s collective, interconnected, and organic nature, we emphasize its roots in feminized labor and knowledge networks.

New Museum presentation

A flyer for Demo2023: Future Memory shows Gabriella and Livia with their heads leaning together. Livia and Gabriella present on a stage at the New Museum.

Gabriella Garcia and I introduced Browser Histories at NEW INC’s DEMO Festival, held at the New Museum, in 2023.

What would a digital media project look like if sex workers were involved and compensated at every level? For Decoding Stigma’s first grant-funded project, we established a paid cohort of sex workers and accomplices to participate in a series of “communal dreaming sessions.” 

Over a series of meetings, we convened to discuss topics spanning community, safety, surveillance, and self expression, and responded to prompts with writing and visual art. An archive website collects these workshops and their outcomes, establishing a living counter-narrative of technology as collective, communal, and expressive.

See Browser Histories ↗

Credits

Browser Histories was developed with Gabriella Garcia. The workshops were planned and conducted in collaboration with Lena Chen and OnlyBans.

Supported by C/Change Creative R&D Lab, Goethe-Institut San Francisco in cooperation with Gray Area, San Francisco, CA.

Installation photos by Marion Aguas.
Meditation written by Cy X.
Browser Histories logo design by Qualiatik.
Web development by Andrew Lux.
Accessibility consultation by Caz Killjoy.

Related events

Exhibited at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances, Future Memory Showcase, New York, NY, June 21, 2023.

Presented at the New Museum, NEW INC DEMO Festival, New York, NY, June 23, 2023.

Presented at Gray Area, C/Change 2022 R&D Lab Cohort Salon, January 19, 2023.

Decoding Stigma
Art and activism collective
From 2020–2023 I was a co-founder and creative director of Decoding Stigma, a collective of people in the Venn diagram of sex work, technology, and research.
Over a pixelated, black and white image of a manicured hand caressing a computer mouse, text reads,
A grid with logos for the Max-Planck institute; Body of Workers; Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society; Surveillance Technology Oversight Project; Hacking//Hustling; HIPS; ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society; ITP NYU; and SexTech Lab at the New School.

Decoding Stigma’s partner organizations.

In the summer of 2020, Gabriella Garcia and I started a collective.

We were both involved with the urgent, vital, sex worker-led activism and art that grew in the wake of 2018’s disastrous SESTA/FOSTA law. We were each the only advocates for sex workers rights in our respective technology-focused graduate programs, and we were tired of explaining ourselves. Inspired by Gabriella’s thesis, we dreamed of making a space where like-minded activists and researchers could meet to collaborate, organize, and simply exist, without the need to battle stigma and misconceptions.

Others felt the same way. With crucial support from Hacking//Hustling, Decoding Stigma brought together a diverse group working in and out of academia, across tech, art, design, law, public health, gender studies, anthropology, and clinical social work. What began as a series of weekly Zoom meetings solidified into an ongoing collaborative practice spanning publications, dreaming sessions, and community talks.

Publications

Bringing radical theory and praxis to accessible platforms.

Text above an image of a blooming plant reads,
Text reads, Text reads, Text reads,
Text reads, Text reads, Text reads,

Instagram publication #1

“What do we want? Dreaming of mutual aid at the intersection of sex work, tech, and academia.” Words by the Decoding Stigma collective.

Over an image of computer generated, wireframed orchid blossoms, text reads,
Text reads, Text reads, Text reads,
Text reads, Text reads, Text reads,

Instagram publication #2

“What does ‘decoding stigma’ mean to you? A collective definition.” Words by the Decoding Stigma collective.

Over an image of a butt clad in see-through vinyl pants with a '90s cell phone tucked in the back pocket, text reads,
Text reads, Text reads, Text reads,

Substack publication #1

“The Cybernetic Sex Worker.” Words by Gabriella Garcia.

Collaborative dreaming sessions

We put so much energy into crisis response and survival. A series of workshops asked, what would it look like if we could redirect that energy toward liberation?

