Jeff Thompson

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Jeff Thompson is an artist, programmer, hacker, and educator based in the NYC area. He is currently Assistant Professor and Program Director of Visual Art & Technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey and artist-in-residence at Bell Labs.

Thompson has exhibited and performed his work internationally at venues including the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheldon Museum of Art, the Taubman Museum of Art, SITE Santa Fe, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Jersey City Museum, and the Weisman Art Museum. Recent commissions include Abandon Normal Devices, Brighton Digital Festival, Rhizome, Turbulence, and Harvestworks.

Performing A Literary Reading with Allison Parrish, Daniel Temkin, and Ranjit Bhatnagar

Reading of Texts From the Network

When talking about networks, we almost exclusively talk about the interfaces we interact with, intangible but powerful forces like the cloud and algorithms, or the physical infrastructure of the network. But many intermediate layers exist in the network written as readable texts. These include HTTP headers, OUI registrants, and network SSIDs. They reveal human connections between us and our computers, the devices of others, programmers, and corporations. While hackers and other explorers of the network may see these texts, we usually register them only as information, not writing to be read or critiqued.