Info

Jason Huff (b. 1981) is an artist, writer, and designer living and working in Los Angeles, by way of Georgia, fifteen years in New York, and two in Providence for graduate school at RISD. He makes books by running familiar texts through machines and publishing what comes back. The first was AutoSummarize (2010), which put the hundred most-downloaded books on Project Gutenberg through Microsoft Word's summarize function, reducing A Doll's House to the name Nora, repeated. The New Yorker called the results absurd and quite funny, and the edition is catalogued in the Post-Digital Publishing Archive. Then American Psycho (2012), made with Mimi Cabell, which mailed Bret Easton Ellis's novel through Gmail one page at a time and collected the 819 ads it generated; the most common was a coupon for Crest Whitestrips. It has its own Wikipedia entry and sits in the Printed Matter catalog. Then Best Fight Ever / Worst Fight Ever (2011), which cut two YouTube fight scenes, one famously good and one famously bad, into three-second clips and had Mechanical Turk workers describe them in writing. The book has two front covers and no back. And then Endless Opportunities (2012), which queries Google image search on a loop and prints the results, watching for the ranking to change. It ran live for the length of Toonskin, Kenya Robinson's exhibition at Artspace in New Haven. He builds software, most recently regender-xyz, free and open source, which transforms the gendered structure of English texts. Its first publication is Pride & Prejudice in four volumes. And he writes about the cultural impact of technology, for Rhizome, where he was an Editorial Fellow, wrote Beyond the Surface: 15 Years of Desktop Aesthetics, profiled Damon Zucconi, and left four more in the archive. Also for The New Inquiry, where Serf Boards took apart Amazon Mechanical Turk and crowdsourced labor. And once for The Creative Independent, whose guide to making a website for your creative work he wrote, illustrated by Sean Suchara.

His books are held in museums: the MoMA Library, acquired in 2017 as part of Paul Soulellis's Printed Web, every title of which he lists in a public index; the Whitney Museum's Special Collections; and the Bavarian State Library in Munich, which holds three of them in the Library of Artistic Print on Demand collection. They appear in anthologies including Output (MIT Press, 2024), Conceptualisms (University of Alabama Press, 2022), Printed Web 3, and a Kunstforum International issue on the postdigital. The work has been exhibited in galleries in Brooklyn; Paris, at the Jeu de Paume; Tel Aviv; Dallas; Belgium; and New Haven. It has been written about in academic journals by Karl Wolfgang Flender in Interface Critique and Kaja Marczewska in Media-N, discussed by Hannes Bajohr, Silvio Lorusso, and Scott Rettberg, and catalogued in the ELMCIP knowledge base.

He has taught in classrooms at RISD, Parsons, NEW INC, and PRAKSIS in Oslo, a month-long residency on the artist as entrepreneur, with Marisa Olson, Silvio Lorusso, and Stephanie Pereira, among others. He has spent years making space for other artists to show their work: three seasons of Living Room Light Exchange with Nicholas O'Brien, and before that Black Sheep Projects, an alternative space he co-founded with Derek Paul Boyle to give RISD undergraduates a show before graduation, written up in Hyperallergic in 2010. He spends his days leading design teams as Design Director for Retail at Shopify, across hardware, software, brand, content, research, and systems. Previously he was Design Director at Netflix, the first design manager hired into the Los Angeles office; and Director of Product Design at Etsy, where he was one of the first dozen designers and led design through the 2015 public offering. Before that, straight out of RISD, he was on the early team at a startup called Weft, a textile design platform founded by Brooks Hagan and Steve Marschner.

He holds an MFA in Digital+Media from RISD and a BFA in New Media from the University of Georgia. He can be reached by email or Instagram.

Collections

Anthologies

Writing

Press

  • 2016InverseGabe Bergado · AutoSummarize at Internet Yami-Ichi
  • 2014DazedThomas Gorton · American Psycho
  • 2014Daily DotMiles Klee · American Psycho
  • 2014AdweekMiles Klee · American Psycho
  • 2014Electric LiteratureMaru Pabón · American Psycho
  • 2010The New YorkerMadeleine Schwartz · Rise of the Literature Machines
  • 2010The RumpusJeremy Hatch · AutoSummarize
  • 2010HyperallergicLiz Hall · Black Sheep Projects

Scholarship