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<\/a><\/p>\n\nJames Coupe <\/p>\n Warriors<\/strong> The International Center of Photography (ICP) will open its new integrated center on Manhattan\u2019s Lower East Side with James Coupe: Warriors, one of four inaugural exhibitions. It will be on view at ICP at 79 Essex Street at Essex Crossing from January 23 to May 17, 2020.<\/p>\n The exhibition uses Walter Hill\u2019s 1979 cult movie The Warriors as a narrative template. Hill\u2019s movie follows a Coney Island street gang, the Warriors, as they battle twenty rival gangs during a journey from the Bronx back to Brooklyn. Each gang has distinct demographic, stylistic, and sexual preferences, which they communicate through linguistic, sartorial, behavioral and visual signifiers . <\/p>\n The exhibition makes use of a customized version of the notorious Deepfakes algorithm, which can switch peoples\u2019 faces for those in existing video footage, and has become indelibly associated with \u201cfake news.\u201d Faces swap at a variety of speeds and resolutions, and do not attempt to be seamless in all cases. iPads around the ICP building capture peoples\u2019 faces and then run a series of demographic, personality, and other classification analyses on their images. Using Deepfakes technology, this catalogue of faces are analyzed and grouped into “gangs”, before being auto-composited onto members of given \u201cgangs\u201d from original footage in The Warriors.<\/p>\n The exhibition consists of three works, each using a key scene from Hill\u2019s film that involve confrontations between gang members and illuminate demographic differences of race, gender, and class. The centerpiece of the project focuses on a 9-minute scene at the beginning of the film, in which over one hundred rival gangs gather in an outdoor stadium at the invitation of Cyrus, leader of the Gramercy Riffs gang. <\/p>\n Cyrus\u2019s speech contains a Marxist-inflected demand for class solidarity and armed revolution against the corrupt city police force, in which he hails the various gang members as \u201csoldiers\u201d in a unified army of collective resistance. This dramatic call-to-arms culminates with his sudden assassination, positioning Cyrus as a Che-like revolutionary martyr.<\/p>\n The character of Cyrus is retained, not swapped, but all other characters will be gradually swapped over the course of the work\u2019s exhibition. Due to its durational and interactive composition, the work evolves in relation to the profiles of the people captured by the cameras. Hence the new gangs generated by the work reflect patterns of immigration, gentrification, and demographic shifts in a neighborhood that exemplifies the historical image of the United States as a \u201cnation of immigrants.\u201d Visitors will find themselves algorithmically segregated, an experience that is \u201cparticipatory\u201d yet not \u201cdemocratic,\u201d since it forecloses any sense of control over how one\u2019s profile is instrumentalized.<\/p>\n As a result of bearing witness to the speech, the visitor becomes implicated in Cyrus\u2019s call to action, and hailed as a potential \u201csoldier\u201d in the army of resistance. In an increasingly divisive political climate where state-sanctioned violence, white supremacist and xenophobic hatred, police brutality, and massive economic inequality are coupled with a widespread distrust of mainstream journalism and the concept of \u201cfact,\u201d Deepfakes have emerged as a key mechanism for manipulating the public through false propaganda. And yet, by the same token, the Warriors project insists that this technology can also be deployed as a mechanism for questioning and critiquing official media sources, promoting skepticism, and perhaps most urgently, imagining alternatives to existing narratives.<\/p>\n \u201cCoupe\u2019s work shows how technology can be used to create content with unintended and often problematic consequences. The collision of past and present highlights the social tensions portrayed on screen and their contemporary relevance,\u201d said Erin Barnett, ICP\u2019s director of exhibitions and collections.<\/p>\n Warriors sheds light on how these mechanisms of power and control operate in public and private space, on city streets and online, typically relying on tacit consent. Warriors reflects on how personal data\u2014including images\u2014is continually mined, manipulated, and (mis)categorized, and on the resulting widespread distrust in mainstream media, evidence, and facts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" James Coupe Warriors International Center of Photography, New York City Jan 23rd \u2013 May 17th 2020 The International Center of Photography (ICP) will open its new integrated center on Manhattan\u2019s Lower East Side with James Coupe: Warriors, one of four inaugural exhibitions. It will be on view at ICP at 79 Essex Street at Essex […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2588"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2645,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588\/revisions\/2645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nInternational Center of Photography, New York City
\nJan 23rd \u2013 May 17th 2020<\/p>\n<\/a>