2026 Whitney Biennial

Excerpt from Cooper Jacoby interviewed by Jordan Carter
Whitney Biennale Catalogue, March 2026

CJ: That’s what really drew me to work with AI. I’m hesitant to say sentience, but it’s a sort of complexity that might as well be agency when you’re able to script an object’s field of possibilities in ways that are completely unpredictable to you. I made these AI-enabled benches[How do I survive? ] at the Hammer Museum, and I would get notifications that they insulted a visitor or said something surprising. And you’re like, “Wow, it’s really out there. I didn’t do that, but I guess it’s really engaging people.”

JC: I find parallels there with Conceptual art—the idea of mining archives or indexes or linguistic inventories. It does seem like you’re mining digital language sets in a comparable way.

CJ: Absolutely. A lot of photo-text Conceptual art is essentially prompt engineering: write the idea into the prompt and produce all the versions of this concept. I’ve increasingly been interested in the provenance of the archive and data I’m using. With the intercom sculptures that I was making [Estate], I wanted to make this ghost in the machine, but in a kind of undeadway—a dead person’s social media profile inhabits the sculptures. What became the most fascinating to me, though, was how their voice changed from early social media to when social media becomes overtly performative and professionalized as everyone realizes they’re online. In 2008, it’s, “I’m in Chicago, eating a cookie,” and then by 2024, it’s, “please subscribe to my cookbook channel.”

JC: I want to think about the ideas of portraiture and biography, as you and your friends show up in your work by way of proxies. You described the series of works

in which you mobilize your friends’ voices to recreate the way these dead creatives speak as portraits, as well as the work in which you’ve used your own baby teeth.

CJ: I thought, if I’m instrumentalizing the digital remains of anonymous people in these intercom works, I should instrumentalize myself in a way, which led to me using my baby teeth in the clockworks [Mutual Life]. It also came out of an exhaustion with biography, of being asked, “Where are you in the work?” My frustration with that led me to think, “Okay, I’ll give you something that’s the most valued or cherished material part of myself.” Baby teeth were also my first real encounter with the type of money exchange where something comes out of your body and you’re paid for it somehow, and that’s supposed to be even.

JC: A base, corporeal economy. These works with the clocks— the sort of pairing a cellular age with one’s time lived on earth— reminded me of Felix Gonzales-Torres’s Perfect Lovers[1987–90] the paired clocks that over time fall out of sync.

CJ: I started the clock works after I saw an offer to take this “biological clock test” to get a better rate on my health insurance. I got very interested in the history of life insurance, which was integral to the development of the stock market because industrial life insurance policies took the premiums paid by working-class people who might not ordinarily have invested and plowed those into capital markets. In both the Estate and Mutual Life works, I’m curious how life is increasingly assetized in different forms, whether it’s a data training set or actuarial; whether its your social media residue or better calibrating the window in which you’re likely to die.