Artist Statement

Site-Specific Installation with Wireless Routers, Custom Software, Digital Video, and Smartphones (2014)

Since 2005, Silicon Valley’s largest corporations have operated private commuter shuttles between their corporate campuses and San Francisco. In recent years, these so-called “Google buses” have become prominent symbols in the debates surrounding housing displacement, privatization of city services, and the economics of the tech sector. Staged in the spring of 2014, Harris David Harris’s d0ntb33vil is a tactical media intervention that mimics the network names and passwords of the buses in order to temporarily disrupt the daily activities of riders. The work attempts to highlight the particularity of each city space and to gesture toward the consequences of replacing public, embodied environments with privatized virtual worlds.

• Harris David Harris is a media and performance artist whose work examines the neoliberal tendencies of emerging consumer technologies, particularly in the contexts of urban life and gay assimilation. His video installations and creative interventions have been exhibited in galleries and festivals in San Francisco, Oakland, New York, Los Angeles, and Bergen, Norway. As a drag queen, Harris has performed in venues ranging from SFMOMA to OccupySF, and her activism has been featured in the New York Times and NPR. Harris holds an MFA in Digital Arts & New Media from UC Santa Cruz and a BA from Swarthmore College.

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