Kayli Balin

Media Arts & Sciences major, Cinema & Media Studies minor

I am continually studying the ways technology impacts society through different mediums.

As a project-based artist, I explore areas of surveillance, the body, and identities using methods that generate curiosity. I attempt to give tangible bodies disparate relations of theories that predate me and my ideas, and bring them to the present.

Studying how the body works under both digital and physical modes of surveillance, I observe tactility and interfaces and how they affect our precarious experience with reality as we figure out what it means to live, to work and think.

small dilemmas

mixed media, hand embroidery on aida cloth

2 embroidery hoops; left with two offset eyes and red lips; right with green thread pixelated drawing of an ear with small bugs

This body of work has been informed by traditional domestic crafting methods and media theories on surveillance. I use the production strategies of traditionally gendered crafts with the formal characteristics of old and new surveillance technologies to give tangible bodies to my ideas on information gathering. I cross stitch a pixelated human ear in the colors of grey and green, intertwining the tactile to the digital, paired with a disembodied, abstracted face. I choose the traditionally female domestic crafting techniques of household economies of the 18th-20th centuries to materialize images of contemporary surveillance and data collection, bridging times and exposing modes of control in the present. Within this time of crisis, I am especially focusing on methods of mobility, equity, and repetitive (meditative) processes.

Surveillance has taken a much greater meaning in this time of crisis: instances of mass contact tracing, counting bodies within a public space, patients in a hospital, authorities stressing people to stay at home. In this new domestic reality I am cross-stitching meaning, subversion and new realities.

...and this is just a beginning.

close up on embroidery hoop with white cloth, green thread image partially seen, and a tangle of green and white thread over an embroidered black fly with red eyes

close up on embroidery with white cloth background, rectangles with simplified eyes - left yellow with lilac iris on blue, right orange with green iris on light blue with adjacent red square; below red cartoon lips on peach rectangle

embroidery hoop with white cloth, green pixelated drawing of an ear, and two black flies with red eyes and their backs covered in tangles of green and white thread

embroidery hoop with white cloth background, two embroidered eyes and lips on small floating rectangles

close up on an embroidery hoop with white cloth background and partially seen green and gray thread design, focused on a plastic black fly with red eyes that has been secured to the surface with a tangle of green and gray thread over its back

Click the image below to view process photos.

3D printed white and green flies, along with some green crumbles of 3D printer plastic, on a wood surface

to see more work by Kayli: kaylibalin.com

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