About the Artist

Avital Meshi (b. 1978, Jerusalem, Israel) is a new media and performance artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. When she moved to the United States with her family, Meshi seized the opportunity to switch from a career in behavioral science to one in the arts. Inspired by Relational Aesthetics and New Aesthetic theories that address how humans and machines interact, Meshi developed her performative art practice to explore how AI algorithms affect social behaviors and the social environment.

Meshi’s work invites people to learn that they can reclaim agency over technology. Her art provokes conversations around identity and identity transformation, surveillance, recognition, and classification. As the artist states, it is crucial to recognize “the technosphere as a natural phenomenon not dissimilar to thoughts, or gravity… Acknowledging algorithms as such gives the conscious observer autonomy over the regulation of their impact.”

Avital Meshi holds an MFA from the Digital Art and New Media Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BSc + MSc in Behavioral Biology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Performance Studies Program at UC Davis.

Meshi has exhibited her work in the Currents New Media Arts Festival in Santa Fe, the Root Division Gallery in San Francisco, the Sesnon Gallery in Santa Cruz, the ACM SIGGRAPH, NeurlPS, the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, and more.