Death to the Digital

Where do our digital selves go when we die? Who can we be when no longer bound by our physical bodies? How does the state surveil this? Death to Digital 000 (2021) is an exploration of what it means to obscure one's identity online. What it means to refuse the commodification of self and still exists authentically within and beyond the digital world... beneath its watchful eye.

All images courtesy of Maud, The Dainty Funk, 2021.

Personal Statement 

All my life, the beauty of conventionally un-beautiful things have ensorcelled me. The shrivelled up shedded skin of the cicada and its lifelong screech, the inflamed skin of a hangnail, even my own blood were things so beautiful to me. Not the way that people would say scars were pretty out of sympathy or pity or that we were beautiful after the pain had passed or in spite of it. The bleeding is the beauty for me. With Dainty Funk, I hope to center those murky feelings I have about where pain and beauty meet by at least making them meet in my work. More than meet, I want them to love each other. I hate terms like masculine and feminine for what they’ve done to me, but they are the descriptors I use when all else fails. I am intrigued by the horrors of ‘the feminine:’ how soft and vain and beautiful things are often paired with grotesque, frightening ones, when we know where to look. I hope to find them and show them off as the beautifully frightening creatures they are. That I am.