pockets: A multi-player artists’ interview about gender and presence online
About pockets
pockets is a community of people who aren’t part of the dominant gender group working in the creative industries in New York City. We meet to find connection, share resources, and build collective power.
About this event
In a time when the body with its gendered parts is no longer essential for self-representation, what possibilities are available to us as we navigate the expanse of life on the internet?
We’ll explore this topic in a conversation with three artists whose work centers the portrayal and performance of identity — and often gendered identity — online.
In this multi-player interview format, each artist will prepare a question for one another, exploring common themes, intersections, and departures within their practices.
Expect a lively, participatory discussion where all experiences are respected and celebrated. Food, drinks, and good company provided.
Featured artists
Ari Melenciano has cultivated an expansive practice within the arts, technology, design, culture, and pedagogy. Her natural ability to combine many disciplines reveals their interconnectedness and reimagines their conventions for new possibilities. Her art practice ranges from using AI through both critical and imaginative lenses, to sound design using botanical data. Her work has been exhibited around the world from Dubai's Museum of the Future to the Studio Museum in Harlem. She's a frequent international public speaker, and occasionally designs and teaches courses at New York University, Hunter College, Parsons, and the Pratt Institute. She's the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution that imagines new possibilities at the nexus of art, design, technology, activism, and culture.
Maya Man is an artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the internet. Her websites, generative series, and installations examine dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity, and the performance of self online. She is the creator of the browser extension Glance Back and the Art Blocks curated collection FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT. She has exhibited internationally at bitforms, NYC; SOOT, Tokyo; Verse, London; HEK, Basel; and Feral File, online. She has been invited to speak on her work at The New Museum, NYC; The V&A, London; and MOCA, Los Angeles. Her artwork has been featured in Art in America, Forbes, Vogue, Dazed, and more. She is online at mayaontheinter.net.
Nahee Kim (She/They) is an artist and programmer who explores the possibility of computational representation of sexual experiences and contemporary family institutions as biopolitical technology to control human reproduction. nahee.app is Kim's virtual persona to share their playful speculation about computer programs to organize past sexual relationships and help sexual communication to enhance love and satisfaction. As nahee.app, Kim creates code poems about sex, visual documentation about speculative sex toys and networks, web applications hosting machine-recognized sexual movements.