This work is an early sketch of video poetry thinking about power, surveillance, and the divine. The artist’s eyes glow white while attempting to eat the camera Ross has had for three years.
Olivia McKayla Ross is a Caribbean American video artist, programmer and poet from Queens, New York City. Her work is inspired by the relationship between electronic video and vanity—by deep fantasy, Instagram filters, glamour magic, mirrors and the fantasies and anxieties of video transmission: immersion, absorption, surveillance and control. She hopes her practice as a “cyber” doula will encourage her generation to nurture a critical relationship with technology—coining the term data trauma to describe the compounded effects of navigating digital infrastructures created to exploit, categorize, and discard personhood.
