Cooper Jacoby

L'Almanach 26 : Cooper Jacoby

Cooper Jacoby (1989, Princeton, USA)

Cooper Jacoby was born in 1989 in Princeton, United States. He lives and works in Paris. 

Since 2019, Jacoby’s practice has engaged artificial intelligence not as an object of technological demonstration, but as an unruly synthesizer. He dissects the infrastructures and interfaces that structure our contemporary world, revealing the often-invisible mechanisms through which technological imaginaries shape our environments. To this critical reading of technology, he adds an organic and bodily dimension: fragments of the human body, teeth, casts of cow ears in Twisted Pairs (2025), and materials taken from living organisms. These sculptures interlock with one another, connected by a cord of barbed wire that imitates wall-mounted telephones, and intermittently emit a whistle directed toward the other sculptures lost within a disrupted network.

This series draws on a little-known historical fact: during the colonization of the last frontiers of the United States in the nineteenth century, farmers, deprived of any telephone network, transformed miles of barbed wire—originally intended to fence pastures—into transmission lines, permanently reshaping life on the frontier. 
Jacoby sees in this a troubling prefiguration of our present: a logic of infrastructural appropriation that today finds its equivalent in the grafting of data centers onto power plants.

In the sculptural work Model Collapse, two telephone answering machines play an AI-generated version of the “telephone game” with one another. In an absurd, hallucinatory, and repetitive exchange, the language of corporate culture and the language of dreams respond to each other.
This language model is based on two corpora: the thousands of internal emails from Enron, at the center of one of the largest financial scandals of the early 2000s, and the archives of one of the largest public collections of dream narratives.
In the interaction between the answering machines, managerial jargon, discourses of performance and profitability, free associations, slips of the tongue, and distorted memories continually feed one another.

Throughout his recent body of work, Cooper Jacoby develops machines whose syntax gradually drifts into delirium, revealing how economic systems and AI algorithms rely on mechanisms of prediction, repetition, and self-deception. From this interaction emerges another psychotic language, disconnected from reality and sustained solely by its own projections.