Humor, Failure, and the Art of Subversion with Jonah Brucker-Cohen

Overview

Jonah Brucker-Cohen has spent over two decades turning familiar systems into subversive art. His method: take something everyone uses (a mailing list, a crosswalk button, a login screen) and break it in a way that makes you laugh, then think.

Jonah walks through several recent projects that use public data to expose invisible urban realities, such as a crosswalk timer that delays your crossing based on the street’s accident history, a weather system that shows how temperature maps to neighborhood wealth, and a GPS app that routes you through the most dangerous parts of a city. Each one takes data we already have and reframes it as something you physically experience.

We discuss the origin story of the Scrapyard Challenge, a workshop series Jonah co-founded with Katherine Moriwaki in Dublin in 2003. Jonah and Katherine taught non-engineers how to build sound controllers and interfaces out of junk. Their key finding: people with zero electronics experience took the biggest risks and made the most interesting things.

The conversation closes with Jonah’s philosophy on what makes interactive art work: it should be immediately understandable, without a long artist statement required. He points to Blake Fall-Conroy’s Minimum Wage Machine as a model for that clarity: crank it for an hour and it dispenses exactly minimum wage in pennies.

Bio

Jonah Brucker-Cohen is an artist, researcher, and Associate Professor of Digital Media and Networked Culture at Lehman College (CUNY). His interactive works have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, Ars Electronica, Tate Modern, MoMA, and Transmediale, among others.

He was recently interviewed about projects that address artificial intelligence on the AI Futures for Art and Design podcast.

Chapter Markers

• [00:00:00] — Introduction and overview of Jonah’s work
• [00:01:03] — How frustration with static art led to combining technology and art practice
• [00:03:21] — The appeal of failure modes and subverting systems
• [00:04:24] — Infinite Factor Authentication: spoofing security culture
• [00:06:15] — Crossing Algorithm: a crosswalk that knows its street’s history
• [00:07:53] — Unequal Weather: mapping temperature to socioeconomic reality
• [00:09:11] — Killer Route: a GPS app that routes through danger
• [00:10:38] — Why humor works as an entry point for critical art
• [00:11:37] — Scrapyard Challenge: building with junk
• [00:16:00] — Alerting Infrastructure: the jackhammer that museums invite to destroy them
• [00:18:02] — Average Citizen: a chair that counts down public waiting times
• [00:20:00] — Favorite projects: Bump List, feedback loops, and cybernetics
• [00:22:06] — Mike subverts his own podcast tools
• [00:23:01] — Advice for artists who want to critically examine technology

Resources Discussed

• Neural — art and technology publication
• Rhizome — digital art and culture
• Creative Applications — creative technology projects

Contact

• coin-operated.com

Music

Published

Mar 26, 2026