Recent content on Sam Lavigne
A form which calculates an individual’s “income tax body count”, or the total number of war-related deaths they have caused through their income tax contributions to the U.S. government.
Minimum and maximum deaths per year methodology: Deaths from conflicts involving the U.S. military are totaled for every year between 2001 and 2025. If a conflict spans multiple years, its…
12,147 negative prompts used in the generation of “AI” pornography, scraped from the website civit.ai, grouped by user and sorted by length.
When generating images using “AI”, users frequently input both a “positive” prompt (what they desire to see) and a “negative” prompt (what they do not desire to see). These negative prompts might include…
SLOW LLM is a browser extension and DNS service that makes LLMs appear to run very slowly.
Unconventional Carbon Credits For the last several years I’ve been working on a project with Tega Brain to develop a series of “unconventional” carbon offsets centered around instances of industrial sabotage and direct action. The carbon credit industry is notoriously awash in bullshit, but if we were to take its premises seriously, the question arises: why do some activities get…
Offset is a carbon registry and online store selling high-quality premium carbon credits generated from cases of direct action and industrial sabotage. Credits are represented by unique certificates printed in archival ink on photo rag, and the proceeds from each sale are donated directly back to the activists responsible for each direct action. We analyze and quantify each case for its carbon…
A system that creates a new labor distribution for the US. The system is composed of three random digit generators made of air pumps and colored balls, a cluster of raspberry pi computers, and a dashboard that displays the status of the system and the locations of labor assignments. Random numbers generated by the system are used to select candidates and job assignments from a pool of 30 million…
A facial recognition system built on ~10,000 images of publicly available images of the NYPD. Locate the cop deep within yourself.
Read more about the project here: https://lav.io/notes/exploring-cop-data
Or visit it at: https://coppelganger.lav.io
I present Coppelgänger: a tool that shows you what NYPD cop a machine learning model thinks you most resemble. Find the cop lurking deep inside yourself by visiting coppelganger.lav.io, or read on for a description of my process.
Facial recognition systems are widespread, despite the growing body of work on the real and potential abuse of these systems (not to mention their general creep…
Silences (between 0.5 and 1.5 seconds long) in the first presidential debate of 2024.
I recently led a ten-week class at the School for Poetic Computation called Infinite Video, along with Jonathan Gray and Ilona Brand.
In the course we used the command-line tools, Python libraries like MoviePy, VidPy, and Videogrep, and various machine learning models to explore video archives, thinking through the possibilities (and limitations) of analyzing, filtering, sorting, editing, and…
Between 2017 and 2021 the city of Rotterdam used an automated system to assign a risk score for welfare recipients. The scores were meant to act as an indicator of potential fraudulent activity, and those who received the highest or “riskiest” scores were subject to investigations.
Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with WIRED, used freedom of information laws to gain access to…
In a fit of madness I have made a web-based GUI for FFmpeg: FFmpeg Explorer.
FFmpeg Explorer
I’m teaching a class at School for Poetic Computation this fall called Infinite Video. The goal of the class is to explore video archives with code, and I had planned to do a section on FFmpeg, the notoriously powerful and obtuse command-line media manipulator. So, I thought, what if I just…
Last night, my shared studio/art space LARPA held the inaugural screening of what we hope will become a regular event: High Concept Low Effort Cinema.
For our first ever production, Claire Hentschker and I attempted to reduce the overly-dimensional film “Avatar 2: Way of the Water” into a single dimension. Here are the results (turn subtitles on for the complete…
Between 2017 and 2021 the city of Rotterdam used an automated system to assign a risk score for welfare recipients. The scores were meant to act as an indicator of potential fraudulent activity, and those who received the highest or “riskiest” scores were subject to investigations.
Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with WIRED, used freedom of information laws to gain access to…
“Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions” is an unconventional carbon offsetting scheme that draws on strategies of worker sabotage and applies them in the context of high emission companies in the fossil fuel industry. Time theft is a strategy to deliberately slow productivity, where workers waste time and are therefore paid for periods of idleness. For example, fake sick days,…
An extraction of every single zooming shot from 600 hours of leaked police helicopter surveillance footage.
Read more about the work here
Drawing from semi-public databases containing the dates drilling began and the dates wells were abandoned and plugged, OBIT unscrolls the birth and death of all abandoned oil wells in the U.S. The “finality” of the work–a public obituary–coincides with the flood of information each unit measures, or 305,065 total dead wells. An online version of the work streams a simulcast…
The Zooms In November of 2021, an anonymous source leaked 600 hours of police aerial surveillance footage to the non-profit transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets.
