Sign Stealing

This series of participatory games-with-drones invited Northeast Ohio residents back into public spaces as counter to the growing surveillance state. These initial 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. A number of these public actions are included within the Sign Stealing experimental video series.

This film marks the culmination of the artist’s Akron Soul Train residency, during which she spent time working with and learning from unhoused communities in Northeast Ohio. Shot primarily from a drone’s perspective, it examines the tension between collective care and algorithmic control amid an era of expanding police surveillance. Poetic texts by Young, voiced by artist-activist Emphraim Nehemiah, consider how we construct safety as compared to enacting control. Through an interplay of abstracted language and imagery, the film reveals a range of emotional and political distances.

The six-channel video installation, accompanied by an artist book and audience activity, was developed for the Ann Arbor Film Festival as an installation in the University of Michigan’s Quad Project Space. Participants engage with themes and strategies drawn from the video works and through a paired workshop that considers camera vision techniques, AI-driven surveillance systems, and the iconographies of control that underpin these technologies. Original texts, included in the accompanying artist book, provide additional context and reflection for participants, linking the installation and workshop through poetic wandering.

This interactive installation considers our individual and communal relationships to power and systems of control. It complicates a youthful strategy game, often credited for instilling self regulation, by positing a drone as the game leader. Participants advance or freeze along a designated route within the courtyard of the Yerevan Computer Research Development Institute (YCRDI) leading up to the Logos Expo Center. The activity reflects the meticulous labors of the researchers housed within those walls even as it calls for caution in the deployment of new technologies. Full Stop was commissioned for Open Space curated by Eva Khachatryan and features performance facilitation by Hasmik Tangyan.