Veil Machine is the project of sex worker artists, Thea Luce, Cléo Ouyang, and Empress Wu. At its core, sex work, like artwork, works through the interplay between fantasy and reality, intimacy and lies. Veil Machine, like the sex worker and artist, manipulates through masks and connects through commodification. To explore these dynamics, they have developed a practice that is relational, intimate, and ambivalent towards the authentic. Their recent projects include E-Viction (2020), Low Art / High Standards (2021), and Personas (2019).

Thea Luce is the creation of a graduate student and artist based in NYC. Her work examines the intersections of intimacy, labor, law, and ritual in the sex industry. She is a co-founder of sex-worker artist collective Veil Machine and a frequent collaborator with Kink Out. Her work has been funded by Eyebeam, and has been featured by Paper Mag, Vice, and Dazed Digital.

Cléo Ouyang (formerly known as Niko) is a captivating mask belonging to a haunted artist. She works in dungeons, hotels, and apartments, but has been known to do her best work in basements.

Empress Wu (all pronouns) is the chaos-for-pay alter ego of MJ Tom, an NYC-based artist and creative producer interested in investigating alternative modes of kinship available via sex work, queer s/m, and digital landscapes. In addition to the work they do with Veil Machine, they also organize events and exhibitions for Kink Out and Red Canary Song. She and her work have been featured at the Leslie Lohman Museum, MoMA PS1, and the Performa Biennial.

The Design and Technology programs at Parsons present Cloud Salon, a Zoom webinar series that invites artists, designers, technologists, and industry professionals to present projects and to engage in direct conversations with participants.

This fall, the DT programs co-present several Cloud Salon talks with Decoding Stigma, an interdisciplinary, international group of people within the Venn diagram of sex work, technology, and academia, hosting events and meeting regularly to deconstruct and re-generate the relationship between sex work and tech. We make up a distributed network of radical individuals “stranded” on different institutional islands, coming together to try to answer the question: what can tech learn from sex workers?

 This talk will begin with a 20-minute presentation by members of Veil Machine, followed by a 40-minute conversation with participants, moderated by Gabriella Garcia, Decoding Stigma co-founder.

Please click "Register" above to confirm your attendance. After you register, you will receive a confirmation email with a link to join the webinar.