When Machines Forget: Rethinking AI Through Humor and Critique
A Dialogue with Jonah Brucker-Cohen
AI Futures for Art + Design · Kate Armstrong
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Show Notes
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).
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- 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
ClockWise
Expression of Memory
AGRO-MOUSE
Saver
Weather The Times
Subtask
Trophy Camera Dries Depoorter
The Prosthetic Photographer Peter Buczkowski
The Ghostwriter Arvind Sanjeev
Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford
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