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 Israel / 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?

As navigation is delegated to algorithmic systems, the term has expanded from geography to a metaphor for how people maneuver through social, political, and institutional systems. This metaphorical navigation depends on nuanced knowledge shaped by one's identity and lived experiences. Yet, in the settings of the Israeli apartheid road system in Palestine, geography and metaphor collide — to the point that one cannot begin to move without self-identifying first. As autonomous systems are replacing our very movement through space, the project asks: what identity will a self-driving car embody when navigating segregated geographies, and how will it model the strategies of movement tied to that identity?

Through video essay and installation, the work studies how machine-vision reproduces or contest segregation. By foregrounding the car's core task of ego-localization as political self-positioning, the project reframes navigation as an architectural and media problem: how images, maps, and roads make subjects and space.