Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco
June 27 - August 22, 2026
Opening Reception: June 27, 6-9pm
Panel: Show Me Your Bottom Line: Art and Eco-Punishment
w/ Nicole Starosielski, Natalie Loveless, and Jennie Klein
July 18, 2-4pm
The man is hooded. The artist slaps him across the face. Wearing a harness fitted with a four-foot strap-on whip woven from electronic waste, she dips the implement into lithium-rich water and flogs him repeatedly. She takes up a series of wooden paddles coated in graphite and spanks him. Throughout, she administers a series of intimate humiliations involving bodily residue.
Hard Reset: An Eco-Humiliation Ritual asks what it would mean to make the people who profit from technological systems answerable through the body. The cloud, the data center, the battery, the executive decision—these things often feel distant and untouchable. This project brings them into a room and gives them weight, smell, pressure, embarrassment, and consequence.
At the center of the installation is a staged encounter between the artist and an anonymous executive. His identity is concealed, but his role within systems of technological power is central to the work. Using materials tied to the physical infrastructures of computational power (graphite, lithium-rich water, and electronic waste) combined with bodily residue, Miller performs a series of humiliating actions that form a constellation of punishment, kink, satire, ritual, and ecological reckoning.
The work took shape over several months of research and preparation. Miller visited mining archives, lithium-enriched springs, and lithium evaporation ponds, tracing the materials and extraction processes that make contemporary technology possible. She also trained in BDSM houses in San Francisco and Los Angeles, approaching humiliation not only as a metaphor, but as a disciplined practice grounded in its own ethics and performance language.
The sculptural installation unfolds across four screens embedded into a plywood stage, each showing a different view of the performance. On two screens, figures in white coveralls reminiscent of cleanroom workers in computer chip factories prepare the ritual materials, coating paddles in graphite and anointing the e-waste whip with lithium water and urine. Another screen shows the executive’s point of view, placing the viewer inside the intimacy and discomfort of the encounter. A fourth screen shows the scene from above, like surveillance footage, holding the entire ritual together from a cold, distant perspective.
Rather than offering a clean fantasy of justice, Hard Reset sits with the messiness of accountability. The executive is implicated through business decisions that ripple outward into vast geographies that will affect future generations. The artist is implicated too: the ritual offers the immediate satisfaction of symbolic punishment, while leaving open the uncomfortable question of whether that gesture produces any measurable change. And the viewer is complicit too. The work invites the pleasure of watching, judging, laughing, and feeling clever in the space of art, while also confronting a more ordinary refusal: most of us know our technologies come at a cost, and most of us are still unwilling to give them up. Hard Reset turns that contradiction into spectacle, asking what accountability can look like when everyone in the room is already part of the system.