Sam Lavigne

A dialog about the past, present, and future of surveillance. 16:43 minute 2-channel video made from repurposed recordings of a U.S.

Nude Ascending a Staircase, a collaborative artist book by Sam Lavigne and Georgica Pettus, departs from an archive of text prompts used to generate pornographic images, scraped from the website Civitai.

A form which calculates an individual’s “income tax body count”, or the total number of war-related deaths they have caused through their income tax contributions to the U.S. government.

12,147 negative prompts used in the generation of “AI” pornography, scraped from the website civit.ai, grouped by user and sorted by length.

SLOW LLM is a browser extension and DNS service that makes LLMs appear to run very slowly.

Unconventional Carbon Credits For the last several years I’ve been working on a project with Tega Brain to develop a series of “unconventional” carbon offsets centered around instances of industrial sabotage and direct action.

Offset is a carbon registry and online store selling high-quality premium carbon credits generated from cases of direct action and industrial sabotage.

A system that creates a new labor distribution for the US.

A facial recognition system built on ~10,000 images of publicly available images of the NYPD.

I present Coppelgänger: a tool that shows you what NYPD cop a machine learning model thinks you most resemble.

Silences (between 0.5 and 1.5 seconds long) in the first presidential debate of 2024.

I recently led a ten-week class at the School for Poetic Computation called Infinite Video, along with Jonathan Gray and Ilona Brand.

Between 2017 and 2021 the city of Rotterdam used an automated system to assign a risk score for welfare recipients.

In a fit of madness I have made a web-based GUI for FFmpeg: FFmpeg Explorer.

Last night, my shared studio/art space LARPA held the inaugural screening of what we hope will become a regular event: High Concept Low Effort Cinema.

Between 2017 and 2021 the city of Rotterdam used an automated system to assign a risk score for welfare recipients.

“Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions” is an unconventional carbon offsetting scheme that draws on strategies of worker sabotage and applies them in the context of high emission companies in the fossil fuel industry.

An extraction of every single zooming shot from 600 hours of leaked police helicopter surveillance footage.

Drawing from semi-public databases containing the dates drilling began and the dates wells were abandoned and plugged, OBIT unscrolls the birth and death of all abandoned oil wells in the U.S.

The Zooms In November of 2021, an anonymous source leaked 600 hours of police aerial surveillance footage to the non-profit transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets.

Fragile States is an archive of interviews with former political prisoners who have been incarcerated for climate activism.

This June, I launched the Austin Police Department Decruitment Initiative with my collaborator Andie Flores.

Creating Supercuts with Pattern Matching In previous versions of Videogrep I included the pattern library, which, at the time (2015), was my preferred tool for natural language processing tasks.

Thoughts, prayers… Sources Robb Elementary School shooting - 2022 Buffalo shooting 2022 Boulder shooting 2021 El Paso Walmart shooting - 2019 Virginia Beach shooting - 2019 Thousand Oaks shooting - 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting - 2018 Santa Fe High S…

How to Make Automatic Supercuts I’ve been working on some long-needed updates to Videogrep, my command-line tool that automatically generates supercuts.

The APD Decruitment Initiative is a multi-part public service campaign that aims to prevent potential recruits from joining the Austin Police Department, and to convince existing police officers to quit their jobs.

A citizen science initiative to isolate capitalism on a genetic level.

Perfect Sleep investigates sleep and dreaming as a potential climate engineering technology.

A networked, touch-based interface for snails to create music.

Synthetic Messenger was a botnet performance that attempted to artificially inflate the value of climate news.

Zoom Escaper is a tool to help you escape Zoom meetings and other videoconferencing scenarios.

Zoom Deleter is a small program that runs in your menu bar or system tray.

Speculative proposal for the 45th presidential library: a neoclassical structure guarded by all ~700,000 cops in the US.

Tega Brain and I discuss data, AI, and IBM’s toxic legacies with filmmaker Hannah Jayanti while exploring the abandoned IBM Country Club in Endicott, New York.

No Fly Free Zone is an automated live broadcast of the individual nation state travel restrictions as published by the International Air Transport Association (IATA).

A collection of images sourced from the “Amazon Bin Image Dataset”, which contains over 500,000 images “captured as robot units carry pods as part of normal Amazon Fulfillment Center operations.”

Get Well Soon is a massive e-card comprised of over 200,000 unique messages of well wishes.

New York Apartment combines the totality of New York real estate into a single website, sourced from every single for-sale listing in New York City.

Other Orders is a system for sorting text-based content.

A visual overview of Airbnb rentals in Israeli settlements.

An installation in which audience members attempt to match their poses to subjects in the Microsoft COCO image dataset.

Validated Purchases is a series of 5000 unique prints, inserted into books on the shelves of Mill Basin Library in Brooklyn.

The New Organs is an ongoing project to gather, archive and investigate the theories and realities of corporate surveillance.

A systematic examination of propaganda videos produced by ICE and originally published on the Defense Video Imagery Distribution System.

Microsoft’s COCO (Common Objects in Context) dataset contains 220,000 labeled images, originally sourced from Flickr, and then tagged and annotated by workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

A downloadable application and website that raises money for bail funds by mining cryptocurrency.

Video produced by U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is slowly rendered unintelligible.

The Infinite Campaign automatically generates and posts an infinite series of video ad campaigns.