Amy Alexander is a professor, researcher and hackernaut who has been making computationally-based art since the 1990s and writing about the role of algorithms in culture since the early 2000s. Amy is a Professor of Computing in the Arts in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego. With a background in film and additional background in music, programming, and IT, she has focused throughout her career on the fuzzy borders between media and the world.
Amy’s work since the early 2000s has frequently addressed algorithmic subjectivity in digital culture. Her recent projects continue this focus through engagement with artificial intelligence and machine learning systems — including large language models, computer vision, and affective computing. She is currently developing custom-trained LLMs both as tools of critique and as collaborators in live performance, as part of a broader inquiry into generative AI-based cinema.
Recent projects include Deep World, a live audiovisual performance in which her longtime performance persona VJ Übergeek engages in improvised dialogue with a custom LLM trained on writers and thinkers who grappled with difficult times.
Using computer vision and machine learning-based methods of curation and production, What the Robot Saw, is a perpetual livestream that uses computer vision and machine learning-based curation to depict the imagined cinematic gaze of AI social media surveillance.
Deep Hysteria is a still image “AI” series developed using generative deep learning and commercial emotion detection algorithms, which repurposes algorithmic bias to shed light on human gender bias.
Amy’s art practice has spanned net art, software art, computational installation, audiovisual performance, and film. Her research and practice over the years has focused on how contemporary media—ranging from performative cinema to social media—shifts alongside cultural and technological change. Her projects have been exhibited and performed on the Internet, in clubs, on the street, and in festivals and museums. She has written and lectured on software art, software as culture, audiovisual performance (historical and contemporary), and media preservation, and has served as a reviewer for festivals and new media commissions. Her recent lectures have addressed algorithmic bias and subjectivity, performative strategies of documentation in historical media, and systems and disruption in 20th- and 21st-century media.
Amy—who has also worked under the names Cue P. Doll and VJ Übergeek—was one of the early artists developing generative net art, beginning in 1996 with the Multi-Cultural Recycler, one of the first generative internet artworks and a widely exhibited site that spoofed net celebrity and faux multiculturalism on the web. Her early generative sound/text piece theBot (2000) was a web crawler that converted its findings into speech-synthesized poetry. Other notable works from this period include SVEN (2005), an installation exhibited at the Whitney Museum and in streetside surveillance vans internationally, and CyberSpaceLand, a public art/nightclub VJ performance she performed from 2000–2015. In addition to her art projects, she co-founded and moderated the software art repository Runme.org, was an early member of the TOPLAP live coding collective, and has remained active in algorithmic and media art curation. Her projects have been shown at venues ranging from the Whitney Museum, Prix Ars Electronica, Transmediale, SIGGRAPH, NIME, ICLC, and the New Museum to club performances at Sonar (Barcelona), First Avenue (Minneapolis), and Melkweg (Amsterdam). She has also performed in the streets of Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, Zürich, and Aberdeen, Scotland.
Deep World (2025–Present)
Amy received an MFA from CalArts, where she studied live action, experimental animation, and new media. Experimental animation continues to play a key role in her research and practice. Her research on 20th-century audiovisual performance artist and inventor Mary Hallock Greenewalt led to the creation of the Mary Hallock Greenewalt Visibility Project, an online database dedicated to increasing visibility of Hallock Greenewalt’s archives and work. Her recent project PIGS (Percussive Image Gestural System) is a live performance and research platform that uses silent percussion to create improvisational, structured visuals.
Amy’s past lives have included work as a musician, a record store manager, a video camera operator / editor / technician, a 3D animator, a television and new media effects developer, and a systems administrator. She programs in Python, Javascript, Max/MSP/Jitter, Processing/p5.js, and a few others, lately focusing on developing strategies for critical approaches to machine learning and computer vision in cinematic art practice. She plays the drums, and occasionally still stumbles around on bass, guitar, and violin.