Collaboration with
Varisa Tanti, HaoLun Hung
(New Museum’s Incubator)
P5.js, projection mapping, wood panels, strings
Identity Discontinuity (2025)
Identity Discontinuity chronicles the social construction of race across 230 years of American history and the disconnect between the ways in which we self-identify and the institutional identities imposed onto us. Racial categorizations in the Decennial Census have come, gone, and merged—reflecting the country’s migration patterns, exclusionary citizenship policies, whiteness, and imperialist agendas under which the data was created. Even after 230 years of boundary-pushing by advocacy groups and people of color to expand the Census to reflect this country’s racial fabric, why does it continue to be so reductive? And more broadly, how do we reimagine race in ways that don’t limit our personhood—in datasets or otherwise?
Our installation posits the idea of a world beyond the categorizations we are bound by. By no means are we discussing a post-racial world, as race is (and will always be) intertwined with culture, heritage, struggle, and belonging. Our installation is more so focused on the ways in which complex, multi-hyphenated identities are often flattened and how this is reflected in the built environment. When identities are over-simplified, so are the worlds built for them—places and spaces that are easily legible carry a degree of conformity, rigidity, and inflexibility that is then pushed onto the lived experiences of its inhabitants. This process starts with the Census, and institution in and of itself, which determines so much of our immediate environs. Through visualizing the history of the census, our installation attempts to put this dataset on a trajectory toward a speculative future where alternative understandings of race exist
