Steiner Invitation Series: Hacking//Hustling & Veil Machine

Friday, April 15, 2022, 12-1:15pm
Steiner Invitation Series: Hacking//Hustling & Veil Machine
Virtual Event via Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
Co-presented by Tech4Society and Sex Workers Outreach Project Pittsburgh
Moderated by Lena Chen (MFA, School of Art)

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

The sex worker collectives Hacking//Hustling and Veil Machine discuss how FOSTA-SESTA legislation has led to widespread censorship and financial discrimination against sex workers; what it means to stage artistic interventions through institutions; and why artists must respond to the growing threat of digital gentrification.

HACKING//HUSTLING

Hacking//Hustling is a collective of sex workers, survivors, and accomplices working at the intersection of tech and social justice to interrupt violence facilitated by technology.

Speaker Bios:

Danielle Blunt (she/they) is a sex worker, public health researcher, and organizer with Hacking//Hustling. Blunt leads community-based participatory research on sex work and equitable access to technology from a public health perspective. Blunt is a 2021-2022 Civic Media Fellow at USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. She is also on the advisory board of Berkman Klein's Initiative for a Representative First Amendment (IfRFA), one of the 2020 recipients of Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award, and a recipient of the Public Knowledge 20/20 Visionary Awards for Future Tech Policy Leaders. She enjoys watching her community thrive and making men cry. She studies power dynamics through kinesthetic modalities and researches the intersection of public health, sex work, and equitable access to tech. She enjoys watching her community thrive and making men cry.

Red (they/them) is a community organizer, zine maker, Ph.D. student, and underemployed sex working art historian. They helped organize the Justice for Alisha Walker Defense Campaign, are a collective member of Hacking//Hustling, and are a founding member of the Support Ho(s)e collective and of Bluestockings Cooperative. They formerly organized with Survivors Against SESTA (which sunset active organizing in July 2018), Survived & Punished NY, and Red Canary Song.

VEIL MACHINE

Veil Machine is the project of sex worker artists, Thea Luce, Cléo Ouyang, and Empress Wu. At its core, sex work, like artwork, works through the interplay between fantasy and reality, intimacy and lies. Veil Machine, like the sex worker and artist, manipulates through masks and connects through commodification. To explore these dynamics, they have developed a practice that is relational, intimate, and ambivalent towards the authentic. Their recent projects include E-Viction (2020), Low Art / High Standards (2021), and Personas (2019).

Speaker Bios:
Thea Luce is the creation of a graduate student and artist based in NYC. Her work examines the intersections of intimacy, labor, law, and ritual in the sex industry. She is a co-founder of sex-worker artist collective Veil Machine and a frequent collaborator with Kink Out. Her work has been funded by Eyebeam and has been featured by Paper Mag, Vice, and Dazed Digital.

Cléo Ouyang (formerly known as Niko) is a captivating mask belonging to a haunted artist. She works in dungeons, hotels, and apartments, but has been known to do her best work in basements.

Empress Wu (all pronouns) is the chaos-for-pay alter ego of MJ Tom, an NYC-based artist and creative producer interested in investigating alternative modes of kinship available via sex work, queer s/m, and digital landscapes. In addition to the work they do with Veil Machine, they also organize events and exhibitions for Kink Out and Red Canary Song. She and her work have been featured at the Leslie Lohman Museum, MoMA PS1, and the Performa Biennial.

As an artist and activist, Lena Chen is interested in exploring how CMU research on surveillance technology intersects with the marginalization of BIPOC, immigrant, and sex worker communities’ digital civil liberties. During the pandemic, she ran digital harm reduction and performance workshops with sex workers across five time zones, co-created a mutual aid initiative with Sex Workers Outreach Project Pittsburgh, and co-directed CMU’s Intersectional Health Collaboration Summit about COVID-19’s impact on the local BIPOC transgender and sex worker community. In the process, she met several CMU students who were working in the sex industry themselves, yet lacked peer support or resources because the stigma associated with sex work deterred them from being open about their experiences. In addition to creating a safe gathering space for these students and platforming the voices of sex workers themselves, she also hopes this public program will create opportunities for discussing the intersections of technology and social justice. She is collaborating with campus organizations, such as Tech4Society and Ethics for Technologists, to engage diverse audiences across departments in a critical discussion of how sex workers and other marginalized groups can be better represented in the development of technology that impacts them.