Artist Cecile B. Evans On What Truly Matters In The Social Media Age

The work of the non-binary Belgian-American artist Cecile B. Evans can be described as downright bizarre and bemusing, yet also somewhat beatific. Take the 2016 “automated play” Sprung A Leak, for example. 

Its central characters include two lively, bug-eyed humanoid robots, an equally cute robot dog and three “human” users in the form of pole dancers, each appearing on an individual screen. Surrounded by 27 other screens leaking information – at times the kind supposed to be kept confidential – non-stop, this motley crew of AI beings search for their obsession: the wittily named Liberty, a CGI-ed beauty blogger with hands, but no arms. (And you thought you were unhinged, TikTokers.) In the face of all the communication chaos, they ultimately uncover emotions ranging from loss to love.

The London-based Evans, you see, is one of the most prominent voices of Post-Internet Art who, through fantastical, mind-bogglingly coded video projects, examines the impact of digital culture on the human condition. As much as their practice is always set within a technological sphere that combines hardware, software, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, themes such as affection, consciousness, agency, and subjectivity remain central to their work. It might explain why Miu Miu roped them in to create a video installation to accompany its Fall Winter 2024 collection, which explores the shifting meaning of garments and accessories as one develops through life. 

Projected onto screens installed throughout the Palais d’Iéna in Paris, where the show was staged this March, Evans’ film RECEPTION! stars the French actress Guslagie Malanda as its titular lead character: a specialist in lost languages tasked to translate human memories following a storage crisis in which all digital memory has been erased from personal devices. Working in isolation out of a parliament chamber that’s been repurposed into a data centre, she begins the painstaking process of transcribing the recording of a woman speaking in Irish Gaelic when her own memory escapes her, running riot visually through the show space like a hallucinogenic dream that involves the likes of a toy animatronic hamster, a camcorder and even a rice cooker.

Given carte blanche to work on the project, Evans had, in fact, come up with the concept independent of the collection, but the connection between the two is uncanny. Showcased on one of the season’s most age-diverse cast of models, Miu Miu Fall Winter 2024 features exuberant renditions of wardrobe staples from across eras and stages in life – from child-like shrunken cardigans to womanly’ 40s-style sheaths to 2000s-chic low-slung, skinny-fit jeans – evoking the same questions about history, memory and how we keep them alive.

In an exclusive interview post-show, Evans shares what they really think about fashion’s relationship with digital culture, technology, and, of course, TikTok.

This marks your deepest collaboration with a fashion house. What interests you most about fashion’s interaction with digital culture?

“I didn’t start as an artist. I started as an actor (they trained as one at New York University) so my first love has always been audiences. In fact, as an artist, sometimes I feel a bit lonely being in museums because I didn’t grow up going to museums. As much as we try, museums sometimes still feel like fortresses, but that’s not the case with fashion. I recently worked on a film with a group of amazing teenage girls, and they watch all the live streams of fashion shows. Fashion is in some way super accessible to people, and everyone seems to know the references being made – the historical references being made on Diet Pr ada, for example. There’s a real immediacy to the craftsmanship and ideas from someone like Mrs Prada and Dario (Vitale, design director at Miu Miu) embedded into the designs. The way these ideas are disseminated allows people to easily figure them out or discover things that weren’t there in the same way as a film or installation of mine. It’s my dream: that it’s not me telling audiences the references, but that they discover them themselves or make up their own. When you approach my work or anybody else’s work, you shouldn’t have to know anything, and what you walk away with is what you walk away with, and whether you like it or not, that’s yours. And this is something that always happens with fashion shows, which is really nice.”

What references are we supposed to take from RECEPTION!?

