I Touch You and You Touch Me
I Touch You and You Touch Me
Catalog for a solo exhibition of work by Jeff Thompson at Harvestworks. In 2016, Thompson was invited to be artist-in-residence at Bell Labs, famous for their collaborations with artists under the umbrella of Experiments in Art & Technology. Working embedded in the context of Bell Labs’ engineers, Thompson created several large-scale works that are on view for this exhibition.Thompson’s work puts forward conceptual and poetic possibilities for giving agency to increasingly self-aware technological systems. “I Touch You and You Touch Me” is a robotic sculpture trained through a machine learning system to touch viewers the way the artist touches his phone, hallucinating new movements based on its understanding of previous interactions. Other works include several large panels mapping the exact physical location of every byte on the artist’s hard-drive, a 12-foot hand-built inkjet printer that slowly copies a blank wall over the course of the exhibition, and a text that is transformed by a real-time wind sensor, “blowing” a sentence from Italo Calvino’s “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” through a 2D representation of the English language (Harvestworks)