The Ballad of a Laborer
A three-year guerrilla film made inside Google Street View— tens of millions of views, featured in the V&A's Digital Art survey.
An expanded cinema and land art project produced over three years on Google Street View. Six hundred panoramic images map the previously unseen digital landscape of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, unfolding into an open-ended story of a print laborer lost inside Street View, searching for a way out. Published anonymously, the work garnered tens of millions of views and spread virally after being discovered on Reddit, generating coverage across tabloids and mainstream news. Inspired by the stop-motion logic of Street View and the physical comedy of Jacques Tati, Buster Keaton, and Chaplin, the project applies a Dogma 95 approach to filmmaking in virtual space— treating cartography as narrative and the platform itself as medium. Featured in the V&A Museum publication Digital Art — 1960s to Now, presented as a Screenwalk at Fotomuseum Winterthur and The Photographers Gallery UK, and debuted with Microscope Gallery.
2019–2022
Incidental Container
A group exhibition built entirely on free trials, return policies, and promotional contracts — using commercial infrastructure as artistic medium.
A group exhibition and system of circulation that exploits the loopholes of free trials, promotional contracts, and subscription plans as both medium and structure. The project began in a CubeSmart self-storage unit leased under a "First Month Free" promotion, where works by nine artists — including Molly Soda, Sarah Friend, and Zach Nader — were installed on equipment purchased under fifteen-day return policies. At the halfway point, the physical exhibition was documented as a 360° virtual tour; the HTML code was then sublimated onto fabric and hung inside the unit for the remaining lease term. The coded fabric was sewn into tote bags sold on Metalabel, with profits split among the artists — transforming the container into a purchasable object and a new exhibition of people's things. A second iteration at PWA streamed documentation from a free-trial Dropbox account on monitors also on free trial, continuing the project's logic of provisional infrastructure. Featured in the Brooklyn Rail's Art and Technology section in a piece by Charlotte Kent examining agency, ecological systems, and generative AI.
2024
Baby Event Horizon
A newborn's heartbeat visualized as interactive art, vibe-coded with Claude and presented at Rhizome × Anthropic's Vibe Shift.
An interactive work built entirely through vibe coding with Claude that visualizes the cardiogram of a newborn's heartbeat as beats per minute. The piece imports real cardiac data and translates it into a responsive visual system — turning a biological signal into an inhabitable rhythm. Presented at Rhizome's Vibe Shift at ZeroSpace, Brooklyn, organized in partnership with Anthropic, NEW INC, Onassis ONX, and ZeroSpace.
2025
Full practice and exhibition history at jasonisolini.com