The videos are mostly from police helicopters in Dallas, Texas, and the total size of the collection comes to around 1.9 terabytes.
When I heard about the leak I purchased a large external hard drive and got to…
Fragile States is an archive of interviews with former political prisoners who have been incarcerated for climate activism. It is an ongoing project to celebrate and financially support those who have faced retaliatory state violence for engaging in direct action.
Fragile States is a collaboration with Tega Brain, supported by NYU’s “This is not a Drill” initiative.
This June, I launched the Austin Police Department Decruitment Initiative with my collaborator Andie Flores.
The goal of APD Decruitment is simple: we aim to convince members for the Austin Police Department to quit their jobs, and to discourage new recuits from joining.
To further this goal we’ve partnered with some local Austin businesses who have agreed to provide discounts to…
Creating Supercuts with Pattern Matching In previous versions of Videogrep I included the pattern library, which, at the time (2015), was my preferred tool for natural language processing tasks. Integrating pattern allowed Videogrep to create supercuts based on grammatical patterns.
In an attempt to simplify things, I no longer include pattern with Videogrep. And generally speaking I’ve…
Thoughts, prayers… Sources Robb Elementary School shooting - 2022
Buffalo shooting 2022
Boulder shooting 2021
El Paso Walmart shooting - 2019
Virginia Beach shooting - 2019
Thousand Oaks shooting - 2018
Pittsburgh synagogue shooting - 2018
Santa Fe High School shooting - 2018
Stoneman Douglas High School shooting - 2018
Sutherland Springs church shooting…
How to Make Automatic Supercuts I’ve been working on some long-needed updates to Videogrep, my command-line tool that automatically generates supercuts. These updates were motivated in part by a 10 week class I recently developed and taught at the School for Poetic Computation called Scrapism (web-scraping-as-art). The class includes a section on automatically manipulating video, and I’ll…
The APD Decruitment Initiative is a multi-part public service campaign that aims to prevent potential recruits from joining the Austin Police Department, and to convince existing police officers to quit their jobs.
A collaboration with Andie Flores, commissioned by the “It’s Not Fair” for FuseBox Festival, and presented by MoHA. Video staring Rudy Giuliani, David Clarke, Joe…
A citizen science initiative to isolate capitalism on a genetic level.
Supported by the Goethe Institut, as part of the Jemand Society, as well as Unlisted Projects, The Museum of Human Achievement and the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.
Perfect Sleep investigates sleep and dreaming as a potential climate engineering technology. By inviting participants to experiment with their own sleep cycles, the work explores how lack of sleep and climate change are both products of the same extractivist capitalist system where regeneration, rest and natural limits go unvalued.
The work is realized in two parts: as a smart phone app and an…
A networked, touch-based interface for snails to create music. Created with Mari Bastashevski.
Follow the snails on Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok.
Synthetic Messenger was a botnet performance that attempted to artificially inflate the value of climate news. Every day the system searched the internet for news articles covering climate change. Then 100 bots visited each article and clicked on every ad they could find.
The performance ran for two weeks, and took place inside of a Zoom call that was available to the public.
Synthetic…
Zoom Escaper is a tool to help you escape Zoom meetings and other videoconferencing scenarios. It allows you to self-sabotage your audio stream, making your presence unbearable to others.
Made for the Welcome to My Homepage Digital Artist Residency at the Museum of Human Acheivement.
Zoom Deleter is a small program that runs in your menu bar or system tray. It continually checks for the presence of Zoom on your computer, and if found, immediately deletes it.
Made for the Welcome to My Homepage Digital Artist Residency at the Museum of Human Acheivement.
Speculative proposal for the 45th presidential library: a neoclassical structure guarded by all ~700,000 cops in the US.
Commissioned by 45 Library.
Tega Brain and I discuss data, AI, and IBM’s toxic legacies with filmmaker Hannah Jayanti while exploring the abandoned IBM Country Club in Endicott, New York. IBM began its operations in Endicott in 1911, and opened its country club in the 1930s amidst the company’s expanding manufacture of punch card and accounting machines: data technologies that would go on to be used by Hitler’s…
No Fly Free Zone is an automated live broadcast of the individual nation state travel restrictions as published by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). The broadcast is continuous and is updated perennially to incorporate changes as they become available on the IATA website.
