Warriors uses three excerpts from Walter Hill's 1979 cult movie The Warriors, a film which features over one hundred rival gangs, each with distinct demographic, stylistic, and sexual preferences, which they communicate through linguistic, sartorial, behavioral, and visual signifiers. The installation uses these gangs as templates to explore issues of racial, gender, and class division.

iPads in the gallery use imageNet and other AI classifiers to profile visitors' faces, based on demographic, economic, and occupational markers. A customized version of the notorious deepfakes algorithm is then used to dynamically organize visitors into gangs, based on common markers, and then swap their faces into the film, in place of the original gangs, at a variety of speeds and resolutions. Due to its durational and interactive composition, the work evolves in relation to the profiles of its viewers. Installed at ICP in New York's Lower East Side, the new gangs generated by the work reflect patterns of immigration, gentrification, and demographic shifts in a neighborhood that exemplifies the historical image of the United States as a "nation of immigrants." Visitors find themselves algorithmically segregated, an experience that is "participatory" yet not "democratic," since it forecloses any sense of control over how one's profile is instrumentalized.

The installation has three parts: a large three-channel crowd scene in which Cyrus, one of the gang leaders, makes a Marxist-inflected demand for class solidarity and revolution against the corrupt city police force, before being assassinated by a white, alt-right gang; a five-channel encounter between the all-male Warriors gang, and an all-female gang, the Lizzies, becomes a gender- fluid deepfake interchange of aggressors and victims; and a two-channel face- off between the Warriors and an even larger rival "gang" that dominates the city: the wealthy, putting the focus on class antagonism.

Links: http://jamescoupe.com

Commissioned by and exhibited at International Center of Photography, New York City, January 23 - May 17, 2020
With thanks to the Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS), University of Washington. Software development by Jacob Fennell, Forrest Fabian Jesse, and Yuying Hung.
With support from: International Center of Photography (ICP), Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS)

James Coupe (GB/US) is a Seattle-based artist who works with a broad range of platforms, including real-time public surveillance systems, live social media content, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a global workforce of micro- laborers. Reflecting on the impact of Big Data, immaterial labor, and AI, Coupe's works explore the aesthetic value of searches and queries, automation, the use of algorithmic narratives, surplus information, and human affect. He has been exhibited at venues including ICP, ZKM, FACT, Prix Ars Electronica, and Toronto International Film Festival/Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.