Artist Profile: Anisha Baid

The latest in a series of interviews with artists who make work that responds to network culture and digital technologies.

Nihaal Faizal: Your work Breaking the Screen (2020) is part video essay, part corporate presentation, but mainly I see it as an artist's statement. It charts the ground for a lot of what your practice has taken as a subject over the last eight years. Loosely, this has been the history of computers, which started, as this work states: “as a woman that computes, to being a large machine, then a small machine, and now is more an idea - a construct which holds many others." What brought you to the computer?

Anisha Baid: That’s really interesting, I don’t think I have thought about the work being an artist statement exactly but you’re not wrong. In making that work, I was contending with the degree of narrative the video essay needed, and how much it could just be a slideshow of these clip art images of women smashing computers that I had been collecting for months. I found the narrative threads in a corporate presentation template I ended up using as a formal structure for the work—which included introductions and credit slides. Essentially I was making a pitch—for and about womanhood and computerhood. My thesis as such, was not that being a woman on the computer is somehow fundamentally different, or that digital experience is particularly gendered—but that the history of gendered labor and performativity had a lot to offer us in understanding our unfolding relationship with computers. I remember reading Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre, during this time, where she foregrounds the theatrical capacity and action oriented set-up of the computer as a medium. I also drew a lot from a brilliant Human Computer Interaction (HCI) studies paper written by Sheryl Brahnam, Marianthe Karanikas, and Margaret Weave that outlined how HCI as an academic and industrial discipline was born from a feminized conception of the computer—that the “interface,” has always been feminine.

This idea is taken to various conclusions in the video piece, which shows these comedic and tragic women stuck in servile roles, doing the organizational and care work of the world. In essence, you can replace the woman there with any kind of dispossessed desk worker under capitalism—but my claim remains that the particular kind of dispossession we suffer is a stifling, feminized labor. I also want to clarify the term feminization that comes from both psychoanalysis and labor studies. It invokes the perception of something as more feminine or related to women, but what this leads to in a patriarchal system is the devaluation of the feminized object and its association with free or cheap labor. Feminization of the computer, creates as its counterpart an entitled masculine user. I’ve also been interested in looking at this difference between the keyboard and the mouse here—where typing contains this long history of feminization and the mouse becomes this managerial pointing tool—these dynamics have continued into other works.

NF: In speaking of feminization, I think of your work Sally’s Helper (2022), in which you perform as Sally, the office secretary who was the "model user" for the first “desktop” interface. The figure that Sally represents, eventually transformed from user to assistant, and forges the line that leads us to characters like Siri and Alexa. How did you figure that transformation in this work? 

AB: I found this “figure” of Sally in a couple of books I was reading about computer history—specifically histories of the graphical user interface (GUI), before which computers were entirely textual and numeric machines. Sally (no last name found) was a secretary at XEROX Parc, where Douglas Engelbart’s “Augmentation Research Lab” was creating the first graphically operated user interface. As they began to think about their expanding consumer base with these more general use computers, they realized the need to understand further, study, and constellate a “user” for whom visual worlds would be designed. Sally, a secretary at the office, was then taken as the first “model user” for what went on to become the interface metaphor of the “desktop.” They created the desktop to retrofit Sally’s desk at the time—files and folders, memos, mail and the like. This was absolutely fascinating to me as a case study, not an exception but an example of how technology happens in the real world. How socio-cultural realities write themselves further into code in ways that seem even harder to locate and, by consequence, change.

In the performance Sally’s Helper, I’m thinking about the cultural specificity of Sally as a white office lady from the 1980s. My imagination of her lines up with a lot of the clip art and stock images I have collected in the previous work, and the goal of the performance is to traverse the distance from “caricature” to complex subjectivity. We are all made in the image of Sally, as “users” of the desktop, and I also think of the performance as an ode to and a lament for her. This is possible because the piece is primarily a piano composition. It takes a lyric-first approach to composition as the sounds are generated through typing on the keyboard, but through the process of performance, I am able to become an embodied user. In the performance, Sally is not an efficient, invisible typist, but an author and a musician using the keyboard as her instrument and pen. 

My first solo exhibition, “MS User” at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust focused on these two figures of the “user” and the “assistant” as figures on either side of the computer screen—both designed to exercise as little agency as possible. Sally is also interesting to me, because she was simultaneously the model “user”, and the model “computer”, as we would see in future versions of the desktop model. Recreating the environment of the ’80s office was not enough, and user interfaces came to be set up as “second person” environments more and more—where an assistant figure like Siri or Alexa or Samantha (from the film Her, 2013) would be needed to personify the increasingly complex functions of the machine. As computers themselves become more advanced and capable, their functions are mediated through a simplified and feminized friendly interface. 

NF: Sally's Helper is also a work about posture, and pain—its presentation but also its disguise. Your work Self Portrait as Tech Support (2022) amplifies these concerns. It consists of a foam mouse pad designed to help prevent carpal-tunnel syndrome, on which a low-resolution webcam photograph of yourself appears. It is a skeuomorph in reverse, where the mousepad becomes a body, providing the user with a perverse sense of comfort.

Ultimately though, the pad is the base and optimal surface for a vital tool in our interaction with computers.  What kind of mouse does such a mouse pad support? 

