Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti​ are an award-winning experiential artist duo who founded their collaborative art practice, known as Operator, in 2016. Referred to as “the two critical contemporary voices on digital art’s international stages” (Clot Magazine) and “LGBT power couple” (Flaunt), their expertises collide in large-scale conceptual works recognizable for their signature poetic approach to technology. Rooted in the understanding that immersion is not only a physical state but also an emotional one, their approach employs nuance in scale, producing a feeling instead of a spectacle. Ti’s background as an immersive artist and HCI technologist, and Catherine’s as a choreographer, performance artist and gender scholar make for a uniquely medium non-allegiant output–bringing together environments, technology and the body. 

Operator’s practice has been exploring the topic of privacy, surveillance capitalism, and extractive technologies since their seminal installation “On View” commissioned by the SCAD Museum of Art in 2019. In fall 2021, the duo began a translation of their Lumen Prize-winning work “I’d rather be in a dark silence than” into their crypto-based artwork series entitled Privacy Collection—a durational release of NFT lots exploring the tension between privacy and transparency in blockchain technology. For their upcoming lot, “Human Unreadable,” the artists developed an onchain generative choreography method which will be documented and made available in a white paper on Metalabel.

Operator has been awarded by The Lumen Prize (Immersive Environments), ADC Award (Gold Cube), S+T+ARTS Prize (Honorary Mention), and MediaFutures (a European Commission funded programme). They’ve spoken and appeared in BBC Click, Bloomberg ART+TECHNOLOGY, University of Cambridge, Christie’s Art+Tech Summit, SCAD Museum of Art, MIT Open Doc Lab, Ars Electronica, Art Basel, CADAF, Universität für angewandte Kunst (Vienna), Francisco Carolinum and ZKM.

Originally from Los Angeles and currently based in Madrid, Spain.