Luke Shannon’s Replacement Character examines surveillance and selfhood through an interactive, kinetic installation: the plotter-scanner. This custom machine, designed and built by the artist, combines a standard document scanner and a 4'×6' plotter to create a life-sized scanner bed that offers new perspectives on documenting, digitizing, and reflecting the self.
The plotter-scanner is a tool of simultaneous surveillance and witness. While the scanner suggests a clinical and impersonal perspective, the act of making images requires total closeness. The resulting prints are both precise and intimate, holding the body at scale, yet fractured at the seams. Shannon likens this to being online: an expansive presence stretched across windows and gridded feeds, pieced together from fragmentary, constantly updating views. Shannon’s engagement with the machine becomes a new form of self-portraiture: durational, ephemeral, and mirroring the artist’s own presence.
The exhibition’s title refers to the “�” symbol, a temporary placeholder used when a computer fails to recognize or render a character, exposed in anticipation of its own obsolescence. Shannon explores the idea of a replaceable, upgradeable persona in the information era, where the hyper-documentation of our selves predicates its own replacement. This work prompts viewers to reflect on what it means to be seen—not only by other people, but by our environments, technologies, and the ubiquitous systems we increasingly engage and inhabit. In doing so, it raises critical questions about how intelligent machines read or interpret us through images.
