Throughout their practice, Artist calls attention to the ways in which technological tools and social platforms produce value, construct identity, and exercise power. In works like Dignity Images (2017–ongoing) and A Refusal (2015-2016), the artist questions the construction and performance of online identities by deliberately withholding images from social media and creating physical sites for viewing them instead. Through both of these works, Artist reveals the viewer’s choice to participate and engage in social media as a tool to participate in the construction and distribution of power and value. “I was thinking about the kind of power in the images that you have that you don’t post online or that you don’t share,” the artist says. “Maybe it’s not valuable within social media, but it’s super special to you.” In another work, Security Theater (2023), Artist hangs CCTV cameras in the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, feeding live footage of museumgoers into an enclosed room where a software identifies and misidentifies participants as “HUMAN” or “VEHICLE.” Through Security Theater, Artist destabilizes power structures that normalize surveillance by calling attention to the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and architectures in our daily lives while inviting viewers to surveil alongside being surveilled. 

In other projects, Artist highlights the role that history and early technological choices play in contemporary aesthetics and user functionalities. In the work Mother of All Demos II (2018), the artist references a 1968 computer demonstration of the same name that elevated computers from performing calculations to augmenting human intelligence. The artist constructs a functional computer out of dirt and models a CRT monitor and component parts after the 1997 Apple II (the last computer with a black interface before transitioning to white interfaces). Sitting atop a white table, the computer leaks a viscous black material, the artist asks himself what a computer rooted in Blackness might look like and excrete. In Master-Slave-Flip-Flop (2021), Artist constructs a neon wall piece modeled after a computer circuit board. The work takes its title from the commonplace computer science term “master-slave.” Through these works, Artist examines the racial biases embedded in early programming language and its repercussions in today’s relationships of power. Whether working in photography, software, or installation, the artist identifies the histories and logics that structure our engagement with technology and offers alternative visions of interacting with and enacting social change within these systems.