-1 Digital Lab-1 Digital Lab

Derived from a custom script that analyses and automatically re-cuts the footage to only include shots where the camera zooms in or pans, Levigne explores the idea of reducing vast troves of information to reveal underlaying patterns and biases. From the aimless wandering eye of the camera to the sporadic moments of apparent action and focus, the renewed categorisation appears to depict nothing in particular. The footage instead reveals a slip between fiction and reality speaking to the role of law enforcement itself, and to how self-mythologizing police narratives go on to shape the world. In lieu of a subject, the interface itself comes into focus.

A fictional aesthetic made popular through popular media somehow becomes real in application while remaining mysterious in function. The footage seems to emerge from a fantasy that is itself further perpetuate through its own existence, a window into, and emerging from, the seams between the speculative and the real.

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.