Black Box Armor exhibited at RESONANCE ↗ in the 2024 CMU Art Senior Show at the ICA Pittsburgh, formerly the Miller Institute of Contemporary Art.
A mediation on “technological intimacy” exploring the associations between opaque, unknowable black boxes and transparent, clear-craze casing.
Like others in my generation, I grew up on the internet, and before I was anything in the real world I had built myself up in there– between forums, blogs, photos, and now-abandoned sites of instinctive creation. This digital footprint was my second life, but also followed me subtly into the real world. My internet egos were concealed around the corner, sitting out in the open but perhaps in the shade.
Black Box Armor meditates on this intimacy and explores the associations between opaque black boxes and transparent casing. Where black box technology embodies obscurity and mystery, clear-cased technology is open, vulnerable, trustworthy, and pure. At the same time, it is illusory– the mechanisms of visually-transparent technology are trapped behind panels and casing. Similarly, in human expression, seeing the body’s identity and adornment does not mean understanding a mind, but experiencing its physicality can be demystifying. If computers are our second brain, what of our second body?
@vey4ne on Instagram from 2021 to 2024.
An explorative vessel to play with the pseudo-anonymity of internet identity. A place for more freedom and catharsis in my illustration practice, nurturing my childhood memories, anime-inspired fantasies, and nostalgic ideals with amalgamation doodles, stream-of-consciousness illustrations, and formal drawing studies on Instagram.
Names and emails changed to protect privacy.
A delicate, nostalgic narrative reminiscing on memories & objects associated with friends dear to me.