Jennifer and Kevin McCoy
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are media artists whose interdisciplinary practice spans moving image, software, drawing, painting, and installation. Their work combines artistic production with sustained research into how emerging technologies shape cultural narratives, systems of knowledge, and everyday perception. Grounded in both critical media studies and studio-based experimentation, their projects investigate the social, political, and perceptual consequences of contemporary image-making technologies. Across their practice, the McCoys employ computational tools, archival materials, and spatial installations to examine how media systems organize information and influence what is seen, remembered, and valued. Early projects included database-driven sculptures composed of television clips structured through categorical, algorithmic, and narrative frameworks, as well as diorama-like miniature film sets animated by live cameras and custom software. These works functioned as both artworks and research platforms, revealing the underlying logics of classification that shape contemporary thought.
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Technology in the McCoys’ work operates not simply as a medium, but as an active social force—one that mediates relationships between individuals, images, and environments. By foregrounding the infrastructures behind image production, their projects encourage audiences to critically reflect on how technological systems encode cultural assumptions and distribute power. Installations are often designed to make these processes visible and experiential, fostering public engagement. Their recent work focuses on the evolving visual mythology of the American West, reconfiguring mid–twentieth-century archival imagery through collaged databases of AI-generated landscape photographs. This body of work interrogates how machine vision, synthetic imagery, and large-scale datasets are reshaping ideas of place, history, and authenticity. By juxtaposing historical sources with algorithmically produced images, the artists explore the social implications of AI-driven representation—raising questions about authorship, environmental memory, and the persistence of national myths in an era of automated image production.
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The McCoys' work has been widely exhibited in the US and internationally with exhibitions including the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the British Film Institute- Southbank in London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The San Jose Museum of Art, The Addison Museum of American Art, The Sundance Film Festival, and many other venues in the US, Europe and Asia.Their work can be seen in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the 21C Museum, and the Speed Museum. They received a Creative Capital award in 2003, the Wired Rave Award for Art in 2005, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, and a Headlands Alumni Award in 2014. In 2022 Kevin received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences for co-developing the technology that eventually became known as the NFT.
