I'm a writer in my spare time. I'm currently interested in telling stories about
distance, queerness,
technological
futures, and intimacy through traditional and new media writing formats. My earliest
poetry
can be found in Clerestory Press's Re-Draft (2016,
2017, 2018, 2019, 2020).
On
Gaming — Essay — The Seventh Wave, 2025
“I dream within the confines of my sixteen-inch
screen,
mouse-scrolling and clicking in my sleep.”
My artist statement as the featured artist for The Seventh
Wave's community
anthology On Gaming, edited by dezireé a. brown. Illustration by Isabel
Li.
Should You Leave First, I’ll
Sweep Your Grave —
Short Fiction —
Kernel, 2025
“Death was supposed to be a private matter.”
In this story, a woman grieves her late husband while having to
perform the labour of his
datakeeping—that is, the sorting and verification of all his digital
accounts, profiles, and
existences. The government asks her, as his next-of-kin, to do this work
in memoriam. But as she
leafs through his online personas and discretised lives, she begins to
wonder: who is she really
doing this for, and why? Link coming soon! Illustration by Isabel Li.
Trans+ History Week — QueerAF, 2025
Aya Kamikawa is the first out transgender politician in
Japan, she is making
history - right now. She's been instrumental in LGBTQIA+ rights in the
country, including
helping pass one of Japan’s first ordinances banning discrimination on
the basis of sexual
orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, or nationality in Setagaya. Her
story is the reminder,
even on person can have, in the fight for a better society. Story by Kat
Joplin. Illustration by
Isabel Li.
Haunted Machine —
Interactive Fiction — The New River, 2024
Haunted Machine is a multimedia artificial desktop
fiction exploring the
perspective of Siren, a writer grieving the death of her lover and
conflicted about her changing
gender identity, political standing, creative style, and cultural
belonging amidst a near-future
crisis of government surveillance and technological weaponisation.
Illustration by Isabel Li.
between [you] and
[me] — New Media Web Story — Fellows
Collective,
2024
An aspiring poet moves to the imperial metropolis and
builds a new body for
himself. His childhood friend stays home, isled by the smallness of
their low-cost labour
technohub in the Asia-Pacific. Their reconnection reveals that dreams of
the past are not so
distant after all. “between [you] and [me]” is a multimedia narrative in
electronic love(?)
letters. As genderqueer Pacific youths, Deyu and Sayang’s paths
intertwine in a dying world of
uneven technological advancement and environmental destruction, where
queerness and access to
community feel like high-fidelity western commodities—impossible. This
was also an excuse(!) to
write a cheesy cyborg romance. Created with Sidnee Lim. Illustration by Isabel Li.
fetish —
Computational Poem — Taper,
2024
I was thinking about lucky charms, rituals, and
superstitions, and how
many of these are physical motions or objects — what’s a ritual, a
fetish in the digital age? Especially when superstition tends to be
fending off the uncontrollable, yet the computer typically provides
discrete executions that follow your exact instructions. I wanted to
explore this through the context of coming of age on the internet —
a time when everything is changing and very little feels within your
control. Against the anxious buzz of teen uncertainty, this small set
of every day digital habits and interactions become injected with
desire, need, and belief.
My research interests are at the intersection of creativity support, social computing,
and justice. My work centres investigating, critiquing, and building on the digital
tools and infrastructure which empower people to do artistic work and uplift underserved
communities.
I'm interested in understanding and elevating the needs of creative practitioners
(illustrators,
creative coders, game developers, et cetera), critically
reviewing the community impacts of AI tools on media creators, and studying youth
interactions with
emerging technologies.
“Reimagining Misuse as Creative Practice: the
Impressions and
Implications of
Usage Norms on Digital
Artists”.
Li, I.*, Chen, A. S.*, Rawn, E., Almeda, S., Hartmann, B., Li, J.
ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2025.
“The world has changed...’—Unlocking Teen
Perspectives on Technological
Futures through Design Fiction Workshops”.
Gak, L., Li, I., Rosner, D., Salehi, N.
ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) Extended Abstracts 2025.
“Labor, Power, and Belonging: The Work of Voice
in the Age of AI
Reproduction”.
Almeda, S., Netzorg, R., Li, I., Tam, E., Ma, S., Wei, B.
To appear in ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
(FAccT) 2025.
“What's the Game, then? Opportunities and
Challenges for Runtime
Behavior Generation”. Jennings, N., Wang, H., Li,
I., Smith, J., Hartmann,
B.
ACM User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) 2024. 🎖️ Best Paper
Award.
“Resistance to Text-to-Image Generators in
Creator Communities”.
Peters, J., Kuh, B., Li, I.
UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity White Paper Series 2024.