Jonah Brucker-Cohen

Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Ph.D., is an artist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Lehman College / CUNY in the Bronx. He received his Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin. His work focuses on “Deconstructing Networks” with works that challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction. His artwork has been exhibited at venues such as SFMOMA, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Art, MOMA, ICA London, Whitney Museum of American Art, Palais du Tokyo, Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, and more. His artworks, “Bumplist” and “America’s Got No Talent” are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has written for WIRED, Make, Gizmodo, Neural and more. His Scrapyard Challenge workshops have been held in over 15 countries in Europe, South America, North America, Asia, and Australia since 2003.

Presenting

Socializing Public Spaces With Shared Input From Mobile Devices

This talk will discuss recent projects I am working on that focus on allowing large-scale collaborative input from people in shared spaces using data from the mobile devices such as cellphones and tablets. Beginning with an earlier project of mine called “SimpleTEXT” that encouraged mass contributions from people sending text messages from mobiles phones to drive a public performance, I will expand on this project by introducing a new product I have launched called “Lively” that takes advantage of the ubiquity of mobile devices using browser-based output and WebGL visualizations of incoming text messages by large audiences. The project has been performed at a wide range of public spaces such as large conferences, public movie theaters and performance spaces, and co-working spaces.