"When we pose sex work as a radical art practice, what new worlds are possible?"
A conversation with Veil Machine at Parsons Design & Tech Cloud Salon
“When we pose sex work as a radical art practice, what new worlds are possible?”
That is the central question for Veil Machine, the project of sex worker artists Sybil Fury, Cléo Ouyang, and Empress Wu. Veil Machine creates under the premise that, “At its core, sex work, like artwork, works through the interplay between fantasy and reality, intimacy and lies.”
Last August, Veil Machine presented e-Viction, a 12-hour virtual peep show in protest of new internet censorship laws such as the SESTA-FOSTA and EARN-IT acts, which systematically shuttered any digital space that sex workers turned to for income, community, and mutual resources. The project was created to “defiantly reclaim virtual space for sex workers and other marginalized folks being evicted from online space,” and recreate for its audience the devastating experience of being kicked off the internet by self-destructing at midnight.
In collaboration with Parsons Design & Technology Cloud Salon, Decoding Stigma spoke with Veil Machine about creating digital spaces as an act of resistance, designing paths of discovery, and how making art that implicates opens an opportunity for actionable empathy.
Watch the full conversation below!
It’s no coincidence that when we were promoting the event, Instagram blocked any post, story, or comment where we tagged Veil Machine’s account. We had to circumvent this censorship by deleting any mention of Veil Machine’s social media handles, further cementing just how necessary this conversation is.
It also leaves us to ask, what does it mean that a corporation can block conversations about topics they deem inappropriate, even when they are to take place in the academic context, where controversial dialogue is supposed to be most protected? And if we can’t have them here, where can we expect to be able to safely challenge what Jillian C York calls the hegemony of Silicon Values, also known as digital colonialism?