James Coupe is an artist whose work focuses on emergent systems, aesthetic machines, autonomy, and networks. Educated in Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and Creative Technology at the University of Salford (England), his recent projects have included appropriative powerline networks, parasitical cellular phone agents, autonomous robot systems, self-organizing telephone call centres, and installations in which computers use spam to search for the meaning of the Internet. His controversial recent work with ‘surveillance cinema’, in projects such as (re)collector and Surveillance Suite, uses computer vision software to extract demographic and behavioral information from video footage. The footage is then automatically reorganized and recontextualized into narratives, often based upon classic film scripts.

His work has been exhibited throughout the world, including IDEA (Manchester), Camden Arts Centre (London), The Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art (Sunderland), Artsadmin (London), Custard Factory (Birmingham), Aspex (Portsmouth), Artsway (Sway), Lighthouse (Poole), Folly Gallery (Lancaster), Stills Gallery (Edinburgh), Lee Center for the Arts (Seattle) and The Junction (Cambridge). He has received numerous commissions that include New Contemporaries, Metapod, Low-Fi, SCAN and Lancaster City Council, Enter_, and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. His work has received all levels of national and international awards including the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Board Innovation Award, Creative Capital and Artist’s Trust.