Film
White Fragility Cyber Deal
Mail Art
Techno Raiders
about the art
This month, Artists Nina Sarnelle and Camille Ora-Nicole critique the influence of social media and the technocrats who run them. Drawing on comedy, poetry, and song, they attack these systems head-on to give a vibrant focus for our collective outrage.
Nina Sarnelle’s White Fragility Cyber Deal is a BOGO from their ongoing music performance project Mouth Noise. Two new music videos called "The Long Arc of Privilege" and "Face Break," are punctuated by a bonus clip from their longform research project “The Erosion of Silicon Beach.” White Fragility Cyber Deal uses live action footage and animation to deconstruct whiteness as material in the digital “everyday.” The triptych is both funny and biting, including stuttering fragments from Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional trials, dishware skinned with the facial textures of Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk, Silicon Beach real estate listings, and caricatures of white privilege performed through social media. Nina’s videos don’t give us definitive solutions but provide moments of clarity and catharsis, with equal parts humor and horror.
As a visual artist, Camille Ora-Nicole is interested in creating abstract diagrams that show movement around words to illustrate relationships between ideas. With roots in Camille’s experience in architecture, their abstract drawings create gestures around text, suggesting weight, space, and connections between the words and ideas. She created “Techno Raiders,” an ekphrastic poem and ink drawing, in response to Nina’s films.
Both Nina and Camille’s art help us connect dots, tying references and systems together into a web of connections to help us make better sense of our contemporary moment.