“ Look Closer is an interactive tapestry of news footage documenting ICE operations and immigration enforcement across the United States. At a distance, the surface reads as continuous—an unbroken field of raids, arrests, and detention. It feels total.
Move closer, and that breaks down.
Each region—country, state, county—opens onto a looping clip drawn from more than 1,600 sources: courthouse arrests, suburban driveways, detention centers, protests. Hover to hear what’s happening. Click to expand and play with sound. Inside the same system, there are moments of refusal, of care, of people protecting each other, of ordinary life continuing anyway.
Geography is rendered through Voronoi cells, dissolving political boundaries into a single continuous surface you can pan and move through. The map stops being about jurisdiction and starts becoming about presence.
The piece argues through accumulation. No single clip is the point. Together, they reveal a distributed apparatus operating across thousands of unremarkable places—a machine without a clear center, visible only in the aggregate. But they also show something else: that it is never complete.
The tapestry never stops moving. Neither does the system. Neither do the people living within it.
My project is a website, it doesnt really work as static image heres a link: https://the-machine-is-everywhere.pages.dev/”
