ABOUT
I'm an artist, programmer, powerlifter, and aspiring teacher. These practices provide different interfaces for investigating my own being in the world and the performances of looking and being seen.
My work often starts with drawing as an intuitive exploration and reflection. These sketches evolve into wearable readymades, hand-drawn zines, performative videos, interactive programs, and other objects that allow me to live inside them. My work builds alternate realities where monsters roam and images take on their own desires.
The last book I published is a small collection of drawings about emotional labor and an end of the world. It includes the first pictures I made of my anger, if it had a body and eyes and teeth.
I approach images as if they're alive and can speak back to me. I try to create metaphors large enough I can walk into them. Taking dreams and metaphors seriously (and literally) allows me to stretch and test their meanings.
I'm currently designing a costume for myself to imagine what it might be like to have (more) agency over my body's visibility in public spaces. This armor includes translucent resin chest plates and a browser-based tool for generating speculative camouflage.
In programming, there's a concept called a `promise` that represents an activity that takes an unknown amount of time to complete. A `promise` usually `resolves` with the result, calculation, or resource you were looking for, or it `rejects` with an error.
My work is (intentionally) full of these requests that never complete nor error out; there are promises that I can't resolve for myself. There's room in this in-between space to continually “practice.” Asking impossible questions and scripting un-resolvable promises is my way of worldbuilding.
Lizz Thabet holds a BFA in photography and visual culture from Rochester Institute of Technology and graduated from the Web Development Fellowship at Fullstack Academy of Code. In 2017, Lizz participated in Triple Canopy's Publication Intensive and served on Women's Studio Workshop's board of directors from 2017 - 2021. In 2020, she attended a programming retreat with The Recurse Center and taught a workshop on onion services at NYU's ITP Camp in 2022. Lizz currently works with Docker as a software engineer.
