sabsabby

san francisco

Year:


2026

For:


Coursework

Tools:


TouchDesigner,

Raspberry Pi, Tone.js, Thermal Receipt Printers

Abstract blue and white wavy lines background

Every platform I use keeps a record. The GPS coordinates from a Lyft ride, the dietary flag stored when I ordered lunch, and the three-second gap between closing and reopening an app at midnight: these data trails accumulate into a portrait of a life that is intimate, precise, and almost entirely inaccessible to the person it describes. In aggregate, they power an information economy built on behavioral prediction. On an individual level, they are a personal archive of a scale and depth never before possible. But while this archive is about us, it is rarely in a form that allows any meaningful relationship with it. What happens when that archive is placed alongside the archive of a community? What does it mean that the same industry extracting my behavioral data also displaced the neighborhoods I was walking through, mapped streets that communities spent decades fighting to stay in, and logged public space the same way it logs my body while I sleep: continuously, without asking, because the data has value and the cost is someone else's to bear? Surveillance capitalism is not just a privacy problem, but rather it is a spatial problem, a community problem, and a historical one. San Francisco is a thermal receipt installation with two printers, one screen, and a continuous audio track that holds both of those scales in the same room at the same time, and asks what it means to be a person whose data and whose community have both been extracted.