Sally's Helper by Anisha Baid

Sally's Helper by Anisha Baid
Friday, March 22, 6:15-6:30pm
during the reception for Second Degree Vision: CMU MFA Exhibit 2024

The performance project Sally’s Helper explores footnotes from the long history of typing as feminized labor. In the performance, the performer embodies the character of Sally, an office secretary who was used as the ‘model user’ for the first graphical user interface developed at Xerox PARC in the late 1970s. Sally will be a musical composer/performer and stenographer of her story at the same time working on the keyboard as a musical instrument. Moving between subjective accounts of chronic computer pain as a digital native, and references to the history of computer work, the performance dwells on the now normalized psycho-somatic oppression of sitting at a desk in front of a computer.