THREAT MODEL (2018)
Artist: Martine Syms
In cybersecurity parlance, a “threat model” maps a digital system’s vulnerabilities to anticipate possible threats from hacking. But in the hands of Martine Syms, Threat Model (hanging until June as part of the Uncanny Valley exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco) is a charting of the ways that a Black self—herself—is shaped by technology and the ever-present eye of social media.
Simultaneously vulnerable, funny, and confrontational, the piece fills an entire room with a threat model of Syms’s own psyche, doubling up on the idea of insecurity to illustrate and emphasize the humanity (and inhumanity) of the Black experience. Syms lays bare her weaknesses and flaws in oversize vinyl
