The Unselected began with screen captures from public video chatrooms. The images were deliberately disrupted and translated into physical prints, retaining timestamps, fragments, compression artifacts, and unstable identities. What appeared fleeting online became durable matter. The project is a critique of the GCHQ Optic Nerve program.
The persistence of the supposedly temporary
The project focuses on communications that users often experience as transient. By printing them, the work emphasizes how networked images can be copied, classified, and retained beyond the moment in which they were made.
The title "Unselected" refers to the term used by intelligence agencies for bulk and untargeted data collection. This is the tactic used in Optic Nerve, where GCHQ captured images of people in private Yahoo chatrooms to build a facial recognition database.