Whitney Biennial Artists Explore Boundaries Between Human and Machine

As I stood in the Whitney Museum’s sixth-floor gallery for the opening of this year’s Biennial, I found the eye of a surveillance camera, iridescent and round as a soap bubble, staring back at me. It was implanted in a rectangular body the color of aging plastic, decades-old desktop computers, and exposed bone. There was also a small embedded LED screen marking hours, months, days, and years, but since what was not clear. I was about to walk away, confused, when the voice of an elderly woman echoed out, full of warmth and experience. “It was a combination of too little sleep, too many chores, and a teeny tiny toddler,” she said cheerily. “Not to mention the supermoon!” I laughed, first in surprise, a wave of affection bubbling up that was quickly quashed by wariness.

The work, Estate (July 10, 2022), by Cooper Jacoby, surfaces an emergent genre of horror seeping through the mass consciousness: that of measurement and quantification. Jacoby made the work by scraping text from deceased creatives’ social media and feeding it into a generative AI model. The data, collected without consent, was remixed by the generative AI and voiced by the artist’s friends. The LED monitor records how much time has passed since the subject of the work died. In this case, three years, six months, 206 days, and 10 hours. The work was, by turns, macabre, uncomfortable, and maybe even profane. It is also a stunning commentary on what big tech companies have been doing for years: scraping our data and using it to animate generative AI models to make “art,” to “write,” to cancel grants to the humanities, to guide a missile to detonate above a school, etc.

Jacoby is far from the only artist in the Biennial—or the general public—to be contending with the changing face of technology. Social scientists have long noted that digital technologies are associated with qualities like transparency, objectivity, rationality, and futurity. Think of Y2K aesthetics: desktops were built so one could see the machinery inside, pop stars danced in white voids, and airbrushed halos of light in advertisements. Each, in their way, promised a new, clean future on spaceship Earth. Yet several dozen tech disruptions later, it has become difficult, if not outright laughable, to convince the public that these technologies are ushering in a bright future. As the world wakes up to our techno-capitalist age of constant surveillance, data extraction, and omnipresent biometric technologies, artists have begun to strip technology of its sterile shell to reveal the beasts hidden in the machine.

In the Whitney’s fifth-floor gallery, three bodies hover a foot off the ground, propped up by a metal pole speared into their backs. Feet dangle, heads loll, eyes remain closed, save for the pale impression of an eyelid that appears more like a feature of a death mask. One figure is naked, missing a nose, a vague form with strange textures scattered across her skin. The other two bodies don witches’ cloaks—the thin, plastic kind available at a Spirit Halloween. For the work, titled For Satan in America and Other Invisible Evils: Experiments in Public Sculpture (Witches 1–3), Isabelle Frances McGuire modeled the figures using high-fidelity 3D medical scans of the body’s interior. Because the scan captures the insides, the exterior is merely a leftover form. Like Jacoby, McGuire seems to be playing with the question of the distorted double. Meant to illustrate the Salem witch trials, it is also a scene of accusation. Someone here is human; someone here is not. But here again appears the incredible power of digital measurement—a kind of techno-Satanic magic—to blur the boundaries between the real and the imposter.

The CCTV camera returns in Gabriela Ruiz’s 2026 sculpture Homo Machina (Human Machine a.k.a. Gay Machine). The piece looks like a carnival game: a fiberglass machine cast in slime green, with budding growths, screens, a screaming face petrified in chrome, and a chimera fetus in its womb, tail in mouth. The camera feed is channeled into the monitors studded symmetrically across the work: step closer to see yourself in the fun-house mirror of surveillance. In other words, the image of the self is captured and consumed in an endless cycle that generates something less than human.

It seems that artists, as much as their audiences, have become preoccupied with the question of what it means to be human. As the digital philosopher Yuk Hui noted in a recent essay, we are coming off a long period within academia—and, I would argue, the arts as well—that was less interested in fixed boundaries between the human and nonhuman and more engaged with questions of entanglement. (Remember how much we all loved mushrooms?) Yet the very sudden appearance of generative AI has changed the discursive field. Our entanglements with technologies are not nearly so romantic as the Gaia hypothesis—that theory that this Earth is one big organism and we are just different parts of the same body. On the contrary, as these artists propose, the hybrid of the human with technology is freakish and horrific.

It was difficult not to think of these works in relation to Clavicular, a “looksmaxxer” who went viral this year for his extreme outlook on beauty, and Bryan Johnson, who is on a years-long quest for immortality. (Last year, Johnson went viral for pumping his teenage son’s blood through his veins, an event that recalled a years-old internet urban legend about tech founders harvesting the blood of the young.) Both figures represent what technological entanglement really looks like: a fierce belief that biometrics, biohacking, and a commitment to a scientific view of the body and its perfection will be rewarded. Yet the mentality required to submit to this quantified view of the self is so brutally contradictory that it quickly becomes nihilistic. Looksmaxxing is based on the idea of hacking the gene pool—by convincing women that the looksmaxxer is the most desirable mate—yet Clavicular has said he is now infertile from the treatments he has subjected himself to. Meanwhile, Johnson’s quest for more life has become so vampiric that, if his experiment were the plot of a novel, we would criticize the author for being heavy-handed. Clavicular and Johnson are both driven by the same techno-body horror that animates the artists above. And yet their coping mechanisms are very different: they run into technology with open arms, hoping to be spared. But spared from what?

I think I now understand why measurement appears as such a horror to the contemporary psyche. Recently, at a dinner party, I met a young tech worker who tried to convince me to use AI in my writing. I tried to explain to him why I don’t: I really like writing. I don’t want to not do it. He tried to appeal to my sense of efficiency: Couldn’t I streamline my work and publish more? I told him that he was missing the point. My work is meaningful to me not just as a result, but as a process, as a way of spending my time on Earth. He wondered how I would survive the coming era of mass unemployment if I refused to make concessions. I said I’d figure it out. He asked if instead AI might be a collaborator who could help me hone my ideas. I told him that I have friends who serve that purpose, whose opinions I value. But what if the AI was as smart as your friends, he pressed on. What if he could turn the host of the dinner party, a dear friend of mine, into a model that thought and talked just like her? The debate devolved from there

“But I have her!”

“Well what if she died?”

“Then I would be devastated!”

“What makes her so special? How could you be sure it wasn’t her, if I built that model?”

“She wouldn’t be in front of me.”

“So it’s the body then? What if we made a body? Are you even sure she exists?”

I felt, in that moment, a profound sense of defamiliarization. The red carpet beneath my feet stretched out, and well-meaning faces looked down on me. Was he serious? I wondered. It is telling, of course, that what started as a conversation about work efficiency devolved almost instantly into the heart of the matter: mortality, immortality, and replaceability. If we can be measured so exactly, so precisely, what is to stop us from being modeled or recreated? Perhaps not an exact replica, but close enough? It’s no wonder that figures like Clavicular or Johnson cling so closely to their vessel, hoping to avoid obsolescence by embracing quantification. Yet even this dream of replacement—my friend as chatbot, as an unliving doll—is a sterile fantasy, a satisfyingly futuristic sci-fi scenario. No, the future will not be clean, close to perfect, or controlled, not even in an uncanny way. It will be freakish, bloody, and disgusting, just as the artists in this year’s Biennial suggest.