Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician exploring ecology, technology, and culture.
She is the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, and co-founder of VICE’s imprint for speculative fiction, Terraform. Her 2018 history of women in computing, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, published by Penguin Random House, has been translated into six languages.
Her writing has appeared in The Verge, VICE, Rhizome.org, Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Document Journal, Eye on Design, Quartz, OneZero, and Aeon, among others.
She has given invited talks at the Hirshhorn Museum, Walker Art Center, TEDx, La Gaité Lyrique, Google I/O, The New Museum, XOXO Festival, MUTEK, Goethe Institut, Manchester International Festival, SXSW, Gray Area, Neural Information Processing Systems, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Decentralized Web Summit, among others.
She lives in Los Angeles, where she is an advisor to graduate design students at Art Center College of Design.
She is the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, and co-founder of VICE’s imprint for speculative fiction, Terraform. Her 2018 history of women in computing, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, published by Penguin Random House, has been translated into six languages.
Her writing has appeared in The Verge, VICE, Rhizome.org, Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Document Journal, Eye on Design, Quartz, OneZero, and Aeon, among others.
She has given invited talks at the Hirshhorn Museum, Walker Art Center, TEDx, La Gaité Lyrique, Google I/O, The New Museum, XOXO Festival, MUTEK, Goethe Institut, Manchester International Festival, SXSW, Gray Area, Neural Information Processing Systems, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Decentralized Web Summit, among others.
She lives in Los Angeles, where she is an advisor to graduate design students at Art Center College of Design.
“Evans tells the story like a friend who knows you get bored easily; a generous sort of brilliance.” — Miranda July
“Evans is the whole package.” — Cory Doctorow
“An insightful, intelligent observer.” — The New York Times
SELECTED PROJECTS
Terraform
Motherboard
Literary incubator for near-term speculative fiction co-founded in 2014 with Brian Merchant within Motherboard/VICE; we have published hundreds of award-winning short stories, Twitter bots, interactive fiction projects, and graphic narratives from emerging and established authors. The print anthology Terraform: Watch Worlds Burn was published by MCDxFSG Originals in August 2022, alongside a limited-run podcast series and events.
BIO STORIES
Faber Futures & World Economic Forum
BIO STORIES is a design-led global stakeholder engagement methodology developed by Faber Futures in collaboration with the Global Future Council on Synthetic Biology that assembles stakeholders from across the world to dialogue about the living world. The inaugural BIO STORIES report includes “The Museum of Symbiosis,” an extended speculative fiction narrative written using Faber Futures’ dialogue methodology as source material.
FutureAbstract
Walker Art Center
Series of four speculative fiction study guides created for the Walker Art Center’s Intangibles, an online collection of intangible products/artworks created by artists and designers. Each PDF guide includes an essay, case study, reading list and study questions. Remastered and reissued for free on the Tezos blockchain in 2021. Read and download The Future Unmanned, The Future Mundane, The Mythic Future, and The Parallel Present.
SVS
Rhizome.org
A play for four bots in three acts, created in collaboration with Tracy Chou for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven. Each iteration of the script, which is entirely voiced by bots, randomizes the names, genders, and nationalities of its characters; the play serves as a dramaturgic bias test. SVS was performed live at the New Museum in New York City in 2016 and the Riverside Museum of Art, Beijing, in 2018; the script can be run—and viewed—here.