Rebekah Modrak was selected as the Helmut F. Stern Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities for the 2021-22 academic year. The Institute promotes interdisciplinary research and discourse in the humanities and the arts. The central function of the institute is to form an intellectual community of faculty and graduate student fellows who spend an academic year in residence in the institute, pursuing their research and participating in a cross-disciplinary, weekly seminar.

Throughout the year, Rebekah is working with Italy-based collaborator and curator Marialaura Ghidini to create an extensive net-based artwork challenging the logic of current digital technologies that preference productivity and efficiency over our human nature to be complicated and contradictory. Titled UnProductiveSolutions (UnPro), the artwork presents as a “company” whose mission is to disrupt and challenge assumptions of existing technologies. UnPro will find form as a company website of imagined e-products. Ultimately, UnPro asks: what would technology look like if it supported our right to “complex personhood.”