Lena Chen is a Chinese American writer and artist creating performances and socially engaged art in live and virtual contexts. Her practice has been informed by her experiences as one of the earliest documented survivors of revenge porn and her work in the sex industry as a stripper, cam performer, and fetish provider. She earned a B.A. in sociology from Harvard University, and is a MFA candidate at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art.

The most legible title for Maggie Oates is “creative technologist.” On odd days, she’s a caregiver, a privacy nerd, a performer, an aspiring transformative justice practitioner, and an artist. Her academic and personal research focuses on the intersection of privacy and The Arts, particularly on how artists and institutions (over/under/mis/lovingly) use digital data. She is based indefinitely in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

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 talk is organized in partnership with Decoding Stigma.

Decoding Stigma is 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 Lena Chen and Maggie Oates, followed by a 40-minute conversation with participants, moderated by Decoding Stigma.

Sponsored by the BFA Design and Technology and MFA Design and Technology programs at Parsons School of Design.