Artist: Sophia Brueckner
Exhibition Title:  Unrequited United
Exhibition Dates: October 14 - December 6, 2024
Reception and Gallery Talk:  TBD

Artist's Statement

Unrequited United explores Amazon Kindle Popular Highlights in romance novels. A passage in a Kindle e-book becomes a Popular Highlight after a certain number of people independently highlight the same passage. Popular Highlights show up as underlined text along with the number of people who highlighted that passage. I expected that romance readers might highlight the smutty parts, but, surprisingly, they are predominantly highlighting passages about grief, loneliness, and trauma. These often heartbreaking passages are not the sort of thing that people would broadcast on social media. They aren’t something people are bookmarking to return to later or posting on Goodreads. The anonymity of Popular Highlights allows people to show vulnerability and empathy with feelings they might be reluctant to reveal on other social media platforms.

Since 2010, I have collected thousands of Kindle Popular Highlights from romance novels into a database. Over one hundred thousand individual acts of highlighting were used to determine the content for these artworks telling the story of the intense loneliness, grief, vulnerability, and discontent felt by the readers. This work reveals a glimpse of a positive, anonymous social network emerging unintentionally through this minor Kindle feature. With this ongoing project I draw attention to this existing example of collective social support in order to change society’s vision for the future of social technologies.

Artist Biography

Sophia Brueckner is a futurist artist/engineer who researches how technology shapes us. Inseparable from computers since the age of two, she believes she is a cyborg. As a software engineer at Google, she designed and built products used by tens of millions. At RISD and the MIT Media Lab, she researched the simultaneously empowering and controlling aspects of technology with a focus on haptic and social interfaces. Since 2011, Brueckner has taught Sci-Fi Prototyping, a course combining science fiction, extrapolative thinking, building prototypes, and technology ethics. The class and the students’ projects received international recognition and were featured by The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Wired, NPR, Scientific American, Fast Company, and many others.

Brueckner’s work has been featured by Artforum, SIGGRAPH, the Peabody Essex Museum, Leonardo, Eyeo, ISEA, and more. She was an artist-in-residence at Autodesk Pier 9 and Nokia Bell Labs E.A.T. She is currently an associate professor at the Stamps School of Art and Design and co-director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC) at the University of Michigan. Her ongoing objective is to combine her background in design and engineering with the perspective of an artist to inspire a more positive future.