Miyö Van Stenis

The Artist is in Danger! : A Manual for Disappearing Before YOU Disappear

In 2014, the Venezuelan government officially labeled my artwork, Venezuelan Duhkha Levitation, an act of violence against the regime. I did not wait for the arrest.

Vigipirate Quadcopter Drone (2014–ongoing) is my response: a working survival system that appropriates France's own Plan Vigipirate security alert infrastructure and re-engineers it as a tool for the persecuted rather than the persecutor. The project operates across fourescalating levels: from an encrypted drone carrying my personal archive, to a Python crawler excavating evidence from state-controlled media environments, to an SMS-triggered autonomous flight protocol capable of evacuating my data to a secure location without human intervention if I am ever detained, deported, or disappeared.

This talk is not primarily about the drone but about the cookbook. Every component of this system: hardware, firmware, flight controller, crawler logic, encrypted storage, emergency protocol, is drawn entirely from public repositories, DIY forums, hacked Android applications, and declassified military documentation. I don’t own this technology, I assembled it. That distinction matters: if I can build a survival infrastructure from open-source knowledge, so can anyone under threat.

The most subversive act is not the device. It is the documentation.

I will walk through the technical and conceptual architecture of VQD, present its current state (Levels I and II realized; Levels III and IV in active development pending production support), and open the floor to the question this project has always asked: whose body does security infrastructure actually protect?. 

Venezuelan Duhkha Levitation available at: https://vimeo.com/85312696
Vigipirate Quadcopter Drone documentation available: https://www.miyovanstenis.com/vigipirate.html

Biography

Miyö Van Stenis is a Venezuelan new media artist and political refugee based in Paris. 

Declared a terrorist by the Maduro government in 2014, she has navigated the European asylum apparatus since. Her practice spans hardware modification, VR installation, and networked systems, examining state violence, surveillance, and bureaucratic desubjectivation. 

She has exhibited at HeK Basel, NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, ZKM, and Art Basel Miami; her work is analyzed in Thinking Through Digital Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Curating Digital Art (Valiz, 2020). She teaches immersive technologies at Parsons Paris – The New School and Paris College of Art.