Cooper Jacoby’s Whitney Biennial installation turns the logic of surveillance into a physical experience
Among the many New York art events crowding the spring calendar, Cooper Jacoby has emerged as one of the Whitney Biennial’s most memorable presences. At the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the artist has installed five works in a green-carpeted environment he describes as “almost like a rat trap,” a space designed to pull viewers in before revealing how thoroughly digital life can be mined for value.
The centerpiece is Estate, a 2026 work that begins with an intercom mounted on a folding screen. It speaks to visitors in an eerie, shifting voice, generated through AI models trained on years of social media content left behind by anonymous deceased creatives. Jacoby says he selects subjects not for biography or fame, but for the size of their digital archive. In his telling, the point is less personal history than the way corporations treat online traces as raw material.
The work’s camera scans the room for people and objects, including food and drinks, then triggers related material from the subject’s archive. A small screen counts the years, days, minutes, and hours since death. The result is not simply a meditation on grief. It is also a portrait of how little regulation governs life online, and how even death can be folded back into the data economy.
Jacoby extends that inquiry in Mutual Life, a series of sculptures resembling basketball-sized eyes with stainless steel pupils and bloodshot wax retinas. Teeth function as clock hands, and the works are tied to biological age, a metric the artist encountered through a health insurer offering lower payments for taking a test. The series links AI companies, social-media platforms, and insurers through a shared habit of translating human experience into measurable risk.
The Whitney Biennial remains on view through August 23, 2026. In a season already dense with fairs, auctions, and major surveys, Jacoby’s work stands out for the way it makes abstract systems feel immediate, intimate, and difficult to ignore.
