2024 Tech Prom Artist Exhibition

On November 14th, nearly a thousand attendees marked what has become a new tradition at CDT – the unveiling of a one-night-only Artist Exhibition alongside our long-standing annual benefit (and tech policy’s favorite party), Tech Prom.

2024 is CDT’s second year bringing together incredibly talented artists whose work explores and reflects some of the same data and algorithmic systems and themes at the heart of technology policy discussions happening in the present moment.

For 30 years, CDT has been a leading voice in the fight to advance civil rights and civil liberties – especially now as technological transformations, and the resulting capacity for real world harm, are rapidly increasing. 

We’re made up of policy experts, lawyers, and technologists who believe policies, laws, and technical designs should empower people to use technology for good while protecting against invasive and discriminatory uses. But in order to fully explore and understand these values, it’s necessary to add the voices of artists to that conversation and to share those voices with one of our biggest, most impactful audiences.

As the curator of our Tech Prom Artist Exhibitions, my goal is to collaborate with artists and artworks that challenge Tech Prom’s audience to reexamine the lenses they use to view their daily work in policy, advocacy, government, industry, and more. I feel fortunate to be able to say we succeeded in elevating a group of incredible artists and agencies with this year’s cohort:

Sophia Brueckner is a futurist artist/designer/engineer who researches how technology shapes us. She worked as a software engineer at Google; and then a researcher at the Rhode Island School of Design and the MIT Media Lab. Since 2011, Brueckner has taught Sci-Fi Prototyping, a course that combines science fiction, extrapolative thinking, building prototypes, and technology ethics at MIT, Harvard, RISD, Brown, and the University of Michigan.

Sophia brought to this year’s Tech Prom her romance series, which pulls in pieces from two bodies of work – Captured by an Algorithm, memorializing Kindle Popular Highlights on porcelain commemorative plates, and Unrequited United, which extends an invitation to viewers to express solidarity with the anonymous highlighters. The beauty of Sophia’s series is in its ability to capture transient collective emotions into multiple physical forms. I beg you to give in just a little – to a sense of vulnerability, and a connection to a wider human experience – when exploring her work.

Creative Theory Agency is a Black-owned, full-service creative agency, founded by Tamon George and Gary Williams Jr., mission-driven to bring creative equity and cultural impact to marketing moments. The Agency is filled with nationally recognized, award-winning creative leaders – but Tech Prom’s one-night-only installation was  driven in large part by Senior Brand Manager Gerald Gordon, very much a curator in his own right, and Account Director Hannah Strickland.

The Agency exhibited Ad Intelligence: New Age Advertising, a reflection of advertising’s ability to serve as society’s most honest mirror, and the latest extension of their WHAT PROMPTED YOU? campaign (which started the year with a full-scale takeover of Union Market DC’s most recognizable wall of murals).

Working alongside talented students from Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communications and professor Dr. Jana Duckett, Creative Theory Agency embarked on an exploration of how artificial intelligence is reshaping this reflection of American culture. The Agency brought their creative expertise to them through a series of lectures and exercises, giving the MSU students hands-on experience with generative AI tools and tasking them with the opportunity to reimagine legendary advertising visuals in their own voice, from their own perspective. The end result is a powerful statement both on the importance of centering access to transformative tools for those whose careers will be most impacted – and the need to recognize the added work required to use new technologies by those same voices.  

Lastly, Curry Hackett is an award-winning transdisciplinary designer, public artist, and educator, currently teaching at The Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York. Curry exhibited a large-scale, AI-generated collage entitled In the Woods, We See Things, which takes inspiration from “the hush harbor: structures erected by enslaved Black folks to conduct religious activity in secret.” The landscape is peppered with televisions and digital screens, speculating on Black modes of gathering, and their relationships with media, technology, and nature. 

This work is related to Hackett’s series, Ugly Beauties, exploring similar themes of space and place but at larger scales. And if you’re lucky enough to visit us at CDT’s D.C. office at any point, you’ll see Curry’s work from our inaugural Tech Prom Artist Exhibition last year – an untitled series of images exploring architectural materials from an alternative “near-future” that centers Black abundance and joy – installed permanently with us.

We’re deeply grateful to artists, attendees, partners and fellow CDTers who helped make this year’s exhibition a resounding success! And we look forward to continuing to find new ways to add artist’s voices to the prism of CDT’s important work.

The 2024 Tech Prom Artist Exhibition is sponsored by Anthropic. This sponsor has offered their support independent of the artists and their artwork, and has no editorial input on the artists’ work or themes, nor CDT’s curation of the event. All artists in the Artist Exhibition have been compensated as part of their effort in bringing their work to our event.