What fields cannot gather
Interactive Art Installation at Gray Area Creative Code Showcase Spring 2025
at Gray Area, San Francisco, CA
This is an interactive installation that examines the tension between institutional identity validation through data and the complexity of human existence.
Participants stand before a camera to simulate posing for a government ID photo. They immediately see themselves split across two realities:
One screen collages their face and body with form fields scraped from official immigration forms used in the pathway to naturalization, citizenship, and sponsorship. Your reflection becomes a living bureaucratic document. A field for Social Security Number hover over your forehead, household income brackets cling to your shoulders, and personal questions such as "Have you EVER applied for relief removal, exclusion, or deportation?" swarm around your body as you move.
The other screen shows their reflection as a luminescent silhouette superimposed over a montage of memories and routines of everyday people, the textures of human life, that resist data quantification. There lies an existence beyond any checkbox or dropdown menu.
When you are read as a collection of data points, which parts of you vanish?
Exhibition
The physical space mimicked the experience of waiting in line to get your photo taken. A table lay scattered with pens and clipboards of various forms relating to immigration such as Form I-485 Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status (Green Card), Form N-400 Application for Naturalization, and redacted government headshot photos.
Technology
HTML/CSS, Javascript, p5js, ml5, WebRTC
The dual-reflection installation uses real-time segmentation, facial landmark mapping, and body tracking recognition models.
