Top of page

Innovator-in-Residence Jer Thorp

Illustration by Becca Farrow

During his time with us, data artist Jer Thorp decides to flip the script: putting people instead of data first, and being as public as possible with his process.

Work

Documentation

Jer is documenting his research and thoughts via Open Science Framework External. He has created a Github repository of his code, data, and miscellanea External related to his residency. Jer also reflects on his process in Medium posts like Artist in the Archive External and Strange Attractors and Paths Untrodden External.

About Jer

Jer Thorp is an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada, currently living in New York. Coming from a background in genetics, his digital art practice explores the many- folded boundaries between science, data, art and culture. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Scientific American, The New Yorker, Popular Science, Fast Company, Business Week, Popular Science, Discover, WIRED and The Harvard Business Review. In 2012, Jer was the Data Artist-in-Residence at the New York Times.

Jer’s data-inspired artwork has been shown around the world, including most recently in New York’s Times Square, at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, at the Ars Electronica Center in Austria and at the National Seoul Museum in Korea. In 2009, Jer designed a custom algorithm which was used to place the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan.

Jer is a National Geographic Fellow, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and an alumnus of the World Economic Foundation’s Global Agenda Council on Design and Innovation. He is an adjunct Professor in New York University’s renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and is the Co-Founder of The Office for Creative Research. In 2015, Canadian Geographic named Jer one of Canada’s Greatest Explorers.

Back to top