Livia Foldes
studio@livia-foldes.com
Recent work
A mobile phone rests on a stack of colorful vintage literary journals. On the phone’s screen, crisp boxes outline links to interviews with writers Anne Carson and Latasha N. Nevada Diggs.

Studio

Art direction and design
Femme legs in stockings and heels straddle a bulky 1980s-era computer and punch card over a neon-yellow background in a rough, collaged illustration.

Decoding Stigma

Creative direction and social practice work with Decoding Stigma, a collective working to prioritize sexual autonomy as a necessary ethics question for futurists.
A black-and-white photograph of myself staring into the camera’s lens is covered with hand-drawn lines and dots that evoke the interface for facial recognition software. The photograph is reflective, and you can glimpse my hands holding an iPhone.

Coded Portraits

Towards understanding and reappropriating images that are also data.
A screenshot showing a pixelated, dramatically zoomed-in photo of a child’s eye. The software has placed a large bullseye selection tool over the child’s pupil. Small type reads, “I can select a single pixel.”

Memory Metadata

A visual essay exploring the slippages between how I see and remember a personal photograph, and how the machine that captured it does.
A screenshot of stark white text on a dark background. It looks like an email, with a subject line that says Mon, April 13, 2020, 9:19 PM. American retail experience.’ The rest of the email grows increasingly nonsensical.

Dear Rachel,

In March 2020, when most of the country stopped, the marketing emails kept coming.
In a hot pink-tinted photo, dramatically lit hands with manicured nails seductively stroke the scroll wheel of a 1990s-era computer mouse. A group of small animated gifs from erotic websites blink in the foreground.

Sex Workers Built the Internet

Thesis work for my MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design.
In a 1980s-era advertising photo, two businessmen reach out to shake hands. One man is in a potted plant-filled office, and the other, a slightly translucent hologram, reaches out to him from a futuristic-looking monitor.

“Be THERE Now,” Adjacent

The intimate power dynamics underlying telepresence—an old technological dream with a renewed, COVID-era urgency.
I’m turning my head and making faces into the camera. It looks like I’m wearing a mask of my own face, repeated several times in decreasing sizes.

Personal practice

I work in the latent space between art, design, technology, and activism.