Visual Inspection Zone
Proof of Personhood, 2019/2023
Singapore Art Museum

Press: Plural, The Straits Times, TimeOut
Support: Singapore Art Museum

Visual Inspection Zone borrows from a series of promotional images of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg produced during a “refugee simulation” at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2010. The imaginary scenario documented by the publicity image—the spectacular violence of the border regime—is inverted into a new documentary of the fictional images constructed by passport counterfeiters.

Using a software package developed and disseminated by passport counterfeiters, Sheryl's identity is combined with the biometric information of passports and identity cards trafficked on the dark web until a plausible hybrid identity is achieved. The "Visual Inspection Zone" is the non-machine-readable portion of a passport's identity page: moving between the images, the audience constructs a third identity between Sheryl and her inadvertent proxies (Erika, Alessia, Sozan, Raghda, Lily, Zahra, and Sheera)—that of the border officer.

SMPLverse
SMPLverse, 2022

Mirror

Press: Gilbert Again (James Langdon), JPEG2000, Paradigm Trilogy, worthlessjpeg.eth, Zora Zine
Support: Friends With Benefits

SMPLverse NFTs use facial recognition to match users to images synthesized by Microsoft to train face tracking algorithms for its mixed reality headsets. Like many NFT projects, Microsoft's dataset was procedurally-generated from a library of digital assets: from a template 3D face model, 100,000 images were rendered with random identities, expressions, textures, hair, clothing, and environments.

Synthetic data is increasingly used to train computer vision algorithms because it is diverse and perfectly labeled by design. In mixed reality headsets, these algorithms communicate the slightest expressions of bodily reality to virtual images. The synthetic data on which these algorithms are trained are the medium of this communication, the skins we wear on the metaverse's computational layer. Though the figures in Microsoft's dataset resemble the avatars that populate the metaverse's surface, they function as avatars for the infrastructure along which all other avatars travel.

If the fundamental problem animating NFT projects consists of investing images with new identities and realities, SMPLverse elaborates the ultimate indifference of our images—corporeal and otherwise—to those identifications.

Taking Longer and Producing Less
Conjuncture, 2020
Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY

Exhibition Catalogue

Support: Whitney Independent Study Program

Taking Longer and Producing Less turns on a set of mirrored mail-order envelopes, photographed by the United States Postal Service's universal mail imaging program—the earliest commercial computer vision application. Inverting the practice of the “poor man's copyright,” whereby one mails a copy of one's work to oneself to prove the date of an idea's conception, the data extracted by the imaging program is the intellectual property of USPS. Consumers may distribute this information only insofar as is necessary “to explain or effectuate a Postal Service transaction.”

Immovable Properties
Immovable Properties, 2020
1BBP, New York, NY

Exhibition Checklist

Support: Chashama, Foundation for Contemporary Arts

The donated real estate venue is left open for the exhibition duration.

Provisional Readymades
Exit Strategy, 2019
NeMe Arts Centre, Limassol, Cyprus

Exhibition Catalogue

Support: Cyprus University of Technology, The Island Club, U.S. Fulbright Fellowship

Provisional Readymades takes up the temporal structure of the exhibition to temporarily introduce goods from Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus into the sovereign Republic of Cyprus. In accordance with the procedures enumerated by European Council Regulation No. 866/2004, which establishes special rules for those areas of Cyprus “temporarily outside the area of freedom, justice and security,” the goods were accompanied by an auction catalogue “providing reasonable evidence” of their intended exhibition.

After their mandatory exhibition period at the NeMe Arts Centre in Limassol (Republic of Cyprus), the objects were placed on long-term loan to S.N.K. Venus Home Developers Ltd (liquidated 2011) in Pyla, a bicommunal village located in the United Nations buffer zone.

Chekhov's Gun
Chekhov's Gun, 2018
062 Gallery, Chicago, IL

Exhibition Catalogue

Press: Studio International
Support: National Academy of Sciences, University of Chicago Arts, Science & Culture Initiative

Using a network of microphones dispersed throughout a city, ShotSpotter triangulates the location of a gunshot by comparing the distance from its point of origin to the three closest microphones. ShotSpotter installs and maintains these systems themselves, renting access to local police departments. Besides real-time surveillance, the proprietary data which ShotSpotter collects is fed into the company's machine learning dataset and spun off into predictive policing programs which police departments may also subscribe to. Given the fallibility of the system, the data is regularly retrofit by human analysts to substantiate the claims made by police officers in court.

Chekhov's Gun stars a group of technical support engineers employed by ShotSpotter to visually confirm that the soundwaves selected by ShotSpotter's machine classification are gunfire and that the time signatures have been correctly synced for echolocation. In the film, the three employees rehearse a dialogue based on court transcripts in which ShotSpotter employees testify to the efficacy of the gunshot detection system; their staging anticipates the triangulation of gunfire. The film installation includes screenprints marking moments of mishearing in the testimony, a bench padded with acoustic foam, and an acoustic diffuser produced from a Chicago homicide prediction map.

A series of acoustic interventions used a purpose-built parametric speaker to communicate with ShotSpotter's technical support engineers via their own gunshot training dataset, isolating an individual microphone in Chicago from its intended function in the network. The waveforms of these interventions were encoded for compact disc—the technological standard for courtroom evidence—and reproduced as embossings.