Replacement Character | Luke Shannon

“Replacement Character”, a show of new work by Luke Shannon created using his custom-built plotter-scanner, runs until November 8 at Heft Gallery, New York. It is made up of 40 unique life-size prints, ten video works, and a limited number of personal commissions from the artist. The series will also be exhibited at Paris Photo 2025 from November 13 to 16. The exhibition’s title refers to the � symbol — a placeholder used when a computer fails to recognize or render a character.

The following two essays by the curator Sofia Garcia and the artist Maya Man, which are drawn from a book of essays published to accompany the show, discuss the experience of working with the artist and his interactive, kinetic photographic apparatus: the plotter-scanner. In the book’s introduction this is described as being “made up of 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 essays, it states, “serve not as documentation of ‘Replacement Character’, but as new production and distribution”.  

‍This Has Touched by Sofia Garcia‍

The first time I stood before Luke Shannon’s plotter-scanner, I laughed out of sheer giddiness. A scanner, one of the dullest tools of the office, had been inflated to monumental scale. Standing at nearly four by six feet, the sight was absurd but also magnetic, yet what struck me most was how it didn’t ask for admiration from afar. Instead it pulled me closer, as if the only way to understand it was to press myself against its surface. That demand for intimacy is the scanner’s defining difference from the camera.

A camera flatters. It gives you an array of choices: an angle, a pose, the distance that allows you to shape how you appear. The scanner allows none of that.

Your nose flattens, fabric wrinkles, skin creases against the glass, and everything is recorded without reprieve. Roland Barthes wrote that the photograph testifies to the “that-has-been”. The scan insists on something even less forgiving: this-has-touched.

And then there is the button. The simple push that transforms an impression into a file, instantly light enough to circulate anywhere. Shannon has said that the button itself, not the scanner, is the true invention of our time. He’s right. Distribution is the real power here. The button is casual, even thoughtless, but once pressed it cannot be undone. What was once private is already public, already sliding into contexts beyond your control. I know the feeling: the late-night impulse to share something small or sincere, only to watch it reframed by others. What at once felt personal becomes communal, or worse, distorted. The button makes us complicit in our own circulation.

Shannon built his scanner from scratch. It advances beneath its subject line by line, the beam crawling slowly to assemble an image over several minutes. The process feels neutral, but it is deeply generative. Each scan follows the same rules, yet no two outcomes are the same. Accident, movement, hesitation, each shifts the result in ways the system cannot anticipate. It is the paradox of generative art in physical form: rule and variation, determinism and surprise.

The first version I encountered stood upright, scanning in a grid. I treated it like a photo booth: a hand pressed in one square, a grin in another. The stitched result was cartoonish, a collage of mismatched parts. At first I laughed, but the laughter carried a sting. The image revealed something I had not expected, that when gestures are pulled apart and magnified, they slide into theater. A simple set of instructions: stand here, hold this, press against the glass, yielded an image that felt performative.

This is the generative condition — even when we follow the system, the output exceeds our intention. Guy Debord’s line in The Society of the Spectacle echoes here: in a culture saturated with images, the ordinary cannot help but become theater.

Months later, when I visited again, the scanner had evolved into its final form. It now lay flat on the floor, more like a platform than a mirror. Climbing onto it was unnerving. I remember my palms sweating, wondering whether the glass would hold me. Once down, there was no retreat. The machine moved slowly beneath me, demanding stillness. My shirt had ridden up, exposing skin I had not meant to show, a trace of armpit hair I had not even thought about that morning. Vulnerability arrived uninvited, recorded with the same fidelity as everything else.

That moment clarified what separates Shannon’s scanner from conventional photography. A camera offers control: angles, edits, the ability to shape the narrative. The scanner erases those options. It does not capture how the body looks. It captures how the body presses. Even accidents become evidence. What feels mechanical turns theatrical.

This is where Shannon’s work begins to brush against surveillance. Michel Foucault’s panopticon comes to mind in the sense that one is always visible, and that visibility shapes behavior. In Shannon’s scans, every detail, whether intended or not, is captured with equal authority. Yet to call this only surveillance feels incomplete. Shannon himself describes the machine as both “watcher” and “witness.” The distinction matters. Surveillance captures in order to control. Witnessing records in order to affirm. “Replacement Character” sits between these poles, holding preservation and exposure together at once.

That double bind extends to the archive. Once scanning is complete, what was living becomes reproducible, portable data already severed from its moment. Jacques Derrida called this “archive fever”, the paradox that to preserve is also to excise, to detach. Shannon makes this explicit by scanning his own notebooks and sketches, collapsing biography into artifact and practice into record. But clarity is not the same as legibility.

The title “Replacement Character” points to the small glyph that appears when data cannot be read. Even in their precision, the scans admit failure. Seams remain visible, fragments stitched imperfectly, meaning never entirely secure.

