Kaitlyn Jo Smith

Kaitlyn Jo Smith’s interdisciplinary studio research considers the implications of automation on labor and religion in relation to America’s working class. Through the implementation of automated technologies and machine learning, her work questions the authority of algorithms while promoting a dialogue around future applications of artificial intelligence. 

Inspired by a rural upbringing, Smith’s practice explores the intersections between work and worship. American Standard renders visible the intangible realities of unemployment, using automated technologies that are directly linked to the loss of over four million US manufacturing jobs since 2000. Like American Standard, Confessional Kiosk employs machine learning. In this installation, an AI priest offers penances to examine religion as a social domain in which automated decision-making becomes morally questionable. Most recently Smith has focused her attention to autonomous trucking. Blind Spot implements Google Street View to meld man and machine, collapsing the distance between our collective human past and inevitable machine futures.

Smith’s work has been shown nationally and internationally. She is the 2023 recipient of the Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellowship in Studio Art, was longlisted for the 2021 Lumen Prize in Art and Technology (London) and received the College Art Association’s Services to Artists Committee Award for her video Lights Out. Smith has been featured in PDNedu, Art IDEAL, and Al-Tiba9 Magazine (Barcelona). She has presented her work at FEMeeting: Women in Art, Science & Technology (Windsor), Technarte International Conference on Art and Technology (Barcelona, virtual), and Homecoming, Society for Photographic Education Annual National Conference (Denver).