A Reality Artist Taking Inspiration From The Everyday

Signe Pierce gained notoriety in 2015 within queer and feminist art circles for her incredibly shocking and poignant performance video, American Reflexxx[…] Currently, Signe is elaborating on the themes she began to explore in that video, such as cyber surveillance, constructs of femininity, and the male gaze.

Factory of the sun
In this immersive work, which debuted at the 2015 German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Steyerl probes the pleasures and perils of image circulation in a moment defined by the unprecedented global flow of data. Ricocheting between genres—news reportage, documentary film, video games, and internet dance videos—Factory of the Sun uses the motifs of light and acceleration to explore what possibilities are still available for collective resistance when surveillance has become a mundane part of an increasingly virtual world. Factory of the Sun tells the surreal story of workers whose forced moves in a motion capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine.

Where the City Can’t See
Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by fiction author Tim Maughan, ‘Where the City Can’t See’ is the world’s first narrative fiction film shot entirely with laser scanners, designed in collaboration with Alexey Marfin. The computer vision systems of driverless cars google maps, urban management systems and CCTV surveillance are now fundamentally reshaping urban experience and the cultures of our city. Set in the Chinese owned and controlled Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ) and shot using the same scanning technologies used in autonomous vehicles, we see this near future city through the eyes of the robots that manage it. Exploring the subcultures that emerge from these new technologies the film follows a group of young car factory workers across a single night, as they drift through the smart city point clouds in a driverless taxi, searching for a place they know exists but that the map doesn’t show.