Studio
Making exposure visible
Pwnshow's studio practice examines the aesthetics and politics of surveillance, memory, and sustainability — working with the media of image-making, informatics, lecture, and engineering. Its premise is the agency's founding belief: a society cannot govern what it cannot see.
The studio's processes come from the lab
Retained Reports
Generative adversarial networks hallucinate the portraits of people who never existed, displayed on powered-off electronic-ink — permanent, like the data we cannot delete.
View the work →The Mallards' Call
Surveillance imaging is turned inward, on grief and solitude, to ask whether there can be any sublime in today's surveillance.
View the work →Sans Surveillance Sans
A typeface replaces the euphemisms of the surveillance industry with honest language as you type.
View the work →W.A.R. – War Against Reality
Embedded journalists' war footage, computationally compressed into single abstract images that hide more than they show — as does the reporting itself.
View the work →Works have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery (London), Ars Electronica, the Bangkok Art Biennale, the Singapore International Photography Festival, the Belfast Photo Festival, and the Museum of Science and Technology, Dresden, among others — and honoured by the Allard Prize, the Magenta Foundation's UNSTUCK Grant, and the Hariban Award (twice).
The studio undertakes commissions, exhibitions, and lecture-performances, and collaborates with curators and institutions on works at the intersection of vulnerability and art.