Shane Nicholas Multidisciplinary Artist

Shane Nicholas's work investigates how surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence see, misinterpret, and reconstruct the human body. Using consumer-grade 3D scanning technology, an adapted Xbox Kinect, I deliberately work with equipment that produces flawed, incomplete data to expose the gap between what these systems claim to capture and what they actually render. Each sculpture begins with scanning a human subject. The Kinect, designed for gaming rather than precision capture, generates inherently inaccurate digital information. Sometimes I combine multiple scans of the same subject into a single file, layering different perspectives that conflict and contradict each other. These digital errors and distortions are then made permanent through 3D printing, where the form is constructed line by line through extruded filament. The resulting sculptures don't simply document human subjects. They fragment, filter, and reconstruct bodies according to algorithmic logic rather than truth. Each printed layer is a trace of technological failure, where the line skips, misreads, and misinterprets. These distorted figures embody the fundamental contradictions in surveillance systems that claim to capture reality but instead remake us through flawed technological processes. By using inadequate tools and embracing their errors, I reveal how surveillance technologies don't passively record but actively reshape humanity according to their own biases and limitations.