Violet Forest is a new media artist and creative technologist born in Miami who works across web, AI, VR/AR and game art, exploring the confluence of femininity and technology. She holds a BA in Art from Florida International University and an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 2016 co-founded the Cybertwee collective with Gabriella Hileman and May Waver.,,
After graduate school she worked as a freelance front-end and Unity developer in Chicago before becoming part of Berlin's game art and virtual reality scene, presenting work at Transmediale and the Center for Arts and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. Between 2018 and 2020 she was based in Berlin, working as a UX design technologist at the Volkswagen Future Center Europe on prototyping for Level 1-5 self-driving vehicles, and later served as a research fellow in Paris on an open-source prosthetics project, developing a robotic hand movement mapping application.In 2021 she returned to the United States and began creating and minting NFTs, also working as a developer and Discord moderator for the early Tezos platform Hicetnunc.xyz.,
The Cybertwee Manifesto she co-wrote, which declares that “Romantic is not weak. Feminine is not weak. Cute is not weak.”, has itself become a reference point for other artists, inspiring Sabato's 2024 Barbie World: The Breakdown Sessions.Work from Cybertwee has been acquired by Rhizome, the born-digital art organization affiliated with the New Museum in New York.Her piece OMG LOL Metaverse, a nostalgic net-surfing journey through early internet culture, was shown in “Web as a Medium”, a 2024 net art exhibition at NEORT++ in Tokyo and on objkt.one.In 2023 she showed a piece titled Cybertwee in “E-motions”, a 26-artist exhibition curated by Claire Silver for Unit London.
