Bio
Jess Tucker (they/she) is an American and Dutch artist currently based in Berlin. Their performances and installations combine video, electronic music, prints, sculptures, and digital interactivity to playfully examine how machinic mediation shapes our experiences of embodiment, selfhood, and desire. Their work has been featured in international exhibitions and performance programs, including Rewire Festival, FOAM Museum of Photography, Goethe Institut, Sónar+D, the Van Gogh Museum, Mana Contemporary, and the International Museum of Surgical Science. Jess is a 2025 Re:Humanism Prize winner and Lumen Prize Finalist. They were a 2023-24 Grant Wood Fellow at the University of Iowa and have been supported by the Mondriaan Fonds, Chicago Artists Coalition, Thoma Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, and DCASE.
Jess is currently a Lecturer of Digital Media at NYU Berlin, and a visiting researcher at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, supported by the Fulbright Germany program. Their research and teaching focus on entangled histories of surveillance and digital media, highlighting subversive practices in video and Internet art. Jess holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has taught video and digital art at the University of Iowa, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and China Academy of Art.
Artist Statement
My multimedia works transform ungraspable virtual processes of self-quantification into embodied reflections of distorted desire, both grotesque and beautiful. I explore cracks in machines as in humans, finding empathy in our entangled faults and fortes. Working with generative and body-interactive software, I make videos and performances, as well as sculptural and and framed prints of digital compositions.
My work is informed by research into the historical co-evolution of media and surveillance technologies, and their interrelated impacts on self-image, fear, and social division. I'm particularly interested in face- and body-tracking technologies and their relationship to historical systems of visual control, from the development of linear perspective as a totalizing viewpoint, to religious and imperial imagery that rendered bodies as either sacred or deviant. I often deconstruct my research and creative processes through performance lectures, interweaving presentation with live audiovisual experimentation.
In my recent works, I playfully disrupt the surveillance gaze of face-tracking and deepfake technologies by amplifying their embedded functions to absurd extremes. Using these tools against themselves, I process my own intimate photographs, videos, and motion data through custom-built AI workflows that transform bodies into churning masses of fluctuating faces. These hypermediated figures feature faces erupting through every surface, simultaneously exposed and obscured, vulnerable and threatening in their excessive visibility.
Jess Tucker (they/she) is an American and Dutch artist currently based in Berlin. Their performances and installations combine video, electronic music, prints, sculptures, and digital interactivity to playfully examine how machinic mediation shapes our experiences of embodiment, selfhood, and desire. Their work has been featured in international exhibitions and performance programs, including Rewire Festival, FOAM Museum of Photography, Goethe Institut, Sónar+D, the Van Gogh Museum, Mana Contemporary, and the International Museum of Surgical Science. Jess is a 2025 Re:Humanism Prize winner and Lumen Prize Finalist. They were a 2023-24 Grant Wood Fellow at the University of Iowa and have been supported by the Mondriaan Fonds, Chicago Artists Coalition, Thoma Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, and DCASE.
Jess is currently a Lecturer of Digital Media at NYU Berlin, and a visiting researcher at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, supported by the Fulbright Germany program. Their research and teaching focus on entangled histories of surveillance and digital media, highlighting subversive practices in video and Internet art. Jess holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has taught video and digital art at the University of Iowa, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and China Academy of Art.
Artist Statement
My multimedia works transform ungraspable virtual processes of self-quantification into embodied reflections of distorted desire, both grotesque and beautiful. I explore cracks in machines as in humans, finding empathy in our entangled faults and fortes. Working with generative and body-interactive software, I make videos and performances, as well as sculptural and and framed prints of digital compositions.
My work is informed by research into the historical co-evolution of media and surveillance technologies, and their interrelated impacts on self-image, fear, and social division. I'm particularly interested in face- and body-tracking technologies and their relationship to historical systems of visual control, from the development of linear perspective as a totalizing viewpoint, to religious and imperial imagery that rendered bodies as either sacred or deviant. I often deconstruct my research and creative processes through performance lectures, interweaving presentation with live audiovisual experimentation.
In my recent works, I playfully disrupt the surveillance gaze of face-tracking and deepfake technologies by amplifying their embedded functions to absurd extremes. Using these tools against themselves, I process my own intimate photographs, videos, and motion data through custom-built AI workflows that transform bodies into churning masses of fluctuating faces. These hypermediated figures feature faces erupting through every surface, simultaneously exposed and obscured, vulnerable and threatening in their excessive visibility.
Photo by Maria Luceiro 2025