Time itself fractures in the process. Each image takes minutes to compile, thousands of instants stacked into a single surface. What looks immediate is anything but. Henri Bergson’s distinction between clock time and lived time plays out here. The machine produces one kind of time: divisible, mechanical. The subject experiences another: the long hum of the scanner, the uncertainty of whether to shift or hold. For me, those minutes stretched into something meditative, though tinged with anxiety. Every hesitation felt etched into the record. It was impossible not to think about how similar this is to life online, where the present is captured and circulated before it is even lived.

Comparing the prototype to the final version made the stakes clearer. The grid of fragments had felt playful because I believed I was directing it. The flatbed demanded surrender. The scanner made plain a shift I recognize in digital life more broadly: what once felt like casual self-expression has hardened into inescapable exhibition.

This, I think, is where Shannon’s work is most compelling. What matters is how directly the scanner stages our cultural condition. A banal office tool becomes an engine of intimacy. Its neutrality produces vulnerability. Its distortions remind us that wholeness is always a construction. And in the process, it claims its place within generative art. The scanner is both code and machine, producing infinite variations out of a fixed set of rules. It is not simply documenting the world but generating new images from it, revealing how systems shape and distort what passes through them.

“Replacement Character” reframes portraiture for a networked age. These are not likenesses in any traditional sense. Nor are they performances we can fully control. They are propositions: that presence is always provisional, and that every act of being seen is also, inevitably, an act of being misread.

Lucky Luke by Maya Man‍

Luke likes looking. But Luke doesn’t like to be looked at. Curious then, that he chose to construct a machine that looks at him quite closely. Closer than a person ever could, capturing him with machine vision, head-to-toe entirely.

Experiencing the plotter-scanner is intimate. Its elevator eyes look you up and down as you’re splayed out, horizontal on the glass for a lengthy five minutes. It’s uncomfortable, like having a conversation with someone who doesn’t know the socially appropriate time to break eye contact. It forces you into that squirming mental state, when the staring has gone on for far too long.

Fixating on the feeling of being looked at is undeniably a symptom of the “contemporary condition.” Increasingly, the duty of the artist is to watch themselves from every possible angle. It is important to exercise discipline over how we appear through our work, conversations, and of course, social media. Maybe X or TikTok, but most likely Instagram.‍

@_lukeshannon currently features zero posts on his Instagram profile. His page reads like a series of “���” symbols, forcing visitors to use their imagination in lieu of a curated grid of images. “No posts yet” announces the text over the blank, white, lower half of his account page. Nothing under his tagged posts either, by the way. His most notable hint toward a more specific character concept is his profile picture. The small circular photo reveals Luke gazing down at the T-shirt he’s wearing. He holds out the bottom part of the fabric so the text on it is visible for the photographer. “I’m real,” it reads, in default sans-serif font. With his head tilted down, away from the camera, you can barely catch the contours of his face.

I gave him this T-shirt for his birthday last year. I had it custom printed at the Uniqlo on Broadway in SoHo. “I’m real,” I typed into the iPad at the UTme! T-shirt printing counter. I wanted to make something, as advertised, “one-of-a-kind” that I could “take home straight away.” I took that photo of him, wearing it for the first time, in my apartment on October 17. He wore it out the door that night when we went to see Bladee live on his COLD VISIONS tour at the Brooklyn Mirage.‍

COLD VISIONS is one of Luke’s less loved Bladee albums, but inevitably his favorite song on it is “Lucky Luke.” It’s more meditative and less rage-driven than the rest of the record. In the last line of the song, Bladee declares, “I’ll draw faster than my shadow.” This is a reference to the Western cartoon series Lucky Luke, whose eponymous protagonist “shoots faster than his own shadow.”

In a clip I found on YouTube, Lucky Luke draws his gun, spins around, and fires a shot at his shadow behind him. His shadow then peels off the wall and promptly disappears in defeat.

In Jungian psychology, the “shadow” refers to the hidden, repressed parts of oneself. If the shadow lives below, posts on a platform like Instagram live at the tip of the self-iceberg. Imagine each one scraped off the surface of one’s self-performance. Posts are the pieces of a person that rise to the top — moments and markers worthy of being plucked from the material experience of living and rendered into pixels pushed onto others’ feeds.

Look at me! a post screams. Then I do, casting my eyes downward, peering into the phone-shaped portal in my hand. It’s pictures, pictures, pictures, forever in the bright LED light. I hide from my shadow by looking at my screen.

In On Photography, Susan Sontag proclaims that act of taking a photo violent:

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves … Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder — a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”

Does this make a selfie a form of self-destruction? I know firsthand how masochistic it feels to not only take an image of yourself, but then voluntarily spawn instances of it online for others to surveil. If that’s true: a “self-portrait scan” is Lucky Luke, spinning 180 and shooting his shadow with a ghost gun he printed himself.

*BANG!*

Luke peels himself off of the half-inch-thick glass.

Luke doesn’t like being looked at. But I love looking at Luke. Like a scanner pressed against the glass, I try to see him. Lucky me.