The iconic rolling hills photo used for the background of Windows' XP operating system is rendered in grainy black and white over a searing neon background, overlaid with a large headline that reads, 'Freedom to F*cking Dream.
An illustration of a femme figure with a visible heart surrounded by a lotus flower, octopus tentacles, posed hands, and a glowing digital overlay. In a smiling photo of Sasha Costanza-Chock, her wavy, purple-toned hair and bold earrings stand out from a deep blue background. In a black and white photo, Joana Varon poses in front of a cityscape, looking intently at the viewer.

Freedom to F*cking Dream

Workshop with the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies, led by Sasha Costanza-Chock and Joana Varon. Workshop created by Gabriella Garcia.

Image 1: Oracle for Transfeminist Technology illustration by Clara Juliano. Image 2: Sasha Costanza-Chock’s photo by Caydie McCumber.

On a neon-colored slide, titled

Decoding Stigma 2021: What do we want NOW?

Internal dreaming session. Words by the Decoding Stigma collective.

Over a glowing purple gradient, a collaged image of growing mushrooms is surrounded by a snaking title that reads,
Over a luminous red/orange gradient, a densely interconnected circular diagram accompanies a title that reads, Over a deep blue gradient, a vintage cyanotype photo of a placid lake accompanies a title that reads,

Browser Histories: Process as Prototype

Documentation of the Browser Histories workshop series. Workshops created with Lena Chen / OnlyBans. Words by Gabriella Garcia.

Community talks

Redistributing institutional resources and promoting projects spearheaded by other sex worker collectives.

A flyer for Cloud Salon: Ayanna Dozier shows the artist over a deep blue background. A photograph with a warm, grainy, retro quality shows a woman riding an escalator, her back-seamed stockings leading up to a shiny red vinyl dress, with a furry, animal print coat hanging from her arm, her head cropped from the frame.

Cloud Salon: Ayanna Dozier

Design & Technology, Parsons School of Design, May 5, 2022.

Image 1: Flyer design by Tricia Ilena and Anna van Nieuwland. Image 2: Still from Nightwalker (2022). Copyright Ayanna Dozier.

A flyer for Cloud Salon: Lena Chen & Maggie Oates. A femme person reclines on pink fabric facing an open laptop, their pose reflected multiple times on its screen.

Cloud Salon: Lena Chen & Maggie Oates, OnlyBans

Design & Technology, Parsons School of Design, October 5, 2022.

Watch the talk

Image 2: Installation view of OnlyBans. Copyright Lena Chen / OnlyBans.

Screenshot of a Zoom talk shows four speakers engaged in conversation.

Heaux History Project

black beyond _origins festival, June 18, 2021. Moderated with jazsalyn.

Watch the talk

Flyer for Cloud Salon: Veil Machine. Over a photo of a pink balaclava-clad dancer adjusting their high heel next to a stripper pole, a floating chat window displays innuendo and emoji-laden house rules.

Cloud Salon: Veil Machine

Design & Technology, Parsons School of Design, November 2, 2022.

Image 2: Screenshot from E-viction, 2020. Copyright Veil Machine.

As Decoding Stigma’s creative director, I set out to challenge and subvert prevailing media depictions of sex work and gendered labor. In response to heavily stigmatized and stereotyped representations — and in close conversation with Gabriella’s potent theoretical writing — I plumbed dark corners of the Internet Archive to build a vocabulary of playful, defiant imagery highlighting the deep connections between erotic labor and technology.

See Decoding Stigma’s Substack ↗

Credits

Gabriella Garcia is Decoding Stigma’s co-founder and director.

Many thanks to our community of advisors, collaborators, and comrades: Kendra Albert, Danielle Blunt, Melanie Crean, Chibundo Egwuatu, Panteá Farvid, Hacking//Hustling, Vaughn Hamilton, HIPS, Tina Horn, Lorelei Lee, Sinnamon Love, Red Schulte, Monica Sheets, Red Canary Song, Support Ho(s)e, Zahra Stardust, Yin Q, and many, many others.

