Lynn Hershman Leeson: Shadow Stalker
Manual Override, The Shed, NYC (November 13, 2019 – January 12, 2020)
Uncanny Valley, de Young Museum, FAMSF (February 22, 2020 – October 25, 2020)
Art in the Age of Anxiety, Sharjah Art Foundation (March 21, 2020 – June 21, 2020)
The 13th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (opens September 2020)
Production | Acquisition Grant
Shadow Stalker, a new video and interactive installation by Lynn Hershman Leeson, explores the vulnerability of individual identity and privacy in the current digital age. The installation confronts the intentions, pervasiveness, and unregulated status of algorithms that enable digital tracking and racial profiling in the name of crime prevention. As in Leeson’s past projects, Shadow Stalker evidences the artist’s response to rapidly evolving technologies, her focus on protecting individual rights in an era of surveillance, and her collaborative process of working with cutting-edge scientists and engineers. The installation consists of a series of interlocking rooms activated through algorithms, projections, and performances. Each visitor to the “live” installation will, upon entering basic personal data (such as an email address), discover their unique digital footprint. The digital footprint, pulled from the same sources that security systems regularly utilize, will appear within the visitor’s shadow. This online data tracks participants as they move throughout the space, exposing the invisible forces that surveil our everyday actions and enable discriminatory practices from credit checks to preventative policing.
Leeson’s projects often develop over multiple years and are presented in varying stages at different venues on their way to full maturation. Shadow Stalker will premiere at The Shed in New York in November 2019; it will then travel to The Fine Art Museums of San Francisco in February 2020, and on to the 13th Gwangju Biennale in September 2020. The interim months between the three presentations of Shadow Stalker will serve as incubation periods, allowing Leeson to further develop the project while accounting for advances in the surveillance technology that Shadow Stalker critiques.
For more information visit Lynn Hershman Leeson‘s site.