This work is a collaboration with Mari Bastashevski.
From the project website:
“Every day…
A collection of images sourced from the “Amazon Bin Image Dataset”, which contains over 500,000 images “captured as robot units carry pods as part of normal Amazon Fulfillment Center operations.” The project is realized as a single image/video containing only the empty bins, as well as a searchable archive, and was produced for the a2p project curated by Casey Reas, Iris…
Get Well Soon is a massive e-card comprised of over 200,000 unique messages of well wishes. The messages are sourced from the popular crowd funding site gofundme.com, a self-described “leader in online medical fundraising”, which, due to lack of affordable healthcare in the United States is widely relied upon for funding vital medical procedures. The piece is accompanied by a short essay from…
New York Apartment combines the totality of New York real estate into a single website, sourced from every single for-sale listing in New York City. The site includes hundreds of thousands of images, video tours, descriptive sentences, 3d structures generated from extruded floor plans, and a mortgage calculator.
New York Apartment was made in collaboration with Tega Brain. It was a commission…
Other Orders is a system for sorting text-based content.
The project was supported by Akademie Schloss Solitude / ZKM web residency program for Rigged Systems, curated by Jonas Lund.
Recommendation systems, like the ones powering the infinite feeds on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, are designed to keep you online for as long as possible for the sake of maximizing ad revenue. In doing so,…
A visual overview of Airbnb rentals in Israeli settlements.
This piece was made for the Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism, and accompanies an article in The Nation by Mairav Zonszein
Images of homes for rent on Airbnb in Israeli settlements
An installation in which audience members attempt to match their poses to subjects in the Microsoft COCO image dataset.
Commissioned by The Shed for Open Call.
Photo by Kyle Knodell
Photo by Kyle Knodell
Photo by Kyle Knodell
Photo by Kyle Knodell
Photo by Kyle Knodell
Photo by Kyle Knodell
Photo by Kyle Knodell
Photo by Kyle Knodell
Photo by Kyle Knodell
Validated Purchases is a series of 5000 unique prints, inserted into books on the shelves of Mill Basin Library in Brooklyn.
The project was commissioned by the Metropolitan New York Library Council for the exhibit “Privacy in Public”.
The prints were generated by a computer program that searches Amazon.com for books on the shelves of Mill Basin Library. The software uses…
The New Organs is an ongoing project to gather, archive and investigate the theories and realities of corporate surveillance.
Commissioned by Mozilla, and in collaboration with Tega Brain.
The New Organs website
A systematic examination of propaganda videos produced by ICE and originally published on the Defense Video Imagery Distribution System. Each work in this series is algorithmically generated from a single ICE video. I feed every frame of every video into image classifying software capable of identifying and isolating common objects in images. The system looks specifically for segments containing…
Microsoft’s COCO (Common Objects in Context) dataset contains 220,000 labeled images, originally sourced from Flickr, and then tagged and annotated by workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk.
The goal of the project, which is used as training material for countless machine learning systems, is to enable state-of-the-art object recognition by “gathering images of complex everyday scenes…
A downloadable application and website that raises money for bail funds by mining cryptocurrency.
When users download the app, a small part of their computer’s unused processing power is redirected toward mining the Monero cryptocurrency, which is secure, private, and untraceable. At the end of every month, the Monero is exchanged for US dollars which are then donated to the Bronx…
Video produced by U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is slowly rendered unintelligible. The original video is a guide to the US naturalisation process, offering viewers a series of practice questions for the citizenship test. I begin by isolating phonemes (or word sounds) in the video, and then slowly sorting and interchanging them until the original becomes multi-voiced, garbled and…
The Infinite Campaign automatically generates and posts an infinite series of video ad campaigns.
I downloaded all of the demographic categories that Facebook and Twitter use to sell targeted advertising. A computer program randomly selects three of these categories, then overlays that text on top of automatically selected stock footage to generate an ad-like video. Finally, the program logs…
The Enron scandal was, as of 2004, the largest bankruptcy in American history and is a prescient example of corporate fraud and audit failure. The Good Life offers a unique opportunity to experience this landmark event from the inside. Users may sign up to receive 225,000 emails confiscated from Enron by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, direct to their inbox. The emails arrive in the…
Cut-out masks made from the faces of 130 executives at leading biometric corporations.
All masks may be downloaded here.
Collaboration with Brian Clifton and Aaron Cantu.
Sample masks
Just the eyes