Artificial Agency
2025-ongoing
Artificial Agency is an ongoing body of work questioning and reimagining our agency in the age of algorithms.
It started as an interactive lecture performance, SOUR GUMMIES DON’T CRY (2025-26), where viewers are given the power to control my body via a custom participatory web app; I execute these commands in real time like a human avatar—along with my digital avatars—while simultaneously giving a speech on data extractivism, digital labor, and queer cyberfeminism.
Through meaningful discomfort with a touch of playfulness, the work encourages the audience to critically reflect on our embodied relations to data, digital products, and agentic AI. How is the illusion of agency used as a means of digital (self-)colonization? Facing the challenges of algorithmic control, how can we reclaim our agency? Is the artist an agentless NPC (Non Playable Character) or an avatar that channels a multitude of agency not owned by a singular entity?
The piece has been presented in various art, academic and public spaces, engaging with diverse audiences ranging from the general public at the Oculus World Trade Center in New York to computer scientists at the 2025 UbiComp/ISWC Conference. It also becomes a social experiment that investigates how power shifts among audience, artist, and computer. The participatory system of the performance aims to reconfigure a more collective and fluid type of agency through embodied interaction.
Every Woman Biennial, Pen + Brush Gallery, New York, 2026 (Photo: Donyé Green)
Attention/Distraction, The Blanc, New York, 2026
The Oculus, New York, 2025 (Video: Adeline Setiawan)
NYU Shanghai, 2025
Online Performance on Twitch, 2025
Currently I am developing the piece slowly but intentionaly into a broader project composed of live performance, music (composed by Chienn Tai), artifacts, and a video game.