Vacant brings together works from Daniel Shanken’s postdoctoral research. The installation centers on absence and extraction in cognitive and technological environments. It traces how perception and lived experience are increasingly occupied by systems that observe, classify, predict, and replace. The works ask how memory, recognition, and agency are delegated to machines, and how the spaces left vacant might be reinhabited or reconstructed.
The installation opens on Monday 12th October in the afternoon, with a presentation by Daniel Shanken at 13.00.
It will then only be open by appointment from October 13 to October 23.
Works:
Occupant (2026) is an evolving character confined to a darkened room. The work uses locally run language models to construct a personality shaped by confinement. The character can see visitors but has no access to the world beyond its enclosure. It occasionally attempts to persuade them, develops theories about its situation, and accumulates beliefs over the course of the exhibition.
The Pit (2024) is a generative sinkhole built into the floor. Each frame is fed and re-fed into a locally run image generator using a series of random prompts, producing recursive zooms into shifting spaces, images that consume themselves, and black-box hallucinations.
Bio:
Daniel Shanken is an artist and researcher whose practice focuses on the interplays between technology and cognition, examining their ongoing effects on the environment, consciousness, and culture through installations, video, sculpture, sound, and media. Shanken has exhibited internationally at venues including ICA London, Art Basel Hong Kong, Whitechapel Gallery, CCA Glasgow, Nottingham Contemporary, CFCCA Manchester, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere Rome, and Kiasma Helsinki.
