In a digital era where our daily activities are becoming increasingly mediated by screens, Lab Artist Jack Lehtinen wonders how this shift is impacting our physical engagement with the world and each other. 

Inspired by the process of automatic drawing pioneered by surrealists in the 1930s, Lehtinen prompts his computer to generate random lines; a wall-mounted plotter – his own personal drawing robot – executes the lines. He then completes the artwork himself using crayon and other classroom materials that emphasize the crafted, tangible quality of human touch and hint at the relative “youth” of our new technologies. Just as AI-generated images are known (often comically) to distort the human hand, Lehtinen’s artworks exacerbate this distortion, twisting and contorting, creating something that is of the human body but is not human. 

Lehtinen is an MFA graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.