[May 14-19] CTW Exhibition: I Touch You and You Touch Me by Jeff Thompson

Harvestworks is pleased to present “I Touch You And You Touch Me,” a solo exhibition of work by Jeff Thompson. 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.

By appointment, Sat. & Sun. May 20-21st 

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.

Jeff Thompson is an artist, programmer, hacker, and educator based in the NYC area. He is currently Assistant Professor and Program Director of Visual Art & Technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Thompson has exhibited and performed his work internationally at venues including the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheldon Museum of Art, the Taubman Museum of Art, SITE Santa Fe, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Jersey City Museum, and the Weisman Art Museum. Recent commissions and residencies include Bell Labs, Abandon Normal Devices, Brighton Digital Festival, Impakt, Rhizome, Turbulence, and Harvestworks.