make :**: out
Luke Shannon and Maya Man
09.19 - 11.08.2026
Palo Alto
Make Out is a two-person exhibition that presents the practices of Luke Shannon and Maya Man. Drawing on the artists’ early 2000s online upbringing, the show focuses on how the presentation of self today is filtered through screens and social media platforms. The show emphasizes both artists’ use of software as a medium and how the language of the internet can be used to investigate its own structures.
To “make out” is both to kiss for a long time and to perceive at the edge of resolution. This exhibition doubles down on the term’s dual meaning, working through the blurry ways that romance and parasociality appear when warped by machines.
WORKS
Battle Royale Pas de Deux
Maya Man and Luke Shannon
2026
Two-channel digital video, color, sound, 16 minutes 9 seconds
Staged within a single Fortnite Battle Royale Duos match, Battle Royale Pas de Deux presents two simultaneous points of view: Maya Man playing as Olivia Rodrigo and Luke Shannon playing as John Wick.
Dropped onto the island by a floating bus, the two players meet at the beginning of the game and embark on an effort to stay in sync. As a treacherous storm closes in, Olivia Rodrigo and John Wick work to survive, dance, and revive each other in the game’s arena.
In French, “pas de deux” translates to “step of two,” a phrase traditionally used in ballet to describe a duet between two dancers. Battle Royale Pas de Deux transforms Fortnite’s competitive online environment into a portrayal of a relationship between the artists’ avatars that spans moments of support, celebration, and struggle.
Seven Websites
Maya Man
Custom generative software (color, sound)
Seven Websites presents seven of Maya Man’s generative, browser-based works, made between 2022 and 2026, together for the first time. Man makes websites as art objects. She came to art through her love of software and her curiosity about how we understand ourselves in relation to the internet.
Read it and Weep 2022
readitandweep.liveshift reality instantly ~ {very powerful} 2022
shiftrealityinstantly.spaceeverything I do is wrong, everything I do is real 2023
everythingidoiswrongeverythingidoisreal.fyiDress Code 2023
dresscode.rodeoTrust Exercise 2023
trustexercise.watch(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes 2025
redshoes.danceCut to the Feeling [Remix] (Stripped) 2026
cuttothefeeling.baby
Replacement Character
Luke Shannon
2025
Custom-built plotter, modified document scanner, tempered glass, software.
Replacement Character examines surveillance and witness 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.
The title refers to the symbol “�” used by computers when a character cannot be recognized or rendered. The plotter-scanner explores the performance of a chameleon self in the digital age, and what it means to be seen: not only by other people, but by our environment, by our technologies, and by the ubiquitous systems we increasingly engage with and inhabit, leaving questions of how increasingly intelligent machines might “read” or interpret us through images.
For You
Luke Shannon
2026
CNC aluminum, servos, pinhole camera, capacitive tip, software.
For You is an interactive installation that treats the visitor's phone and recommendation algorithm as the medium of the work. Three identical devices each steer a phone toward a distinct category:
Health (For You), 2026
AI (For You), 2026
Dating (For You), 2026
For You constructs a closed loop between the phone, a camera watching it, and the sculpture that scrolls it. The installation positions the short-form video feed as a form of neural media, turning the visitor’s algorithmic profile into simultaneously personal and performative self-exposure.
Attention Is All You Need
Luke Shannon
2026
Custom stainless steel ring lights, CNC aluminum, servos, software.
Attention Is All You Need is an interactive installation that scrolls on two phones simultaneously to find a matching video they share that appears on both feeds. Attention Is All You Need is also the title of the 2017 paper which introduced the transformer architecture that modern LLMs are built upon.
This work is a method of demonstrating the distance between two recommendation algorithms, and of syncing them. Taken together, these works investigate how to read digital presence as both representational (what an image means) and operational (what an image does).
BIOGRAPHIES
Maya Man (b. 1996, Pennsylvania, USA) is an artist focused on pop culture’s soft power and contemporary identity on the internet. Her work examines dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity, and the performance of self. She has exhibited or performed at Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; V&A, London; MOCA, Los Angeles; bitforms, NYC; MoMu, Antwerp; SOOT, Tokyo; and Rhizome at the New Museum, NYC. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Document, Los Angeles Review of Books, and CURA among other publications. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center. She is online at mayaontheinter.net.
Luke Shannon (b. 2000, California, USA) is a generative artist using handwritten code and custom-built machines to study selfhood in systems. He is a finalist for the Legacy Futures Lumen Prize 2026 and upcoming resident at Stiftung Laurenz-Haus 2027. He is represented by ARTXCODE and has exhibited internationally with Rhizome, NODE, and HEFT in New York, Paris Photo 2025, Basel Social Club 2026, and Princeton University. In 2018, Luke was rated top 500 (99.9994 percentile) in the battle royale FPS game Fortnite. Luke is online at lukeshannon.xyz.