Read the interview here:
Jonah Brucker-Cohen is an award-winning artist, writer, and researcher whose work critically examines networked systems, interface culture, and emerging technologies. He is an Associate Professor of Digital Media and Networked Culture at Lehman College (CUNY) and a former visiting artist at Cornell Tech. His interactive artworks—often blending humor with subversion explore themes of control, surveillance, and system disruption.
Brucker-Cohen’s projects have been exhibited internationally at leading institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art (where two of his works are in the permanent collection), ZKM, Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, MoMA, and SFMOMA. He has served as chair of the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery (2016) and Labs Chair (2024), and is co-founder of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA Group). His writing has appeared in WIRED, Make, Rhizome, and Gizmodo, among others.
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In today’s episode:
Jonah Brucker-Cohen discusses his experiments with “machine forgetting,” including a clock that only displays the time you last looked at it, as a critique of permanence and surveillance in digital culture
He describes interactive works that deliberately create friction, such as a hacked mouse that resists user control, in order to expose dynamics of power, autonomy, and coercion in AI systems
The artist explores Expression of Memory, a calendar that uses facial recognition and sentiment analysis to record not just events but emotional states, reframing how we archive time and feeling
Reflections on AI art that misinterprets, refuses, or fails, and on practices that make visible the biases, infrastructures, and hidden labor behind artificial intelligence
Until next time,
Kate
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Links
ClockWise
A flip-clock device that deliberately "forgets" — it only tells you the last time you looked at it, calling our constant data surveillance into question.
Link
Expression of Memory
An emotionally aware calendar that not only tracks dates, but recalls how you felt at those moments via facial recognition and sentiment analysis.
AGRO-MOUSE
A hacked computer mouse that becomes increasingly jittery and resistant the longer you use it—embedding friction into what’s usually a seamless interface.
SAVR A.I. (Saver)
A Chrome plugin satire that prevents you from saving your Google Doc unless it's free of grammatical or spelling mistakes—interrogating productivity culture and automation.
Weather The Times
A Chrome extension that filters New York Times articles based on your local weather—surfacing lighter content on sunny days and weightier news when it’s stormy.
Link
Subtask
Reveals the hidden crowd labor behind websites, overlaying data on pay, ethics, and exploitation to critique how the internet is built on underpaid work and elite control.
Trophy Camera by Dries Depoorter
A camera that only takes photos if its AI thinks they could win a photography prize.
Link
The Prosthetic Photographer by Peter Buczkowski
A system trained on “beauty” that only allows you to capture an image if it deems it beautiful enough.
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The Ghostwriter by Arvind Sanjeev
A vintage typewriter retrofitted with AI (GPT) that co-writes with you — the keys move automatically like a ghost finishing your sentences.
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Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford
A research-based book and project examining the hidden infrastructures, labor, and politics of AI.
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