In addition to her acclaimed artwork, Behar writes on various topics including feminist media theory, technologized labor, and objecthood.
[3] Behar has been honored with residencies and fellowships including The MacDowell Colony, Pioneer Works,[4] Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Practice,[5] Cannonball, The Wassaic Project, Art Journal Digital Fellow, and 7.stock.
She is additionally known for introducing the concept of "decelerationist aesthetics.” Behar's art questions how objecthood, gender, race, and labor play out in the digital realm, and often combines sculpture and performance.
She writes that "Behar's work forces a different kind of interaction between the digital and the aesthetic than what is regularly shown and promoted under the banner of new media art .
On our children?”[9] Behar’s interactive installation Anonymous Autonomous (2018) consists of three robotic office chairs that have been transformed to behave like driverless cars.
Relying on simplified versions of the lidar sensors and computer vision systems used by autonomous vehicles, the chairs roam through the gallery, following paper "lanes" that viewers arrange on the floor.
It was co-produced with Pioneer Works and PortSide New York, two organizations based in Red Hook, a Brooklyn neighborhood that was hard hit by the storm.
"[11] In the performance, a mock conversation unfolds between the Atlantic Ocean and an AI digital assistant app that Pedro explains, “sends messages into the water and then translates its sounds — waves, splashes — creating a mysterious, evocative ‘dialogue.’” Roomba Rumba (2015) is an interactive installation in which two Roombas carrying potted rubber tree plants vacuum a bright green carpet.
They mirror the "little old ant" in the song "High Hopes" by Frank Sinatra, trying against all odds to "move that rubber tree plant.” Curators Fatma Çolakoğlu and Ulya Soley describe how the installation "draws uncanny similarities between the plants and exploited workers, as well as machine production and human labor.
"[15] Art critic Kaya Genç and curator Ulya Soley describe E-Waste as "a timeless dystopia" related to Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of "the exform."
In E-Waste, "handmade bits and pieces of machine-made electronic sculptures in the installation are both futuristic and aged, analog and digital, animate and inanimate.
[17] Theorist Tung-Hui Hu describes the moving figure's undulating motion as resembling “that of a natural organism, but the costume and mise-en-scène of the video appears inorganic; the combination is disconcerting because we expect body or data, and yet we see both at once.
[21] Compositions for Bit (2010) is Behar's farewell concert for Disney’s original cult-classic Tron that took place at Judson Church in New York, NY.
The interactive concert featured the polyhedron sidekick Bit as three larger than life sculptures—each holding a dancer, lasers, video mixes, original sound scores, and other components of arcade culture that were brought together as an immersive environment.
[32] From 2009 to 2013 Behar collaborated with Silvia Ruzanka and Ben Chang under the moniker RSI (also known as "Resynplement"), an art and technology team that advocated irrational human–computer interfaces.
[38] Her edited collection Object-Oriented Feminism “explores the political and ethical potential of being an object.” It was published in 2016 by University of Minnesota Press, which describes the book as “a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses—like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialism—that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary.” Patricia Ticineto Clough states that Behar is "not shy in reestablishing feminist theory as a primary resource for thinking about objects, things and environments.
"[39] For reviewer Jesse Bordwin, “Object-oriented criticism and feminist theory are not obviously compatible—their commitments and assumptions seldom overlap—but that tension is precisely what energizes the new collection Object-Oriented Feminism.”[40] In 2016, Behar and Emmy Mikelson, coedited And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, an expanded exhibition catalog for their 2011 co-curated exhibition at the CUNY Graduate Center's James Gallery.
[41] This book shows “how artists have figured and prefigured nonanthropocentric ideas strikingly similar to those expounded in various ‘new’ realist, materialist, and speculativist philosophies.
[45] Behar's solo exhibitions, Data's Entry and E-Waste, were accompanied by illustrated catalogs with the artist's writings and essays by new media scholars and curators.