Through his sculptural series A State, Cooper Jacoby transforms door intercoms, surveillance cameras, artificial intelligence, and digital archives into unsettling reflections on memory, absence, and what it means to persist after death.
At the Whitney Biennial 2026, Cooper Jacoby’s A State blurs the boundaries between technology, memory, surveillance, and human presence.
Born in Princeton and working between Miami and Paris, Jacoby transforms an ordinary piece of technology—the door intercom—into a deeply conceptual sculptural object.
The devices still appear connected to their familiar functions of communication, identification, and access.
But within A State, they become something much more complicated.
The Viewer Becomes Part of the Work
Each sculpture contains a camera that monitors its surroundings.
As viewers approach the work, they are no longer simply looking at an object.
The object is also looking back.
This reversal transforms the relationship between artwork and audience, introducing questions about surveillance, observation, and the increasingly blurred boundaries between physical and digital environments.
The viewer’s presence becomes part of the system.
Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Archive
Embedded within the sculptures are reactive AI models trained on the social media posts of deceased creative figures.
These digital archives become material for generating new responses.
Through artificial intelligence, fragments of language left behind online are transformed into voices that appear to speak again in the present.
The effect exists somewhere between archive and simulation.
These are not simply recordings of the past.
They are technologically generated echoes constructed from the digital traces people left behind.
When Memory Becomes Data
Social media has created enormous personal archives.
Posts, photographs, captions, comments, opinions, and conversations can remain accessible long after the person who created them has died.
Jacoby pushes that reality further.
What happens when those traces are no longer simply preserved, but used to construct something capable of responding?
A State turns memory into data and then transforms that data into a new kind of simulated presence.
The distinction between remembering someone and technologically recreating aspects of them begins to become uncertain.
Measuring Absence
Each sculpture also contains an LED display counting the exact amount of time that has passed since the individual’s death.
The gesture creates a striking contradiction.
The counter continuously measures absence while the AI simultaneously produces the impression of presence.
One part of the sculpture reminds viewers that the person is gone.
Another allows fragments of that person’s digital identity to continue generating something new.
Time moves forward while the archive continues speaking.
Surveillance, Presence, and Technology
The use of door intercoms adds another layer to the work.
Intercoms traditionally exist at thresholds.
They allow someone to see, hear, identify, and potentially grant access to another person before that individual enters a space.
Jacoby transforms this familiar technology into a threshold between presence and absence, living memory and digital simulation.
The embedded camera also places the viewer inside this exchange.
You encounter a technological reconstruction of someone who is absent while simultaneously becoming data within the sculpture’s immediate environment.
Digital Afterlives
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly capable of interpreting enormous collections of personal data, A Stateraises questions that extend far beyond the museum.
How much of a person exists within the information they leave behind?
Can an archive become something active?
Is a simulated voice a continuation of memory, or something entirely new?
And when technology can generate new language from the traces of someone who has died, where does remembrance end and reconstruction begin?
Jacoby does not offer a simple answer.
Instead, the sculptures hold these contradictions together.
Within the Whitney Biennial 2026, Cooper Jacoby’s A State becomes a meditation on artificial intelligence, surveillance, death, memory, and the emerging possibility of digital afterlives—asking what it means to truly live on when memory itself can become data.
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