Shadow Stalker is a "live" interactive installation that uses original algorithms, data mining, live performances, and projections in order to make visible normally private internet information. This project directly reveals an individual's "digital shadow," providing access to online internet information, which is crucial as data has surpassed oil as the world's most valuable commodity. Shadow Stalker directly exposes hidden surveillance systems that now dominate police arrests and highlights the consequences of geographic and economic limitations these systems cause. Audiences will be educated about options for understanding how this software functions and have access to identify some of the limitations that are surreptitiously being placed on their freedom. Increasingly, law enforcement promotes racial profiling and employs flawed artificial intelligent logic to target low income or non-white individuals as possessing criminal intent, often leading to their arrest before a crime occurs.

This is how it works: participants stand inside a "red square" and enter their email on an iPad, a surveillance camera captures their shadow and exposes a chilling sense of their own vulnerability to this kind of data-mining, revealing, in complete sentences, online information inside their shadow, which tracks progressive data in real time as they move through the installation where a video projection warns about invisible surveillance systems and algorithmic violence that robs people of their civil rights. The video advises how to take control and own their online digital profiles and independence. Government issued and tracked red squares instigate a coded prison. Yet the red square has historically been a place of revolution.

Specially designed algorithms and data mining systems define people by race, economics, or gender. There is an implicit urgency now to expose the existence of these tactics and develop a means of revealing and correcting the global damage these dangerous and violent algorithms are causing.

Links: https://www.lynnhershman.com/project/shadow-stalker/

Shadow Stalker by Lynn Hershman Leeson
Commissioned by The Shed with additional funding from VIA Art Fund
Programming:
Original algorithms programming: Mark Hellar
Interactive Developer: Rachel Rose Ulgado
Algorithmic support: Alister Ashe
Conversion of zip code algorithms for White Collar Crimes: Francis Tseng, Sam Lavigne, Brian Clifton

Video:
Director, writer, editor, producer: Lynn Hershman Leeson
Performer: Tessa Thompson
Shadow of the Deep Web: January Steward
Camera: Hiro Narita
Sound: Javid Soriano
Costumes: Nina Hollein
Compositing and color corrections: Gary Coates
Additional editing: Erica Jordan and Collin Kriner
Production team: Marine Macerot Bahet, Emma Scully
Background score: Mathew Young
Production assistants: Alexandra Phelps, Theadora Walsh, Lor O'Connor
Set photographer: Pamela Gentile, Attorney George Rush

With support from: VIA Art Foundation, The Shed, Hotwire Productions, Fine Arts Museum San Francisco.

Lynn Hershman Leeson (US), b. 1941, Cleveland, lives and works in San Francisco and New York. Exhibitions include Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted (The New Museum, NY, opening 2021), Civic Radar (Karlsruhe, 2014), and solo exhibitions in Madrid (2019), Berlin (2018), Basel (2018), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2013), and Manchester (2007). Her 6 feature films include Teknolust (Sloan Writer Director Award), !Women Art Revolution (Best Art Film Award), and Strange Culture (Humanitarian Award) and she has received numerous other awards. She has permanent exhibits in Museum of Modern Art, NY, MOMA SF, ZKM, Tate Modern, Walker Art Center, and numerous private collections. The New York Times listed Civic Radar as "Best Art Book 2016" and Lynn Hershman Leeson: Antibodies as "Best Art Book 2019".