Sophie Kahn is a digital artist and sculptor, whose work addresses technology’s failure to capture the unstable human body.
She grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
She earned a BA (Hons) in Fine Art/History of Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London; a Graduate Certificate in Spatial Information Architecture from RMIT University, Melbourne; and an MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sophie is the co-host of the YouTube channel File Exchange, and served as a mentor with NewInc.
Past residencies include the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York.
Sophie has taught in the Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute as a Visiting Associate Professor; at NYU’s Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center; and at Columbia College, Chicago, as a visiting instructor, and worked at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center.
Sophie has exhibited her artwork in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, Osaka and Seoul. Her video work has been screened in festivals including Transmediale, Zero1 San Jose Biennial, Dance Camera West, Trampoline, Frequency, Currents New Media Festival and the Japan Media Arts Festival.
Recent exhibitions include Transfigured at C24 Gallery in New York, Out of Body: Sculpture Post-Photography at bitforms gallery, New York, and Machines for Suffering (solo) at Bannister Gallery, Rhode Island College, RI. Her work has been supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic, and other private funding bodies. Her work is held in public and private collections in the United States and internationally.
Her public artworks have been commissioned by the Art Students League/NYC Parks, Google, and Lincoln Center. She is a New York Foundation for the Arts Digital and Electronic Arts Fellow.
Sophie Kahn’s work addresses technology’s failure to capture the unstable human body.
She uses a 3D laser scanner to create sculptures, prints, videos, and digital artworks. This scanner was never designed to capture the human body in motion. When confronted with a moving form, the machine receives conflicting spatial coordinates and generates incomplete images. Kahn converts this deliberately damaged data into the form of prints, videos, and hand-painted, 3D printed sculptures. Her fragmented forms draw inspiration from funereal and memorial sculpture, and can read as faux-historical forgeries or contemporary relics.
The psychological underpinnings of her work are based on her personal history of chronic illness and disability. Looking through the lens of medical history, she examines moments such as the ‘invention’ of hysteria at the Salpêtrière asylum, where older technologies like photography also failed to capture the female body and its attendant madnesses. For her sculpture and print series Machines for Suffering, Kahn 3D scanned dancers as they re-enacted the supposed choreography of an attack of hysteria. These works suggest an unstable, monumental, body-as-architecture, under continuous construction or perhaps demolition.
Kahn draws on her early training as a photographer to amplify the eeriness of creating digital duplications of the human body within the space of the virtual. Her recent series The Divers, created with Butoh performers at Pioneer Works, features weightless body-avatars rendered in a 3D digital void. It echoes the monochrome transparency of Victorian spirit photography and the vernacular language of tombstones. These images speak to the inherent deathliness of 3D replications of the digital body and suggest the separation of body and digital avatar as an almost religious operation.
Her latest body of sculptural work, Transfigured, is a series of portraits of people who have undergone life-altering physical transformations. The artist invited her models to choose their own poses, and the creation process involved a series of encounters where each person told their story and then re-performed an element of it through gesture and movement. The life-sized sculptures that resulted convey traces of the models’ stories, and are embossed with their scars and tattoos.
In all her works, the human body is de-materialized, separated from the physical, and then re-materialized into a vastly altered form. Like many of her contemporaries who use 3D software and fabrication tools against the grain, Kahn is interested in situating these technologies within a critical context. She challenges standard viewpoints by creating her own subjective, embodied, and deeply human way of seeing through a technological lens.