Sam Lavigne

Sam Lavigne at the Re:publica conference 2023

Sam Lavigne (born 1981) is an artist and educator based in New York. His work deals with technology, data, surveillance, natural language processing, and automation.

Education

Born in San Francisco, Lavigne studied Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He has a Master in Professional Studies at Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.

Lavigne has since taught at ITP/NYU,[1] The New School, and the School for Poetic Computation, and was formerly Magic Grant fellow at the Brown Institute at Columbia University,[2] and Special Projects editor at the New Inquiry Magazine.[3]

He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Design at University of Texas in Austin.

Projects

Lavigne describes his work as "online interventions that surface the frequently opaque political and economic conditions that shape computational technologies".

He has exhibited work at the Whitney Museum,[4] the Shed,[5] Lincoln Center,[6] SFMOMA, Pioneer Works, DIS, Ars Electronica, the New Museum.[7]

Selected works include Smell Dating with artist Tega Brain,[8] White Collar Crime Risk Zones,[9][10][11] The Good Life[12] and The Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon.[13][14]

He has been named an Honoree at the Webby Awards twice.[15]

ICE controversy

In 2018, Lavigne published a database of the names of nearly 1600 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees sourced from LinkedIn in response to the Trump administration's family separation policy.[16] The project was removed by GitHub who claimed it violated community guidelines and information about the project removed from Twitter and Medium.[17][18] This prompted WikiLeaks to post a mirror.[19][20] Experts stated the project was not illegal as all information was already publicly available.[21]

References

  1. ^ "SAM LAVIGNE". NYU TISCH. Retrieved 5 May 2020.
  2. ^ "2017-18 Magic Grants Announced – Brown Institute". 4 May 2017. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  3. ^ Siddiqi, Ayesha (2014-12-19). "Announcing Derica Shields, Sam Lavigne, and Anwar Batte". The New Inquiry. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  4. ^ Hampton, Rachelle (2020-04-02). "How Two Artists Combined Thousands of NYC Listings Into an Ad for One Massive, $43.9 Billion Apartment". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  5. ^ "The Shed Is Funding 52 Emerging New York Artists to Make New Work—Here They Are". artnet News. 2018-10-09. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  6. ^ "LYFE Glass Ghost – Performance Space New York". Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  7. ^ "Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain: New York Apartment". whitney.org. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  8. ^ "New Dating Website Uses Body Odor to Match You With a Mate". ABC News. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  9. ^ "This App Warns You If You're Entering A Sketchy Financial District". BuzzFeed News. 25 April 2017. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  10. ^ "White-Collar Crime | The Record". The Marshall Project. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  11. ^ "This app alerts you to rampant white-collar crime in your area". The Daily Dot. 2017-04-25. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  12. ^ Wannmann, Azura (2017-01-04). "Experience Enron's Everyday Evil with a 500,000+ Email Experiment". Vice. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  13. ^ Vincent, James (2017-03-03). "Stupid Hackathon celebrates terrible tech with eyeball pong, a robot porn addict, and more". The Verge. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  14. ^ Mahdawi, Arwa (2016-02-08). "Mansplain it to Me: inside the Stupid Hackathon for extremely stupid ideas". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  15. ^ "Ghosts of a Chance ARG at the Smithsonian American Art Museum -- The Webby Awards". Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  16. ^ "What We Know: Family Separation And 'Zero Tolerance' At The Border". NPR.org. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  17. ^ Mikelionis, Lukas (2018-06-20). "Anti-Trump professor thwarted in bid to share ICE employee data". Fox News. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  18. ^ Lecher, Colin (2018-06-19). "GitHub, Medium, and Twitter take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts". The Verge. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  19. ^ Betz, Bradford (2018-06-23). "WikiLeaks posts ICE employees' personal data, report says". Fox News. Retrieved 2020-05-06.
  20. ^ Flynn, Meagan (22 June 2018). "WikiLeaks publishes identities and information about ICE employees amid intensifying anger". The Washington Post. Retrieved 7 May 2020.
  21. ^ "Security, privacy experts weigh in on the ICE doxxing". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2020-05-05.