Utilities
2026 On view
Artist Cooper Jacoby
DetailsWood telephone poles, epoxy resin, fiberglass, acrylic, clear coat, resin-stabilized burl wood, bone, EPDM rubber, aluminum, speakers, screens, electronics
Curator Jordan Carter
Address
101 Chouteau Ave
St. Louis, MO
Site Description
Accessibility: Free parking is available in a gravel parking lot north of the warehouse and along Chouteau Avenue. This warehouse has been temporarily modified to be ADA accessible for the exhibition. There are outdoor ADA-accessible restrooms and ramps into the exhibition space. The interior floors are concrete and may be uneven in some areas. The silo is not ADA accessible.
Artwork Details
About the Artwork
Cooper Jacoby’s Utilities extends the artist’s critical investigations into how artificial intelligence simultaneously augments, instrumentalizes, and hauntingly preserves human life and labor. Situated in a disused silo are locally sourced telephone poles. Attached to the poles are bulbous growths containing answering machines. St. Louis was once a major hub for the telecommunications industry. In this piece, the boxes “talk” to each other about changes in the field. The AI voices are trained on oral histories recorded with former employees of AT&T and Southwestern Bell—linemen, switch technicians, and call-center workers. Solar, wind, and soil-moisture sensors feed data into each unit, affecting the tone and tempo of the conversations. These voices speak to one another, switching between remembrance and speculation in spontaneous dialogues.
Courtesy of Fitzpatrick Gallery.