Jessica Field (b. 1978) is an Ontario based artist who works with computer programming and Artificial Intelligent algorithms to create simulations that are designed investigate psychological concepts and see how artificial agents behave as a way of illustrating core ideas that motivates, inspires and influences human behaviours. In creating her work, she codes her artificial agents until she no longer understands how they will behave so the final outcome becomes an experience where the agents show the meaning of an idea to the creator and the audience.

 

Field’s work embodies the wonder of technology but also addresses issues with artificial intelligence, such as its superficial view of humanity. The work tries to visualize the divide of what people want to see in AI and what AI actually offers beneath the popular jargon used to capture the interest of people’s imaginations. Field, in making her work, researches the commonalities between opposing or different sources of information that people through bias would not entertain as the same to investigate the big question of “what we can know” and how do people try to express themselves to say the same thing differently. These ideas are visualized in video performance, blackboard schematics and drawing.

 

Field has exhibited internationally in Malmo Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden (2008), Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (2010), and in the Kunsthall Graz, Graz, Austria (2010). She has shown in the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Montreal, Canada (2007) and other galleries in Ontario and Montreal. 

Jessica Field teaches as a full-time sessional at Ryerson University. She has received research and production grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the Daniel Langlois Foundation. She studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design from 1997 to 2001 and completed her Master’s in Fine Art at Concordia University in Montreal in 2008.