AB: I think my practice took a major turn through the pandemic when everything really became digital—and all I could think about was the chronic back pain I was experiencing as a result of my computer use. “Work from home” quickly became a labor condition for me to investigate, as I was not alone in feeling this rising occupational pain. The live medium was also a revelation at this time, working with small groups in “guided mediations” and lecture performances led me to becoming Sally. There is a kind of pathos in the circular trap of making work about how much you hate the computer—the computer still ends up occupying a lot of space in your life. Sally’s “helper” in the performance, is in fact the desktop computer that was made after studying her behavior and movement around her desk. The personal computer was an isolation machine, individuating workspaces like nothing before it had succeeded in doing, and eventually would become an obsoletion machine—replacing the “assistant” and making Sally redundant. I’ve tried to construct the performance with this pathos as its rhythmic core—there are long silences, a lot of uncomfortable shifting around in my seat, but most of all it is the restricted sitting position that becomes painful to watch.

I’m really interested in the way bodies orient to the computer, often mindlessly as the visual interface is designed to consume our awareness. The sitting posture that bends the human form along three joints—the knees, the hips and the arms, thus become artifacts of HCI and design.

The mousepads were inspired from similar anime pictures on mousepads designed for gamers and coders. These are the people with the highest risk of carpal-tunnel due to their intensive mouse use. There is a natural overlap in the venn diagrams of internet misogyny and gamer/coder bro culture that led to the rise of these mousepads with simulated women’s (and sometimes animal) breasts as a resting place for the wrist. There is a very interesting and sad story about computer pain in this story, for me, and of course it is also very funny. Inserting myself into the picture did become a way to reverse the skeuomorph and create a kind of void where objectifying desire was supposed to be. I remember you introduced me to Sianne Ngai’s writing on the gimmick as “capitalism’s most successful aesthetic category and its biggest embarrassment and structural problem” which felt very present in this work. 

NF: Another recent work, Relentless Logic (2023) presents an extremely enlarged house of cards, seemingly made up of the deck from the Windows “Solitaire.” Alongside these cards are quotations by Silicon Valley technologists including Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Like all house of cards, this one too is a delicate balance—but what is the balance you see between the ideologies of tech’s founding fathers, and this very commonplace computer game?

AB: Vilem Flusser, in his essay “Why Do Typewriters Go ‘Click’,” reflecting on the haptic nuances of using the typewriter, asks: “Why do machines stutter?” and goes on to answer himself—“Because everything there is in the world (and the whole world itself) stutters.” With this work, I was very invested in bringing to foreground this stuttering and shaky ground on which technological realities establish themselves as muscle memory. 

The quotations in this work are excerpted from product launches, media interviews, or standalone tweets from key technologists from the last four decades, from Douglas Engelbart (inventor of the mouse) to Marc Andreessen (Co-Founder of Netscape browser and present day Venture Capitalist). These quotes present snippets of the personal ideologies and worldviews endorsed by these so-called “founding fathers.”

Microsoft Solitaire, alongside Minesweeper, was the first default game to be built into an operating system. On Windows machines, they were created to teach novice computer users how to use the then-new peripheral device—the “mouse.” Solitaire helped users learn the “click and drag” gesture as the mechanism through which playing cards could be manipulated. The sculpture abstracts these digital playing cards (existing as transparent PNGs), into three dimensional translucent forms, with the pixelated corners on these sculptural cards reflecting the imperfect translation of "rounded corners" in the first solitaire game. On the one side, these cards tell the very specific story of how an interface behavior was encoded into our bodies, on the other, morally ambivalent speech from technologists presents the ideological project under which our interfaces are built. Like you said, there is a delicate balance, and the tension inherent in a “house of cards” is always in the air around this sculpture.

This work, along with Blue Screens (2019) and Desktop Background Paintings (2020) brings an art historical view into the interface—archiving, re-appropriating, and repositioning images from technological history by finding formalist strategies in painting or sculpture for their recirculation. Contemporary interfaces, I think, can be seen as a step in the much-problematized history of Western art—where the frame of a painting transports a silent and solitary viewer into its contents, a (Microsoft) window to another world and the consequent loss of bodily agency in this world. 

Age (if you’d like to share): 27

Location: Pittsburgh

How/when did you begin working creatively with technology?

I come from a family of technologists. My father runs a small electronics business in Kolkata, India and he would sometimes take me to work and give me a selection of nuts, bolts, LEDs and other knick-knacks to keep me occupied… I remember being absorbed in making little abstract sculptures out of those as a kid. When I was a teenager, I also stumbled upon a small community of glitch artists online, they would get into the source code of image files and mess with them to create these cool visual disturbances and I started doing this as well. I must have been 16 or so, and it was the first time it really dawned on me that the computer was really all code, like breaking a kind of fourth wall of the interface. When I entered a more formal creative education, I naturally gravitated towards telling stories about technology with materials from family archives and found video material on the internet. 

What did you study at school or elsewhere?

I got my undergraduate degree at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore where I studied design and media art. It was a fairly small and experimental school and even though it wasn’t a formal art education, watching my professors be artists in the world was really exciting at the time. I have also just finished my MFA at Carnegie Mellon University this year, in a very interdisciplinary studio art program. Before the MFA, I think my practice was situated on the computer almost entirely, but having access to a studio really changed the scope of things and I’ve been making a lot more sculpture and performance work since. 

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously?

I’m currently looking for work as I transition out of grad school and back into the real world. I’ve been teaching in digital media, video art and critical theory as part of my graduate program. Before this, I worked in various arts institutions in India, including as an editorial assistant for PIX journal which is a journal for lens based practices in South Asia. 

What does your desktop or workspace look like? (Pics or screenshots please!)