Body in Beta

Body in Beta is a participatory AR installation that lets visitors see themselves through the logic of computer vision—while reclaiming that gaze as play. Using open-source facial-tracking and generative graphics, the work overlays dynamic “data masks” on participants’ faces that respond to micro-movements: a blink, a tilt, a smile. Each mask is uniquely generated and disappears afterwards; nothing is recorded. The result is a civic funhouse mirror where visibility becomes collaboration rather than extraction.

The installation bridges art, fashion, and civic technology to question how systems recognize and classify us. Within the public interest technology frame, Body in Beta reimagines surveillance infrastructure as a site of transparency and consent. It makes the normally hidden operations of facial recognition visible, tangible, and safe to play with. By turning the camera into a tool for co-creation, the project celebrates experimentation, collective authorship, and the right to opacity—showing that public technology can be both critical and joyful.

Body in Beta is rooted in queer futurism and posthuman media practices that understand technology not as tool or commodity, but as a porous extension of the body—something that dreams, leaks, and remembers alongside us. The project takes seriously the idea that machines are not neutral; they are companions in world-making, spiritual prosthetics that can carry both care and violence. To inhabit “beta” is to accept incompleteness as a condition of justice: a technology—and a self—forever under revision, vulnerable to update, error, and reconfiguration.

In the language of Public Interest Technology, Body in Beta proposes that transparency and accountability need not oppose magic and sensuality. The project turns algorithmic recognition into a participatory rite of transformation—one where civic engagement looks like embodied speculation, and technological literacy begins in wonder. It asks: what if our interfaces were built not for extraction, but for reverence? What if consent, care, and glitch were sacred design principles?

Within the reflective glass of The Oculus, Body in Beta becomes both altar and laboratory: a temporary commons where we test how to live, feel, and appear together inside the machine. It embodies a techno-spiritual ethic—queer, diasporic, iterative—that sees the future not as something to be predicted, but as something we co-compose through our gestures, our faces, and our shared desire to remain unfinished.

Body in Beta is a project by Vinh Mai Nguyễn, graduate of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (’25).

About Vinh Mai Nguyễn:

Vinh Mai Nguyễn is an artist, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of language, digital interface, and cultural memory. Their practice investigates permeabilities and surfaces as unstable systems that morph across touch, screen, and time.