Emily Martinez is a new media artist, 1st generation immigrant/refugee (Cuba > Miami), and a self-taught coder who believes in technological disobedience and the tactical misuse of technology. Their art has been exhibited internationally, mostly through collaborations with Anxious to Make and works with AI. Their solo work is a departure from previous collaborations and a return to unburying histories of immigrant, queer un/belonging. When Emily is not working, she is learning to love and doing their energy work.

Emily’s art and research has been published in Art in America, Media-N, Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), Temporary Art Review, and Filmmaker Magazine. Their work has been exhibited at international venues, including Hebbel am Ufer HAU4 (Berlin, DE), Drugo More (Rijeka, Croatia), Transmediale (Berlin, DE), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MoMA PS1 (New York), V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, NL), The Luminary (St. Louis), The Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, NL), and The Wrong Biennale.

Personal Statement

My interdisciplinary practice spans video, internet art, speculative design, sound design, literature, and artificial intelligence—all grounded in research, archiving, and remix.

I sample from user-generated content, popular discourse, library archives, stock photo libraries, and institutional collections. I pull texts from across the Internet—Reddit threads, YouTube comments, critical theory texts—to construct scripts and narratives. Nothing is off limits.

What interests me most is context – who creates these sources and their proximity to power. I look closely at what gets included or excluded from archives and official documents; how metadata and taxonomies are deployed; what gets elevated, distorted, inverted, or canceled in popular discourse; and how other markers of aesthetic or raw emotional charge reveal bias, erasure, and missing subtext. It is in these gaps where I find material and draw inspiration for creating counter-narratives.

Broadly, my process examines how cultural production within a networked, globalized society shapes material economies, identities, alliances, worldviews, mythologies, and the basis of our collective narratives. Through various projects, I’ve explore my cultural heritage, collective memory, queerness, migration, labor, subjectivity, and power.