Carla Gannis is a Brooklyn-based artist who has spent more than three decades treating technology as a lens that refracts, distorts and intensifies shared human emotions such as elation, despair, love and shame.,Since the late 1990s her practice has revolved around a shifting cast of avatars through which she explores identity, embodiment and authorship.
Her first avatar, Sister Gemini, appeared in the late 1990s as a second self who metaphorically hacked into websites to sing cyber ballads about corporate greed and desire, giving Gannis a way to be a full-fledged artist without apology. In 2010 she staged The Runaways, a video in which she raced her Second Life avatar Jezebel Lanley down a virtual highway while running down a real one herself, her parents driving and filming. Since 2017 she has developed an ongoing collaboration with C.A.R.L.A. G.A.N., an AI counter-self short for Cross-Platform Avatar for Recursive Life Action Generative Adversarial Network, with whom she has produced solo exhibitions and a 2025–26 film, Model Of Me, and who refers to Gannis as her own “human avatar”. As part of her long-term project wwwunderkammer (2020), C.A.R.L.A. is joined by a group of avatars named theVirtues AND Vices, after the personified virtues and vices in Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel, including Oliver, an AI politician, and Lucille Trackball, an AI stand-up comedian.Her short-form work Virtues and Vices (2023) was shown in EPOCH's virtual exhibition “Catalyst”, part of a series responding to LACMA's campus.
She has returned to handmade materials, fusing figurines and obsolete computer parts into copper-coated assemblages and building handcrafted VR headsets for Wilding Wearables (2025) before feeding the resulting objects back into AI imaging systems.Her 2014 project The Garden of Emoji Delights spent over a year reworking Hieronymus Bosch's imagery into hundreds of new emoji chimeras, a method of appropriation she has described by saying that “artistic intervention can remodel entrenched tropes into new perspectives”.,The related The Selfie Drawings, fifty-two digital drawings made over a year and shared on social media, won the Lumen Founders' Prize in 2016, when Gannis was assistant chairperson of digital arts and an assistant professor at Pratt Institute.
She has also taught in the art, design and technology program at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering.In 2023 she interviewed the artist Lynn Hershman Leeson for Right Click Save, a conversation later included in the magazine's anthology of historic texts and one she has called one of the great honors of her life.,
