/SS/ examines what algorithmic systems infer from our public actions. Through creative interventions using semi-autonomous drones, participants conduct children’s games in public spaces, revealing how surveillance is normalized in daily life. Bounding boxes, tracking cursors, and pedestrian-detection confidence ratings make visible the mechanisms of control, while poethical texts and participatory scores propose more equitable and accountable ways of moving together in public space.
Sign Stealing
ON VIEW /
- Armenia Art Fair: Open Platform
- Ann Arbor Film Festival
- University of Akron
- Arizona State University
- Akron Soul Train
- SloMoCo Events
- Cleveland Public Square
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS /
- Contributors: Andrea Belser, Marcia Custer, Elaine Hullihen, Emily Liptow, Laura MacDonald, Martinique Mims, Emphraim Nehemiah, Brad Speck, Hasmik Tangyan, DeAllen Young, and anonymous community participants
PRESS + PUBLICATIONS /
DOCUMENTATION /
- Black Valve Media, Leslie Raymond, Megan Young
Get Outside Games (2020-2022) Inviting Northeast Ohio residents back into public spaces, these events were structured to counter the growing surveillance state. Gestures expanded during a microresidency with SloMoCo to include asynchronous prompts, online events, and work-in-progress screenings with participants internationally. Across all activities, participants were pressed to consider how aerial monitoring shapes human movement, perception, and relation in the built environment.
Bound (2022) Developed for the Ann Arbor Film Festival with the University of Michigan, the six-channel video installation, artist book, and creative workshop explore camera vision, AI-driven surveillance systems, and the iconographies of control embedded within these technologies.
Fuzzy Boundaries (2021) This experimental film emerges from the artist’s Akron Soul Train residency, during which she worked alongside and learned from unhoused communities across Northeast Ohio. Filmed primarily from a drone’s vantage point, the work explores the tension between collective care and algorithmic control within an expanding landscape of police surveillance. Young’s writings, voiced by artist and activist Emphraim Nehemiah, reflect on how notions of safety are constructed in contrast to practices of control. Through the interplay of abstracted language and imagery, the film traces shifting emotional and political distances.
Full Stop (2022) A familiar childhood strategy game, known in Armenia as Մեկ, երկու, երեք, կանգնի՛ր (1, 2, 3, Stop), and in Western contexts as Red Light, Green Light or Statues, is reconfigured with a drone acting as the game’s leader. Participants move or pause along a prescribed route through the courtyard of the Yerevan Computer Research Development Institute toward the Armenia Art Fair booths in Logos Expo Center. The work mirrors the careful, methodical labor of the researchers inside the institute while urging caution in how new technologies are mobilized.