The Victory Box installation
A reconstructed Cold War domestic device that uses AI, surveillance, propaganda, and parafiction to place viewers inside a persuasive narrative engine.
Interdisciplinary artist · Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada
James
Malzahn
Interdisciplinary artist working across installation, painting, drawing, photography, moving image, sound, interactive systems, and artificial intelligence.
The practice moves between technological critique and creative experimentation, examining how machines shape perception, privacy, memory, authorship, and power.
Practice
One body of work across physical and computational media.
I build artworks that examine how technology changes perception, privacy, memory, and power. Some works expose surveillance and propaganda; others treat artificial intelligence as a collaborator in drawing, sound, image-making, and speculative systems. Across physical and digital media, the practice moves between critique and experimentation, asking how machines shape what we see, believe, and become.
The work ranges from early photographic and print projects to immersive surveillance installations, painted portraits, interactive browser systems, generated documentary, sound, and hand-rendered collaborations with AI.
Selected work
Projects across the practice
The Victory Box
A parafictional Cold War surveillance system built from a physical device, an AI-generated documentary, a synthetic archive, and a live monitoring apparatus.
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Lucid: A Portrait in Phases
A series of framed charcoal portraits and directional sound works developed through an iterative collaboration between a human artist and an AI collaborator.
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Perceptual Dissonance
Live network-camera streams and AI-generated imitations merge into an unstable broadcast in which the viewer cannot reliably separate observation from fabrication.
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Unseen Observers
A global collection of images gathered from publicly accessible network cameras during the pandemic and its aftermath.
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How to Clear Your Browser History
An immersive response to mass surveillance, public video chat, facial recognition, and the persistence of supposedly ephemeral online communication.
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Glitched Perceptions
Deliberately corrupted images examine how expectation, bias, and prior experience shape what appears visually coherent.
View projectCurrent directions
Studio practice, systems, and browser-based work.
Current work includes human-machine portraiture, live and synthetic surveillance streams, and browser-based systems that infer identity from small acts of participation.
Recent activity
2026MFA completed, University of WaterlooThe Victory Box thesis exhibition was presented at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, May 14-30, 2026.