Password Protected

In the latest installment of Password Protected, artist Sam Lavigne takes us inside his computer to show us how he subverts and manipulates massive amounts of data to expose ICE agents, helps us visualize the scale of our broken healthcare system through GoFundMe best wishes, playfully composites every single New York apartment into one, and disrupts the utility of Zoom.

Household objects eaten by blobs, and other permutations of the mundane-made-strange.

Former Pioneer Works Tech Resident LaJuné McMillian discusses creating space for black bodies in her work.

Defying medium-specificity, multimedia artist Rachel Rossin combines image, object, and architecture into world-building environments.

Allahyari discusses The Laughing Snake (2018) which is a hypertext-narrative in which Allahyari uses the reiminaging of “monstrous female and genderless queer figures” found in Middle Eastern folklore as a tool to analyze the status and mistreatment of women in a hetero-patriarchy. The Laughing Snake is part of a larger body of work she calls: She Who Sees the Unknown, a collection of remixed parables centering legendary figures that Allahyari examines through the lens of new technologies, specifically virtual reality and additive manufacturing.

American Artist’s video, entitled 2015 (2019), is a response to the racially biased “predictive” policing practices used by today’s law enforcement. In the piece, audience are given a POV through the lens of a fictitious police dashboard camera, superimposed with an imagined, futuristic, and ominous crime “forecasting” display. The video’s narrative places viewers on a ride through the predominantly black neighborhood of East New York, while an unseen cop makes their rounds deterring “future crimes.” As Artist opts not to reproduce the violent imagery that sensationalizes black death in mass media, implied acts of deterrence happen off camera. In this intimate screen share with the artist, we are given a behind-the-scenes look at the various tools, datasets, and predictive policing policies currently employed across police departments, which inspired the video.