SHORT: Jon Satrom tickles machines until they barf. MEDIUM: Jon Satrom is a Chicago-based artist, educator, and organizer who delights in digital detritus. He playfully problematizes media systems and interfaces—scrambling tech’s polished surfaces with error, creative misuse, and humor. Through performance, software art, and collaborations with humans and machines, Satrom embraces glitches, kludges, and exhaustion aesthetics to reveal the cracks and contradictions in our digital infrastructures. LONG: Jon Satrom is a Chicago-based artist, educator, and organizer who delights in digital detritus. He playfully problematizes media systems, interfaces, and conventions—scrambling the sanitized polish of tech with raw error, creative misuse, and humor. Through real-time performance, software art, and collaborations with both humans and machines, Satrom leverages glitches, kludges, crops, instability, and what’s been called “exhaustion aesthetics” to expose the cracks, contradictions, and biases embedded in our technological infrastructures. Through his boutique digital studio, studiothread, Satrom leads creative projects that raise funds and visibility for arts programming and cultural initiatives. As cofounder of netizen.org—a collective of media artists and educators—he advocates for a more critical, playful, and creative digital world. In his role as Assistant Senior Instructional Professor and Associate Director of the Media Arts and Design Program at the University of Chicago, Satrom shares his expertise and curiosity with the next generation of experimental artists and designers.
Jon Satrom is an artist, educator, and organizer who problematizes old and new media structures, interfaces, and conventions. He is a kludge artist and a creative problem creator. By day, he fixes things, interviews folks, and creates digital tools at studiothread. By night, he breaks things in search of the unique blips inherent to the systems we use.
Satrom performs realtime audio/video noise and new-media (often w/ XTAL FSCK, I ♥ PRESETS, & Magic Missile), develops artware (in partnership w/ PoxParty), and has co-programed and experimented with organizational and curatorial systems w/ dirty new-media && glitch comrades (including GLI.TC/H && r4wb1t5!.)
He has performed, workshopped, and lectured across spaceship earth (at places like: STEIM, Amsterdam NL; musicacoustica, Beijing CN; transmediale, Berlin DE; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago US; Centro Multimedia, Mexico City MX; SXSW Interactive, Austin, TX US ). His works have been experienced and featured within white cubes, glowing rectangles, ( 65GRAND, Chicago IL US; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder CO US; MU Eindhoven NL; NUMA, Paris FR; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul KR; and SUDLAB, Naples IT; ) and dead trees ( GLI.TC/H READE[R0R]; Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking; Interface cultures: Artistic Aspects of Interaction; Mobile Digital Art: Using the iPad and iPhone as Creative Tools and The Art and Science of Interface and Interaction Design). He feels a bit weird having to list these accomplishments (more here) and would rather interface with you directly. Satrom also finds it strange to write in third person...