It's Miyö, Bitch!

Miyö Van Stenis is a Venezuelan new media artist, curator, and educator based in Paris, France. She works primarily with Net art, virtual reality, and digital activism. Since 2019, Van Stenis has taught at the Paris College of Art and Parsons Paris – The New School, where she lectures on immersive technologies and new media art.

Artistic Practice

Van Stenis’s projects use code, browser interaction, and virtual space to examine failure, power, and intimacy in digital culture. Her early work We <3 your Com-Puter, a series of browser and desktop performances, used pop-up windows and looping audio to explore the sensory and emotional aspects of interaction on the internet.

Totally Not a Virus. Trust Me, I’m a Dolphin references the ILOVEYOU computer worm and simulates malware behavior through a browser interface. The piece is discussed in Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places by Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), which describes it as an example of net art using the aesthetics of computer viruses to address issues of trust, surveillance, and user interaction.

Miyö's War Room, a virtual reality installation first shown at DiMoDa 2.0, combined political speech audio with video games imagery in a virtual setting to question power and gender. La Tumba (Torture Room) is a virtual reality reconstruction of La Tumba, an underground detention facility in Caracas used by the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (SEBIN). The project is based on the testimony of Venezuelan activist Lorent Saleh.

Her essay “Sexuality and War: Females in Power and Distortion of Gender” was published in Alpha Plus: Anthology of Digital Art (Editorial Vortex, 2017), where she writes about gender, war, and representation in digital media, a preamble to her later project Eroticissima.

Eroticissima is a virtual reality platform exploring sexuality, empathy, and digital embodiment. It was exhibited at HeK – House of Electronic Arts Basel in Radical Gaming and at the NRW Forum Düsseldorf in Sex Now!. The project's avatar-based characters, including Tomiko (Latex Edition), were analyzed by Pamela C. Scorzin in Kunstforum International (Band 303, June 2025) as examples of new forms of eroticism and corporeality in metaverse environments. The piece was also featured in the French cultural magazine Mouvement (No. 113, 2025) in an article on metaverse art, where Van Stenis discussed virtual environments and customizable avatars.

Curatorial work

Van Stenis founded DeOrigenBélico (2010–2013), an online platform for digital art from Latin America. She later initiated Beautiful Interfaces (2013), a project focused on preserving and collecting digital art. The first iteration, Beautiful Interfaces: The Deep in the Void, was presented at The Wrong Biennale and used Tor network access and downloadable exhibition files.

In 2014, she co-founded Dismantling the Simulation with curator Helena Acosta and photographer Violette Bule, a collective connecting activism and digital culture in Venezuela.

Van Stenis served on the council for the 2019–2020 edition of The Wrong Biennale. For that edition, she worked with David Quiles Guilló on The Wrong Router, a distributed curatorial platform using OpenWrt software based on Matthias Strubel’s PirateBox. That edition of The Wrong Biennale received an Honorary Mention at the Ars Electronica STARTS Prize 2020.