Justin Blinder is a Brooklyn-based artist, technologist, and researcher whose work dwells at the intersection of data, technology, and lived experience. Through the interrogation and concretization of data, his practice examines who dominant systems benefit and who they leave behind. Justin’s proposal Ground Truth aims to reconfigure technological tools into narrative devices, transforming vast datasets into embodied moments that challenge how we perceive and move through built environments.
“My artistic practice asks, Who benefits from ubiquitous technologies and who is marginalized? I reconfigure these systems into narrative devices and tools for critical analysis and social justice. I treat data not as neutral statistics but as cultural artifacts, building interventions that aim to increase critical engagement and public participation. By re-appropriating tools that traditionally commodify and obfuscate public and private data, I strive to highlight the political underpinnings of dominant narratives, and to offer alternative, more inclusive, and publicly legible ways of knowing.
Depending on the technologies and issues at hand, these interventions take on a range of forms– from repurposed data visualizations, to hardware attachments and site-specific installations. This approach extends through earlier projects such as Vacated, which used Google Street View and public land-use data to uncover before-and-after images of gentrification across New York City, and Pandemic Pulse, malware that consumed a computer’s resources in proportion to local COVID-19 infection rates. These projects practice counter-mapping: They take data that is usually collected and presented by powerful institutions in flattened, impersonal ways, and reinfuse it with the perspectives and felt experiences of everyday people. Across these works, data then becomes more than a descriptive tool: it becomes material, temporal, and embodied.
By altering technologies that ordinarily help us navigate, quantify, and interpret the world, I expose conditions they often conceal. My work asks what happens when we alter the tools and platforms we use to navigate and understand the world in new, confrontational ways, encoding conditions we might otherwise overlook.” - Justin Blinder
“Rather than using tech as spectacle, I’m interested in what it does dramaturgically: how it reorganizes authorship, how it changes the social contract between performer and viewer, and how it produces new kinds of intimacy, friction, and misrecognition over time. At its core, Cyborg Mirror investigates agency under algorithmic mediation and proposes a performance interface where the body is not just represented by computational systems, but actively negotiates with them.” - Katherine Helen Fisher
TERRENCE ZHOU, Untitled “Trained in mathematics and working across fashion, sculpture, and performance, I approach form as a set of constraints that reorganize perception. I construct wearable structures that alter proportion, redistribute weight, and interfere with habitual movement patterns. Through these interventions, I investigate how physical restriction produces new sensory hierarchies.”
- Terrence Zhou
SERENA STUCKE (of Testu Collective), Field Body “We live in a cultural moment defined by the polished, frictionless surfaces of digital life. In contrast, the handmade and the imperfect assert something essential about embodied experience. Electricity itself is organic — erratic, ambient, alive. Yet the electromagnetic fields that saturate our environments remain utterly invisible, inaudible, untouchable...Field Body [is] a means of engaging with these invisible fields.”- Serena Stucke
“Vestige began as an inquiry into how intimacy, presence, and relation are transformed by technological mediation. Blending dance, contact improvisation, sculptural interface, and real-time virtual representation, the work asks how connection can be felt across distance, translation, and shifting states of embodiment.” - Kevin Peter He