“Oh my gosh, there are so many. I’m such a research junkie. One is Bergman’s persona, the idea of a woman and her double, which I think ended up being incorporated into the runway collection as well: this idea of a multiplicity of human beings. What I love about Miu Miu is that you never have to be just one thing… Now, I created this character of Reception as a woman at work working with machines because historically, women have been erased from this history. Women were, in fact, the first computer programmers. And when you walk into the show space, she’s pictured at work essentially trying to fight obsolescence with these devices – her camera, her USB stick and this animatronic hamster. Where did that come from? My kid is three, and she has a mechanical hamster that rolls around. Her relationship with it is so intimate it does not matter to her that it’s not real. Another big reference connected to this is Aibo, the series of dog robots in Japan that its maker, Sony, eventually decided to discontinue, and people started having Buddhist rituals for their Aibo with the memory cards of their dogs. The way I see it, that’s quite beautiful and funny at the same time, and that’s how the idea of the hamster came about in my film. It’s meant to express how something can be hilarious yet sincere. The joke is not on anyone. Serious stuff can be funny.”

How did your interest in technology start?

“My work is not about technology. It’s about feelings. My primary interest has always been that we exist in these huge structures and systems daily, whether in a government or a school. Any institution is a system, and how we feel doesn’t always align with that system’s expectations of us, and nothing can be done about that. If you’re angry, you’re angry. If you’re happy, you’re happy. And I think there’s a lot of power in this rebellion of emotions. Now, the system I’ve most consistently lived in for my entire life is the Internet.

As a kid, I watched how it was thought of as this huge beacon of imagination – this boundless place. There was never meant to be one World Wide Web. There were meant to be multiple Internets, and we were supposed to build new worlds constantly. Suddenly, though, this space became the one we had already architected. It has its own geographies and nationalities. It’s very managed. Five companies now own the Internet regarding where information is stored, and I think it’s very interesting how we were never given the chance to develop the skill set to deal with this. And I’ve seen waves in which people’s feelings re-command this space. It’s impossible for any government to really control the World Wide Web because there are moments when a surge of humanity takes over whether we like it or not.”

What to you is Utopia? 

“I don’t believe in Utopia. And I don’t believe in dystopia. For example, I identify as non-binary. I can’t even imagine being one gender, so I could never imagine one blanket mood of existing. With technology, it’s more that I live in this world, and this is what takes up a lot of our daily time. I’m not here to judge that. Out of an obsession and curiosity, I’m here more to ask why we are here, what we will do with this, and how we build a future that we want to exist in instead of whatever’s happening right now.”

How long do you spend on your devices?

“It’s really bad. It’s a research tool, but I’m old-fashioned to the point where I need to talk to people. Part of the research for RECEPTION!, for example, was going to talk to my family doctor and going, ‘What’s up with memory?’”

Out of curiosity, what’s your preferred social media platform?

“​​I hate all of them, and I’m on all of them all the time. I think that all the social media platforms are not imaginative enough for people. Something like TikTok comes along, for example, and explodes, and, to some extent, how people use it is completely uncontrollable. Now TikTok is where I go to look for the best restaurants, but it’s also where I go to look at funny dances and where I go to see where protests are happening… Or take how on Instagram, people stopped posting and started using stories. So, for me, what’s more exciting is not so much the platform, but these moments in which people using social media have pushed it to the next level instead of having the direction come from the top down… Any moment that we users, as they call us, can find power and agency is really cool. Without us, these platforms don’t exist, you know?”

This interview is for our TikTok Edition. Tell us: What’s your latest TikTok discovery that you’re obsessed about?

“The sharing of practical information on it alone delights me, but more recently, there’s also Shiftok. Especially during the pandemic, young people started engaging in this meditative process in which you have your current reality or CR, and you go into this meditation to shift into your DR, your desired reality. And people believe they can jump into worlds and be whoever they want to be. For example, if I want to be a character from The Matrix, I can shift into that and do what I want to do with it. On TikTok, people started giving tutorials on shifting and sharing their experiences. They even make music for people to shift to. The way this community emerged out of nowhere is incredible to me.”

THIS INTERVIEW HAS BEEN EDITED FOR BREVITY AND CLARITY.

This article first appeared in the June 2024 TikTok Edition of FEMALE