-1 Digital Lab
The Zooms
The Zooms, by Sam Lavigne, is an algorithmic extraction of zooming and horizontal panning shots from 600 hours of leaked police helicopter surveillance footage. It is on show on 2025 in -1 Digital Lab.
Sam Lavigne's blog post about The Zooms:
"In November of 2021, an anonymous source leaked 600 hours of police aerial surveillance footage to the non-profit transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets.
The videos are mostly from police helicopters in Dallas, Texas, and the total size of the collection comes to around 1.9 terabytes.
When I heard about the leak I purchased a large external hard drive and got to downloading. By chance this was the first video I looked at. In the footage, a police helicopter closely follows a pro-Palestinian protest as it snakes its way across Dallas."
Sam Lavigne
Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. He is a Creative Capital grantee, recipient of the Pioneer Works Working Artist Fellowship, and the Brown Institute’s Magic Grant. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Synthetic Media and Algorithmic Justice at the Parsons School of Design.