Operator is the collaborative practice of Ania Catherine (b. 1990) and Dejha Ti (b. 1985), an artist duo based originally in Los Angeles who have worked together since 2016. Catherine brings a background in choreography and performance, Ti one in multimedia art and human-computer interaction, and together they make medium-agnostic work about privacy, surveillance and the body.,
Their first work, Line Scanner, paired live-triggered projected line animations with improvised dance, made on a lunch break between corporate design jobs. A 2018 commission from Adidas, off is on, was the duo's first fully resourced performance installation and confirmed they wanted to commit fully to their practice.After the curator Storm Janse van Rensburg saw off is on on social media, he commissioned On View, a 2019 installation for the SCAD Museum of Art that examined selfie culture and the commodification of identity under surveillance capitalism.,
In 2020 Operator won the Lumen Prize for I'd rather be in a dark silence than, a signal-blocking trench coat that folded fashion and function into conceptual art.That project seeded the Privacy Collection, an ongoing series exploring the tension between privacy and transparency in blockchain culture, comprising Privacy Key 00, Privacy Portraits - Privacy Collection (Lot 01), Unknown Sitter - Privacy Collection (Lot 02), Attempts and Human Unreadable.,For Human Unreadable, their 2023 debut on Art Blocks Curated, Operator built an on-chain generative choreography method that compresses motion-capture data into code, tying each work's rarity to a choreographic hash rather than visual traits, and structured the release across three acts culminating in a live dance performance of the minted sequences.,
Operator later translated Human Unreadable into X-ray Machine, a sculpture of engraved glass, mirrors, steel and LED light shown in London, and adapted their choreography method for the Paris Opera in “Coddess Variations” with artist Hermine Bourdin.,In 2022 Operator contributed a dedicated Herbert W. Franke tribute edition of Line Scanner (Herbert W. Franke Tribute Edition) to the widescale tribute honoring the computer-art pioneer, and the following year was one of fifteen artists in MoMA's blockchain-based Postcard project.,
