Jessica Feldman is a sound and new media artist. Her recent work is concerned with the political ramifications and potentials of emerging digital technologies; specifically their capacity to facilitate or repress solidarity, and to recondition creativity and labor practices. This work is often sited in or engaged with public or non-commercial spaces, and includes sculptures, interventions, sound installations, weird self-destructing circuits, videos, and compositions. Many of pieces are site-specific (situated), participatory, and/or interactive, and deal with the relationships among the body, (the) media, and intimate psychological and communal social dynamics revealed by contemporary technics of control, or, alternately, liberation. Recent projects deconstruct, mis-use, or hack emergent mainstream technologies (AI, emotion recognition software) to reveal the limits of these tools and reify what is essentially human and beyond digital capture or quantification. Other work specifically focuses on sound and listening practices as sites of solidarity and collaboration (audio recordings of water from different sites of migration, for example). Ultimately, all work uses the artistic object as a catalyst for social relations.

Her work has been performed, installed and exhibited internationally at art galleries, museums, concert halls, public parks, city streets, tiny closets, boats, the New York City subways, and the internet. Venues include Cité international des arts (Paris), Kunstraum Niederösterreich (Vienna), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), Socrates Sculpture Park, White Box, The Kitchen, LMAKProjects, Roulette (all NYC), and many outdoor locations. Her scholarly research studies the values and politics built-into affective listening software/AI and has been published in English and French in international journals and edited volumes, such as Sociologica, the International Journal of Communications, and Transpositions: musique et sciences sociales. She is an Assistant Professor/Enseignante-Chercheuse at The American University of Paris. She holds an MFA in Intermedia Arts (Bard) and PhD in the field of Media and Cultural Studies (New York University) with a focus on emerging technology.