Virtual Reality

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American Artist—yes, that’s their nomen officiale—belongs to a generation caught between paradigms: too young to have encountered the primordial black screen and command-line interface of early machines like the 1977 Apple II, yet old enough to witness how graphical user interfaces (GUIs, pronounced “gooey”) transformed our relationship with computers. GUIs—those windows, icons, menus, pointers, and hyperlinks that structure our daily digital existence— made the digital world more accessible while obscuring its underlying operations.

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I had never met the 35-year-old, but we move within the same art world orbit. From afar, I assumed that they were another computer engineer-turned-artist, one of those figures migrating from Silicon Valley into the art world, bearing the gifts of technical literacy. I voiced this assumption during our (fittingly) Zoom studio visit, only to be corrected. They were, it turns out, a graphic designer who came of age during the halcyon days of the ’90s and early 2000s Internet. Back then, experimentation and anonymity seemed like promises rather than commodities. Corporate consolidation had not yet rendered the web into its current platform-driven monotony, where surveillance capitalism and authentication practices relentlessly tie online activity to real-world identities. This bygone reality—now blurred, diffused, slipping into illegibility—is no surprise. An interface, after all, is always trying to disappear, trying to convince you it’s not there, an alibi for the labor of computation. But even in this smoothing, there’s bleed. There’s the ghost of what’s been rasterized, the pixelated noise glitching, announcing itself, “I’m still here.”

The artist traces the shift from the stark minimalism of the old terminal computers to the hyper-mediated worlds we inhabit today. Their 2018 essay “Black Gooey Universe”—reified in physical sculptures for a concurrent show of the same name—is something like a memoir of this technological transition, charting how these interfaces birthed a new kind of computer user. Their early digital work—most notably, the act of legally changing their name in 2013—functions as an interface itself, a way to critically engage with networks of surveillance and control while pushing online identity to its breaking point.

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In the past five years, their work has been in dialogue with Octavia Butler, culminating in their current exhibition, “Shaper of God,” at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Central to this exhibition is what they describe as their most ambitious sculpture yet: Estella Butler’s Apple Valley Autonomy, 2025, a reimagining of a chicken coop Butler’s grandmother built roughly 90 miles east of Los Angeles after escaping Louisiana’s sugar plantations in the 1930s. Lost to a fire and transmitted through Butler’s familial memory, Artist photographed the desert site where the coop might have stood, aggregated archival documentation of period coops, then fed these fragments to algorithmic transformation via Midjourney’s AI protocol.

If we understand science fiction not merely as a genre but as a speculative methodology, then we might ask: What forgotten places hover at the edges of Butler’s narratives? This question is not merely literary but profoundly political, addressing forgotten places that map the geographies of Black abolition. When Artist began engaging with Butler’s work, the art world murmured: “You were making work about policing, now you’re making work about this sci-fi author.” But, as they point out, the subjects that shaped their earlier practice—“racial segregation, crime and punishment, surveillance”—remain central. “I am thinking about abolition in relationship to speculative fiction,” they explain, “as a way to imagine what else or how else things can be ordered.”