Jason Zeh
Academic Lab Manager and Service Assistant Professor of Digital Art
School of Art and Design
Jason Zeh (born in 1980, Ohio, USA) (he/they) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work blends influences from long-time involvement in the underground, experimental music, noise, and sound art scenes with performance and realtime, generative, media. Zeh’s work grapples with the scraps at the edge of meaning: the noise and errors that are in the margins of any message. Previous performance works dealt with intimacy, confession, and identity. These works employ self-designed software to transform junk electronics into technological systems that offer the promise of communication. However, the unpredictable behavior of these hacked machines makes communication impossible. This body of work combines live speech and live-collaged, voice, recordings with audio and video into poetic confessions and cyborg utterances. For these works, Zeh collected thousands of secrets from internet forums and used that data set to train a machine learning algorithm. Using this data, the computer generated its own secrets. In the resulting text, the speaker seems to be grappling with issues about identity and selfhood. In a live setting, the performer delivers these computer-generated secrets in a way that gives the illusion of vulnerability while actually erecting walls that prevent openness.
Zeh’s current body of work involves the creation of realtime, performable, video objects built from lidar scans resulting in visceral, synthetic, minerals, and ritual actions. The work addresses questions about intimacy, the body, and the environmentally catastrophic processes of resource extraction that are necessary for the continuation of a technologically advanced civilization.
Zeh holds an M.A. in English Literary and Textual Studies from Bowling Green State University, an M.F.A. in Expanded Media from The University of Kansas Visual Art Department and has toured extensively performing solo and collaborative works throughout the United States and abroad. Zeh has been an artist in residence at Signal Culture in Loveland Colorado, at the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City Missouri, and at Extrapool in Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Zeh’s current body of work involves the creation of realtime, performable, video objects built from lidar scans resulting in visceral, synthetic, minerals, and ritual actions. The work addresses questions about intimacy, the body, and the environmentally catastrophic processes of resource extraction that are necessary for the continuation of a technologically advanced civilization.
Zeh holds an M.A. in English Literary and Textual Studies from Bowling Green State University, an M.F.A. in Expanded Media from The University of Kansas Visual Art Department and has toured extensively performing solo and collaborative works throughout the United States and abroad. Zeh has been an artist in residence at Signal Culture in Loveland Colorado, at the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City Missouri, and at Extrapool in Nijmegen, Netherlands.