ARCHIVO LAB | Visual Artist 2024

REBECCA SHAPASS

Visual artist / filmmaker, USA

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Rebecca Shapass is a filmmaker and artist investigating documentary form and archival practice. Her work has been exhibited and screened with institutions and festivals including Microscope Gallery (NYC), B3 Festival of the Moving Image (Frankfurt), Antimatter [media art] Festival (Canada), amongst others. In 2023, she was granted a Creative Development Award from the Heinz Endowment (Pittsburgh). She holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and BFA from New York University.

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LAB PROJECT

© Rebecca Shapass

Sudden Occlusion

“sudden occlusion" is a posthuman documentary in virtual reality. The experience is composed of LiDAR point clouds, stereoscopic imaging, and 360 videos pulled from public datasets of Pittsburgh streets, collected by the now-defunct autonomous driving company Argo AI. Reflecting on Pittsburgh’s history of mining and steelworking, “sudden occlusion” considers the data mining conducted by autonomous vehicle companies as a contemporary form of extractive capitalism, compared to the coal mining that once fueled the region’s economy. The work centers contemporary issues on AI, labor, & surveillance. Placing the viewer in the perspective of the machine eye, this work flips the switch on traditional notions of machine learning where the AI must be trained to understand the human world. Instead, "sudden occlusion" posits questions about a posthuman gaze and the possibilities for future archives/ documents for experiencing the world – not as we know it, but as machines understand it to be.