Shabtai Pinchevsky

Info

I’m a photographer and digital media artist working at the intersection of architecture, archives, technology, and politics. In my works, I use 3D modeling, mapping, internet-based tools, and more to examine archival photographic materials and their relations to geographies of conflict and displacement, especially in Palestine. My practice is engaged with issues of social justice and human rights, and their application in art and media.

Can a Self Driving Car Navigate an Apartheid Road?

Through video essay and installation, Can a Self-Driving Car Navigate an Apartheid Road? will explore the employment of photographic media in systems of algorithmic governance, specifically in self-driving cars' faculty of sensing, as they navigate the segregational Israeli road system in Palestine. As machine learning systems are increasingly trained using biased and distorted data, this project asks how the knowledge produced by such systems represents the intricate relationship between technology, mobility, and politics.

In 2021, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem declared that the Israeli government's policies in the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as in sovereign Israel, constitute apartheid - a grave violation of international law. The Israeli-designed road system in the West Bank is only one manifestation of these apartheid policies and practices, as it charts the entire region through regulations on accessibilities and limitations based on the racial or ethnic identities of drivers and passengers.

The issue of the politics embedded in infrastructure extends beyond the immediate territories of my work. By exploring infrastructures through the lens of self-driving cars, I'll examine how such structures can obscure or facilitate pathways to communications and interactions and how their design fundamentally shapes how we produce and interpret knowledge. Recognizing that any piece of infrastructure is inherently political, I wish to discuss navigation as a form of political observation and expression.

August 2024