Telematic Media Arts
presents

HARD RESET

An Eco-Humiliation Ritual

Jill Miller

June 27th - August 22nd, 2026

Opening reception: Saturday, June 27th, 6 – 9
Closing reception: Saturday, August 22nd, 2 – 4

Hard Reset is a performance project, sculpture, and video installation by artist Jill Miller, which employs the humiliations and ritualized punishments of sado-masochism as instruments of justice in the face of the environmental crisis, playfully asking: Is it possible to make the people who profit from technological systems answerable for the environmental destruction they cause through the erotic disciplining of the body?

Show Me Your Bottom Line: Art and Eco-Punishment

Saturday, July 18th, 2 – 4

A panel discussion, featuring Artist Jill Miller, along with 
Art Historian Jennie Klein, Artist and Art Historian Natalie Loveless, 
and Media Scholar Nicole Starosielski (moderator)

A discussion of eco-punishment and bottoming. Artists and art historians ask: can performance art be used as a corrective mechanism? Is there a place for queer sexualities, kink, and sado-masochistic drives in environmental retribution? 

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Hard Reset is a performance project, sculpture, and video installation by artist Jill Miller, which employs the humiliations and ritualized punishments of sado-masochism as instruments of justice in the face of the environmental crisis, playfully asking: Is it possible to make the people who profit from technological systems answerable for the environmental destruction they cause through the erotic disciplining of the body?

In it, an executive from a technology company is subjected to humiliating degradation by the artist, in the role of dominatrix, employing whips and paddles  produced with the raw materials for and toxic by-products of digital technologies: lithium water, graphite, and electronic waste. She slaps him across the face, spits in his mouth, and serves him a smoothie topped with her toenail clippings, armpit hair, and day-old urine. She wears a four-foot strap-on whip made from reclaimed woven cables, which she dips in lithium-rich water before flogging him repeatedly. She stands over him and pisses. The piece is shot in a fabricated clean room –  also installed in the gallery – where faceless engineers work in full body suits, creating fetishes for the ritual. The scene is reminiscent of computer chip factories, which require the utmost sterility, but here the delicately handled materials are themselves pollutants, industrial and bodily waste, and they ultimately make a filthy mess.

Beyond a metaphor, Miller employs BDSM as a formal process with its own normative protocols – somewhere between science, Noh theater, and a religious rite – providing a lens on the world with unique insight into the nature of embodiment, power and powerlessness, pleasure, pain, drive, desire, abjection, and ecstasy. She takes it up as a critical practice with its own ethics and understanding, rooted in the body and uniquely pertinent to the perverse contradictions of the climate crisis, when it’s no longer easy to distinguish between the normal and the depraved. 

Hard Reset renders the abstract concrete, situating digital technologies, the environment, and industrial pollution in relationship to human bodies, giving them weight, smell, affect, and consequence. It raises questions of private desire and public accountability in the age of corporate rule, limning the boundaries between voyeurism and technological surveillance, and exploring the digital mediation of human connections through apps, like the one the artist used to find her collaborator-client. It is a meditation on the death-drive in digital culture, which presents our self-defeating destruction of the natural world as not merely a mistake or the unfortunate consequence of a practical necessity.  Instead, it seems to suggest, we’re getting off on it.

• Clark Buckner

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Jill Miller is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice interrogates the intersections of human bodies, technological systems, and structures of power. Her projects engage the materials and conditions of contemporary life, ranging from labor and carework to networked intimacy and electronic waste. Through performance, video installation, and participatory encounters, Miller transforms these systems into experiences that are often uncomfortable, humorous, and emotionally charged. Her work prompts viewers to confront the ways our relationships to technology are never neutral, but deeply entangled with larger social and ecological consequences.

While earlier works explored subjects such as motherhood, cryptozoological mythologies, and collaborative storytelling, her recent projects focus on the extractive infrastructures behind our beloved technological devices. Utilizing humor, awkward encounters, and material experimentation, Miller creates immersive environments where viewers are positioned as implicated witnesses rather than passive observers. 

Miller’s selected exhibitions include: Gray Area, San Francisco, CA; Ecija Historical Museum, Spain; Palo Alto Art Center, California; AMP Art Fair, San Francisco; Woods Art Center, Hamburg, Germany; FAB Art Gallery, University of Alberta, Canada; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Korea; California Museum of Photography, UC Riverside; Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA; National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile; Sesnon Gallery, UC Santa Cruz; Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel; Erman B. White Gallery, Bethel University, Kansas; United Art Fair, Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, India; Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada; Pittsburgh Biennial, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris; Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC/VAL), France; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; de Siasset Museum, Santa Clara, California; Musee Ingres, Montauban, France; Lord Hall Gallery, University of Maine; Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute; The Menil Collection, Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France; Centre National d'Art Contemporain, France; British Film Institute, London, England; National Center for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, Russia.

She is the recipient of many grants including: UC Climate Art Action Network from the University of California Office of the President, C/Change grant by the Goethe Institute and Gray Area Art Gallery, Arts Council England Award, California Arts Council ‘Artists in Communities’ Grant; Wikimedia Individual Engagement Grant; STUDIO for Creative Inquiry Grant; Berkeley Center for New Media Seed Award; Regents Junior Faculty Fellowship, and Creative Discovery Grant from UC Berkeley. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in public collections such as CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BA from UC Berkeley.