Replacement Character

Replacement Character by Luke Shannon examines surveillance and selfhood through an interactive, kinetic installation: the plotter-scanner. This custom machine, designed and built by the artist, combines a standard document scanner and a 4'×6' plotter to create a life-sized scanner bed that offers new perspectives on documenting, digitizing, and reflecting the self.

The plotter-scanner is a tool of simultaneous surveillance and witness. While the scanner suggests a clinical and impersonal perspective, the act of making images with the plotter-scanner requires total closeness. The resulting prints are both precise and intimate, holding the body at scale, yet fractured at the seams. Shannon likens this to being online: an expansive presence stretched across windows and gridded feeds, pieced together from fragmentary, constantly updating views. Shannon’s engagement with the machine becomes a new form of self-portraiture: durational, ephemeral, and mirroring the artist’s own presence.

The exhibition’s title refers to the “�” symbol, a temporary placeholder used when a computer fails to recognize or render a character, exposed in anticipation of its own obsolescence. Shannon explores the idea of a replaceable, upgradeable persona in the information era, where the hyper-documentation of our selves predicates its own replacement.

Stop by Heft Gallery at 300 Broome in NYC’s Lower East Side between Oct 8 - Nov 8 to view works from this show, and read more about the works here: Replacement Character exhibition page.
Sign up for event invitations, artwork highlights, and more here: Heft Memos.

Exhibition and opening event images below (images by Gustavo Campos)

Solo III OCT 2025