Nathan Kosta

Bio: Nathan Kosta is a visual artist, educator, and photographic technology researcher. His work explores issues relating to surveillance capitalism, photographic image recognition, machine learning, and land use. He currently teaches photography at San Francisco State University.

Statement: Lighted Vanity Mirrors is comprised entirely of collected review videos uploaded to Amazon.com by customers, demonstrating the products they have purchased within their homes. It is part of a series investigating how acts of self-surveillance, combined with automated image recognition, have enabled the rapid expansion of surveillance capitalism. In this video, each mirror acts as both a light source and a reflector, the purchased product itself reveals the private space of the home through the public space of Amazon product pages. The mirrors extend the act of self-surveillance, enabling customers to submit visual data of their private spaces to Amazon, where the videos are automatically analyzed for any additional data that can be used to encourage further purchasing, such as other products in the background.

Nathan Kosta

Artworks