00:03I capture my reality in various ways, be it using my body by performing on the
00:11streets or my camera by photographing things in front of me, creating
00:15installations. All aspects of life to me are mediums. Nothing is more inspiring to
00:22me than life itself. I'm Signee Pierce and I am a reality artist.
00:29I studied photography, I studied traditional art, but I've also always been really inspired by pop.
00:36They weren't such separate worlds. Pop culture is often viewed as lowbrow,
00:40reality TV is often viewed as fluff, but to me there is just something so Warholian
00:46and incredibly rich about turning your life into a media. From birth women are
00:55taught like you like pink and purple, these are your colors, this is what your
00:59thing is. You get older and you start to realize like femininity and pink and purple
01:04are often associated with weakness. They're demeaned and they're derogatory. I'm
01:09interested in reclaiming femininity as something that we can be empowered by and
01:14not feel emasculated by.
01:19I sometimes shudder when I refer to myself as a performance artist. I feel like there's
01:23something kind of weirdly inauthentic about the word performance because it implies that
01:26I'm like faking it, but I genuinely feel like every type of character that comes out of me
01:32is a real part of my identity. I'm just kind of like turning up the saturation on various
01:37aspects of myself.
01:41American Reflex is a performance that I did in collaboration with my former partner Ali
01:48Coates. We knew it was going to garner attention. I was being provocative, but there was absolutely
01:54no way of knowing how angry it was going to make people. The cyborg in American Reflex is
02:00an example of the nameless, faceless women we see in media every day. The girl you see in
02:09porn who doesn't really have an identity or a name. The girl you see who's modeling, whose
02:15basic purpose is to be an object. What happens when you drop her into the middle of the street?
02:20What happens to her? She gets attacked. She's not human. But to me, she's more than human.
02:29Hi, this is Big Sister speaking. Nice to finally introduce myself. I've been watching
02:35you for a while. Let's get to know each other, shall we?
02:38When I think about surveillance culture, I think about male hackers. I don't really see
02:44a swarm of women, you know, sitting in Silicon Valley, like, mining my data.
02:49What's your email address?
02:51Big Sister is sort of like a data dominatrix. She is out here looking to seek some vengeance
02:58for some of the male gays. When I'm walking down the street, I feel watched all the time.
03:04I think a lot of women feel watched all the time, and we are constantly being observed and
03:08perceived as objects. But we can use technology as a tool to combat some of the more oppressive
03:13aspects of the patriarchy.
03:24Halo came out of this idea that human interaction is dying and that we are starting to essentially
03:33become avatars of ourselves. I worked with an industrial designer. I just told him, make
03:39a selfie stick for my face. Whenever I am Halo, you can't look me in the eye. Like, it's a
03:45metaphor
03:46for the way we're leading our lives through our phones and how we are essentially becoming
03:51the media version of ourselves.
03:56Cyberfeminism just comes from an idea that for so long, women didn't have access to a microphone.
04:04Anybody who doesn't fit under the white cis male heteronormative culture, we're suddenly
04:11finding ourselves being able to say and express ourselves and think out loud and assert our
04:19agency in ways that we never were before by using the internet and new technology.
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