Shane Cooper is an installation artist, specializing in Internet and interactive art.
He works in the special effects field, and has contributed work to such films as the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong. He has worked with musicians, such as Devo in Santa Monica, California in 1996 and Graham Nash in Los Angeles, in 1995.
There are many common themes emphasized in Cooper’s works. Most of them feature interactivity with the viewer and computer learning. In many of his works, the actions of the viewer are somehow recorded and later used in the art itself.
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In Cooper’s art installation “Remote Control”, a television displays an anchorman that looks and sounds real, yet is completely computer-generated. The newscast being shown is generated in real-time, using feeds from various Internet news sources. A remote control with two buttons, labeled “Truth 1” and “Truth 2”, allows the viewer to choose between two channels: one where the news being reported is true, and one where the facts have been reversed.
In “Reflection” (also known as “Parasight”), the viewer stands in front of a wall that has an image of another person, standing in a similar way as them, projected onto it. When the viewer moves in any way, the image projected on the screen changes to match the new way that the viewer is standing. The result is that the viewer sees their “reflection” on the screen, except that the reflection is in fact the image of a previous visitor. In addition, every viewer is also filmed and added to the database of images that can be projected. In this way, every new viewer adds to the exhibit, and increases the accuracy of the next viewer's reflection.
Shane has also created several Internet art works which appear at his personal website.[1]
"Live"[2] (1998) is a simulated chatroom, which is actually full of bots. The bots learn new conversations from the humans that come into the room, which is another example of Cooper's recurring theme of the viewer leaving an impression on the artwork itself. It also features a “live webcam” that is actually a series of images that repeat over and over, with only the timestamp changing.
"Caption"[3] (1998) is a black web page showing only an image and a string of text. Usually, the pair appears to have a meaning of some sort, making it seem like the text was written specifically to go with the image. However, the image and text are chosen completely at random. (This can be verified by simply reloading the page until the same image appears twice, in which case it will most likely be matched with a different text string.) The project serves to illustrate how the human mind will find a link between any two randomly matched items.