Kaitlyn Jo Smith

Lights Out

Video, AI-generated faces

Kaitlyn Jo Smith

Shuttered

Video

About the artist

Kaitlyn Jo Smith

Kaitlyn Jo Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose works address issues surrounding automation by utilizing processes that have rendered the shift worker nearly obsolete. Through 3D scanning, 3D printing, and machine learning, she questions the ethics surrounding the current state of labor practices in America, while drawing attention to the individuals that these processes replace. Raised by skilled laborers in rural Ohio, Smith was thirteen when the housing market crashed and nearly every adult she knew was suddenly out of work. Her artworks make visible the intangible realities of unemployment by employing automated technologies that are directly linked to the loss of over 4 million US manufacturing jobs since 2000.

Smith’s work has been shown nationally and internationally at the Tucson Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona, Split Videoart Festival in Croatia, CICA Museum in South Korea and BIOs in Athens, Greece. She was longlisted for the 2021 Lumen Prize in Art and Technology (London), presented at Technarte Conference (Bilbao), selected as Art Connect’s June Artist to Watch, and received the College Art Association’s Services to Artists Committee Award for her video Lights Out. She has also been featured in PDNedu and Al-Tiba9 Magazine (Barcelona).