Kayli Balin:
Kayli Balin
Media Arts & Sciences major, Cinema & Media Studies minor
I am continually studying the ways technology impacts society through different mediums.
As a project-based artist, I explore areas of surveillance, the body, and identities using methods that generate curiosity. I attempt to give tangible bodies disparate relations of theories that predate me and my ideas, and bring them to the present.
Studying how the body works under both digital and physical modes of surveillance, I observe tactility and interfaces and how they affect our precarious experience with reality as we figure out what it means to live, to work and think.
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small dilemmas
mixed media, hand embroidery on aida cloth
This body of work has been informed by traditional domestic crafting methods and media theories on surveillance. I use the production strategies of traditionally gendered crafts with the formal characteristics of old and new surveillance technologies to give tangible bodies to my ideas on information gathering. I cross stitch a pixelated human ear in the colors of grey and green, intertwining the tactile to the digital, paired with a disembodied, abstracted face. I choose the traditionally female domestic crafting techniques of household economies of the 18th-20th centuries to materialize images of contemporary surveillance and data collection, bridging times and exposing modes of control in the present. Within this time of crisis, I am especially focusing on methods of mobility, equity, and repetitive (meditative) processes.
Surveillance has taken a much greater meaning in this time of crisis: instances of mass contact tracing, counting bodies within a public space, patients in a hospital, authorities stressing people to stay at home. In this new domestic reality I am cross-stitching meaning, subversion and new realities.
...and this is just a beginning.
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Click through to view process photos.
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