Maya Man and Luke Shannon examine how software and social platforms filter the presentation of self, staging their first collaborative work inside a live Fortnite Battle Royale match alongside Man's browser-based generative websites and Shannon's custom-built plotter-scanner and phone-scrolling installations.
make :**: out draws on Maya Man and Luke Shannon's shared early-2000s online upbringing, using software and the language of the internet to examine how screens and social platforms shape identity and how people read one another. The title plays on two meanings at once: to kiss for a long time, and to perceive something at the edge of resolution.
The two artists' first collaboration, Battle Royale Pas de Deux, unfolds inside a single Fortnite Battle Royale Duos match: Maya Man plays as Olivia Rodrigo, Luke Shannon as John Wick. Over sixteen minutes, the two avatars try to stay in sync as a storm closes in, turning the game's competitive arena into something closer to a ballet duet.
Maya Man shows Seven Websites, bringing together seven of her browser-based generative works made between 2022 and 2026, including Read it and Weep and (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes. Her recent work elsewhere has used generative AI text-to-video and text-to-music models to restage scenes from reality television; here, the focus stays on software itself as a medium for examining internet identity.
Luke Shannon presents three interactive machines. Replacement Character combines a document scanner and a custom-built plotter into a life-sized bed visitors can lie on to be scanned, raising the question of how increasingly capable machines might read a person through an image. For You steers a visitor's phone toward Health, AI, or Dating content through a closed loop of camera and sculpture, and Attention Is All You Need, named after the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture behind today's large language models, syncs two phones' recommendation feeds until they land on the same video.
