My work since 2013 has focused on themes of visibility and surveillance capitalism, explored through installation, video, sculpture, public art and Internet-based projects. During this period, I have produced sixteen original works, discussed them in lectures and conferences, and published writings on them. These works have received awards from, amongst others, Creative Capital, Ars Electronica, HeK Basel and the Surveillance Studies Network.

In 2013, I exhibited four new surveillance-based works: Sanctum (in collaboration with Juan Pampin), Swarm, Panoptic Panorama, and On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers. Sanctum and Panoptic Panorama made direct use of social media posts, and all four works organized viewers into demographic groupings based upon algorithmic logic borrowed from social media. The works all made use of a set of facial profiling algorithms developed by Prof. John Robinson from the University of York. While demographic profiling software like this is widely available in 2020, my collaboration with John Robinson allowed these works to be developed at a moment that issues of privacy, corporate exploitation of personal data, and the changing character of public space was of great concern – the Snowden leaks happened as these works were being exhibited. While many were shocked by Snowden’s revelations about the scale of global surveillance programs, the period also coincided with a massive increase in the use of social media platforms – Facebook had over a billion users and acquired Instagram, and Twitter users were sending over 400 million tweets per day. My approach in these works was to explore the implied contradiction that these statistics reveal: the more aware we are of being watched, rather than avoiding being seen we attribute greater meaning to our visibility within these observational networks. As Friedrich Durrenmatt had written of a character in his 1984 novella The Assignment, which was a significant point of reference for my On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers:

not being watched would make him feel not worth noticing, not being worth noticing would make him feel disrespected, being disrespected would make him feel insignificant, being insignificant would make him feel meaningless, and, he imagined, the end result might be a hopeless depression…

In 2015, my work pivoted away from the direct use of facial-profiling systems, as I began making work by hiring Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to make videos based upon specific rules. These include General Intellect, exhibited in a school building slated for demolition a block from Amazon’s campus in Seattle, and Watchtower, a 40-ft sculpture installed in the atrium of FACT, Liverpool. These works focus on routine and repetition, in some cases introducing behavioral patterns: make a video of yourself eating three times a day, or exercising three times a day, or praying three times a day, show us a clock and tell us what you’re doing at a specific minute of the day. Workers tend towards the performative, oversharing, confessional and diaristic. Mechanical Turk, described by Amazon as “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”, involves unseen humans performing mundane tasks by pretending they are machines. The tasks mTurk workers perform show us, on some level, what remains for us until algorithms are improved: surveys, handwriting, and contextual analysis. Again, we see a dialectical relationship between surveillance, meaningfulness and visibility: mTurk workers are rendered invisible by the system they are employed by, yet very closely monitored to ensure they perform properly. When asked to complete a task that gives them visibility, most immediately tried to connect to a (presumed) audience, saying how nice it was to have someone to talk to.

In 2019 I exhibited a collection of works I had been developing over the previous few years, in an exhibition titled “Exercises in Passivity”. While the Turing Test once asked computers to convince us they were human, this exhibition focused on the face that today, we are persistently being asked to prove that we are human. In a political moment where personality quizzes are algorithmically weaponized to manipulate elections, a divisive president governs via Twitter, and immigrants are locked in cages at the American border, the distinction between humans and robots is not simply about man and machine, but a question of who has agency to be human. My research is grounded by a core set of questions: within Surveillance Capitalism, who is visible, who is legal, who commands attention, who performs labor that is not a placeholder for AI? The exhibition included a modified Amazon worker cage, videos made by Mechanical Turk workers, laughing Alexas, AI-driven empathy and personality tests, and Soundcloud Karaoke booths. My aim with these works was to critically illuminate the mechanics of 21st Century capitalism, particularly in relation to the impact of AI and automation upon attention, labor and human affect. The exhibition was funded by a grant I received to develop new work focused on “Big Data”, an artistic counterpart to the massive eScience initiatives taking place in Engineering and Computer Science.

In January 2020, I created the inaugural exhibition at the International Center for Photography’s new museum in New York City, with a solo exhibition of three new moving image works. The works revisit Walter Hill’s 1979 cult classic film The Warriors to engage with contested notions of community, race, gender, and class. Hill’s film is set “sometime in the future”, in a New York City beset with white supremacist and xenophobic hatred, police brutality, and massive economic inequality. In the exhibition I used DeepFakes algorithms to populate key scenes from the film with visitors’ faces, inserted into gangs based on data-driven analysis of their demographic, economic and occupational markers. This collision of past and present strategically highlighted the social tensions portrayed on screen and their contemporary relevance. As I write this statement on a weekend that numerous cities, including Seattle, have issued curfews to try to defuse protests, riots and looting following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, the relationship between surveillance, algorithmic oppression and visibility is more important than ever. During Summer 2020, I will be artist-in-residence at Thoughtworks Arts, a New York City-based art and technology organization. During the residency I will focus on making more work relating to DeepFakes, and will be collaborating with witness.org, who develop resources, guides and tools to help create, archive, and distribute eyewitness video footage, as well as to help distinguish authentic footage from faked and miscontextualized video.