Press

Zahra Stardust, “What can tech learn from sex workers? Sexual Ethics, Tech Design & Decoding Stigma,” Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, December 15, 2022.

Mikayla Knight, #SeggsEd: Sex, Safety, and Censorship on TikTok, [Master’s thesis, San Diego State University] 2022.

Selected events

Gray Area Festival, “Coded Portraits: Policing Images from the 1500s to Today,” October 2, 2022.

Sex Workers Built the Internet,” presented by The New School for Social Research, April 20, 2022. Hosted by Decoding Stigma and Hacking//Hustling, sponsored by the SexTech Lab (SPE), and funded by the NSSR Dean’s Office.

Informal, Criminalized, Precarious: Sex Workers Organizing Against Barriers, “Decoding Stigma: Designing for Sex Worker Liberatory Futures,” Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, April 8, 2021.

 

The Superstructure
Installation, drawings, video
A site-specific installation investigating community and connection through social mapping data made tangible.
In an abstract drawing, fine lines radiate out from a central cluster, growing and reconvening as they move across the page.
In a warm yellow room, a large video monitor displaying radiating forms stands beside a drawing machine marking a long paper scroll, as a visitor with a motion blurred face walks past.
In a video clip, dozens of names connected to one another by fine black lines cluster and shift, rippling organically. In a video clip, a dense cluster of radiating black lines is pulled apart, with smaller clusters moving away from the center.

For a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts, I engaged their quarter-century-spanning database of artists as both source material and subject. Using social mapping software and a large-scale drawing machine, I visualized a series of potential interactions between previous artists in residence.

While visitors watched, networks grew and constructed themselves, as the computer-generated visualizations were translated back into the physical space where the connections first occurred. The resulting drawings, though transcribed by machine, betray the inevitable artifacts and imperfections of their physical production.

An accompanying video essay details the methodology used to generate its weblike forms, and investigates the unexpected outcomes and ambiguities of collaborating with machines.

Credits

Drawing machine built by Jared Smith.

Related events

Exhibited at Headlands Center for the Arts.

I’m glad you asked (Lauren Lee McCarthy)
Design for augmented reality app
An AR app augmenting the social landscape of a Düsseldorf park.
A woman sits reading a newspaper on a green park bench on a sunny day, framed by a hand holding up a smartphone whose screen reads,
Two people chatting on a park bench on a sunny day are framed by a hand holding up a smartphone whose screen reads, Two people chatting on a park bench on a sunny day are framed by a hand holding up a smartphone whose screen reads,

Commissioned for the NRW Forum AR Biennale in Düsseldorf, Germany, I’m glad you asked augments the museum’s grounds with virtually labeled park benches. Statements like “This seat is reserved for people who are missing someone” encourage spontaneous interactions between museum-goers and unaware visitors.

Credits

Artist: Lauren Lee McCarthy.

Related events

Exhibited at NRW Forum AR Biennale, 2021.

Livia Foldes (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based cultural worker exploring the latent space between art, design, technology, and activism. Her work asks how and why machines are taught to understand and misunderstand our bodies and the identities they carry, and explores the radical potential simmering in the gaps. These questions take shape through artistic research, visual essays, workshops and events, software and websites, and imagery created with emerging tools. 

As the co-founder and creative director of Decoding Stigma, a collective calling for the inclusion of sex worker voices in all spaces that purport to be designing our future, she brings grassroots research and radical theory to accessible platforms through playful, subversive imagery.

She teaches courses on artificial intelligence, computational image making, and extended realities at Rhode Island School of Design, and holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design. Her work is held in Rhizome’s permanent collection, and she has spoken in spaces including the New Museum, Princeton University, Gray Area, and the Photographers Gallery.

 

Contact

@liviatronic
studio@livia-foldes.com
CV ↗

Credits

This site was developed by Andrew Lux.
Its words are set in Exposure and Brush Script.