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
00:34really inspired by pop. They weren't such separate worlds. Pop culture is often
00:38viewed as lowbrow, reality TV is often viewed as fluff, but to me there is just
00:44something so Warholian and incredibly rich about turning your life into a media.
00:54From birth, women are taught, you like pink and purple, these are your colors, this is
00:59what your thing is. You get older and you start to realize femininity and pink and purple are
01:05often associated with weakness. They're demeaned and they're derogatory. I'm interested in reclaiming
01:11femininity as something that we can be empowered by and not 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
01:26implies that I'm like faking it, but I genuinely feel like every type of
01:31character that comes out of me is a real part of my identity. I'm just kind of
01:35like turning up the saturation on various aspects of myself.
01:41American Reflex is a performance that I did in collaboration with my former partner,
01:48Ally Coates. We knew it was going to garner attention. I was being provocative, but there
01:53was absolutely no way of knowing how angry it was going to make people. The cyborg in American
02:00Reflex is an example of the nameless, faceless women we see in media every day. The girl you
02:08see in porn who doesn't really have an identity or a name. The girl you see who's modeling,
02:14whose basic purpose is to be an object. What happens when you drop her in the middle of the
02:19street? What happens to her? She gets attacked. She's not human. But to me, she's more than human.
02:30Hi, this is Big Sister speaking. Nice to finally introduce myself. I've been watching me for a
02:35while. Let's get to know each other, shall we? When I think about surveillance culture, I think
02:41about male hackers. I don't really see a swarm of women, you know, sitting in Silicon Valley,
02:47like mining my data. What are your email address? Big Sister is sort of like a data dominatrix.
02:54She is out here looking to seek some vengeance for some of the male gays. When I'm walking down the
03:02street, I feel watched all the time. I think a lot of women feel watched all the time, and we
03:06are
03:06constantly being observed and perceived as objects. But we can use technology as a tool to combat some of
03:12the more oppressive aspects of the patriarchy. Halo came out of this idea that human interaction
03:29is dying and that we are starting to essentially become avatars of ourselves. I worked with an
03:37industrial designer. I just told him, make a selfie stick for my face. Whenever I am Halo, you can't
03:44look me in the eye. Like, it's a metaphor for the way we're leading our lives through our phones and
03:49how
03:50we are essentially becoming the media version of ourselves.
03:56Cyber feminism 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 finding
04:11ourselves being able to say and express ourselves and think out loud and assert our agency in ways
04:20that we never were before by using the internet and new technology.
