In-grid dove into its second sub-theme of Shadow Subversions with artist and environmental engineer Tega Brain. In her works, Brain has subverted existing systems in multiple ways. In New York Apartment, she and Sam Lavigne have collected the totality of New York real estate into a single listing; in the workshop series Bushwick Analytica, Brain invited local middle schoolers to study data driven advertising and build their own targeted campaigns, ranging from “No School on Mondays” to “Play Fortnite”.
In the open crit with In-grid, Brain and the residency artists discussed how corporate software like video conferencing apps and project management tools could be used critically by revealing the edges and ideologies of these technologies, making them open for re-imagination. This is a practice that Brain calls eccentric engineering; it has also been at the core of In-grid, the desire to seek and subvert the same tools that it was built with (Slack, Zoom and YouTube) during the quarantine and social distancing.