Act Iii to Debut at Whitney Museum as Part of Internet Art Survey

The Whitney Museum of American Art will debut Act III, a multimedia performance by the artist duo Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti), with five performances from November 19–22, 2026. Commissioned by the Whitney and presented as part of the upcoming exhibition artport: A History of Internet Art, Act III is the third and final act of Operator's work Human Unreadable.

Structured as theater aware of its own construction, Act III moves between computational choreography and spoken narrative and follows the ten-year arc of Operator across five chapters. Live performances of Act III will take place in the Museum's Susan and John Hess Family Theater on November 19 at 7 pm, November 21 at 1 pm and 7 pm, and November 22 at 11 am and 5 pm. The performances on November 21 at 1 pm and November 22 at 11 am will be livestreamed at cultural institutions around the world.

Human Unreadable began in 2022 by asking how much of a body survives translation into code and its absorption into technological systems. Drawing on histories of experimental choreography and art and technology, from Merce Cunningham and Analivia Cordeiro to E.A.T., Human Unreadable is a three-act structure exploring 'the slow recovery of the human.' Operator built a library of dance movements and an algorithmic method for generating choreographic sequences stored on the Ethereum blockchain. In Act I (May 2023), the artists created 400 visual compositions through this generative code and auctioned them as NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens). Act I concealed each underlying choreographic sequence within a generative artwork. Act II (November 2023) allowed collectors to uncover the dance sequences behind their Act I artworks in the form of choreographic scores and record them on the blockchain, making them visible to the public.

In Act III, the first hundred choreographic scores (#2–101) become the raw material for an 80-minute multimedia performance. Dancers embody the choreography, bringing generative art out of the screen and into performers. What was initially obfuscated is made visible through performance: bodies witnessing bodies in the absence of technological mediation. The work becomes an X-ray of the artists' and audience's own negotiations between body, ambition, and technology.

'Operator's Human Unreadable has not only created an inventive method of storing and distributing an open-source choreography but also addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time—the relationship between human bodies and technology,' said Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney. 'Act III brings the generative code that has shaped the Human Unreadable project back to the human body, making the human readable again in a visceral and poetic way.'

Act III will also extend into the exhibition artport: A History of Internet Art through Operator's Entr'acte, a database artwork newly commissioned for artport and built from the evolving archive of the artists' process of creating Act III.

The performance on November 21 at 1 pm EST will be livestreamed to audiences at Haus der Kunst Munich (Munich), LACMA (Los Angeles), NEWART Centre (Reus), NODE Foundation (Palo Alto), Nxt Museum (Amsterdam), OGR Torino (Torino), Onassis Ready (Athens), Palazzo Diedo Berggruen (Venice), PHI (Montreal) and SOLO Contemporary (Madrid). The performance on November 22 at 11 am EST will be livestreamed to audiences at HEK (Basel), LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura (Lugano), Nxt Museum (Amsterdam), PHI (Montreal), and V&A (London). The livestream is itself a work of broadcast art: a live-mixed transmission, edited in real time across multiple perspectives, unique to each performance.

Performance Listing

Act III
Operator

Thursday, November 19, 7 pm

Saturday, November 21, 1 pm and 7 pm

Sunday, November 22, 11 am and 5 pm

Event Details

Location: Whitney Museum, third-floor theater

Tickets: Tickets will be available online on October 19 at whitney.org/events/operator-act-iii

About the Artists

Ania Catherine (b.1990, US) and Dejha Ti (b.1985, US) are an artist duo whose collaborative practice, Operator, develops critical and conceptual approaches to experience. With Ti's background as a multimedia artist and HCI technologist, and Catherine's as a choreographer and performance artist, they engineer medium-agnostic output, joining environments, technology, and the body. Their exploration into privacy began with their installation On View (2019), commissioned by SCAD Museum of Art, and continues with the Privacy Collection, a durational release of works exploring the tension between privacy and transparency in blockchain technology. Operator has created two architectures for choreographic preservation and transactability: the Operator Generative Choreography Method (2023) and the Performance Operating System (2026).

Operator has been awarded The Lumen Prize (Immersive Environments in 2021 and Generative Art Award in 2023), Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention (2026), ADC Awards (Gold Cube), and S+T+ARTS Prize Honorary Mention (2021). They have spoken at events and institutions including University of Cambridge, Art Basel, ZKM, Christie's Art+Tech Summit, Bloomberg ART+TECHNOLOGY and MIT Open Doc Lab.

About artport: A History of Internet Art

artport: A History of Internet Art marks the 25th anniversary of artport, the Whitney's online gallery space for commissions of net art, which launched in 2001. Since its inception, artport has presented a snapshot of the varied practices artists use to engage with an ever-evolving online environment. Taking place online and in the gallery, the exhibition tells a history of the evolution of net art over a quarter century and features more than 100 works commissioned specifically for artport.

The exhibition presented on the Museum's 6th Floor is structured around the three main commissioning categories of the artport website: the Gate Pages, created from 2001 to 2006 as portals to artists' websites; the main Commissions, which have been ongoing since 2001; and the Sunrise/Sunset series, which ran from 2009 to 2024, along with its successor, On the Hour. In the galleries, the open floor plan creates the impression of floating browser windows, bringing the history of online art into physical space.

Working across code, data visualization, nonlinear narrative, worldbuilding, gaming environments, and AI-driven net art, the artists in the exhibition explore how the internet has reshaped privacy, identity, self-perception, surveillance, and the boundaries between online and offline life. Together, the works offer a wide-ranging look at how artists have used the internet as both a site and a medium for artistic production.

artport: A History of Internet Art is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, with David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant, and Colin Brooks, Head of Digital Development.

About the Whitney

The Whitney Museum of American Art, founded in 1930 by the artist and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), houses the foremost collection of American art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mrs. Whitney, an early and ardent supporter of modern American art, nurtured groundbreaking artists when audiences were still largely preoccupied with the Old Masters. From her vision arose the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has been championing the most innovative art of the United States for ninety years. The core of the Whitney's mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, and exhibit American art of our time and serve a wide variety of audiences in celebration of the complexity and diversity of art and culture in the United States.

Visitor Information

The Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 99 Gansevoort Street between Washington and West Streets, New York City. Public hours are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 10:30 am–6 pm; Friday, 10:30 am–10 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10:30 am–6 pm. Closed Tuesday. Visitors twenty-five years and under and Whitney members: FREE. The Museum offers FREE admission and special programming for visitors of all ages every Friday evening from 5–10 pm and on the second Sunday of every month.

Photo Credit: Operator