James Hoff

James Hoff's work encompasses a variety of media, including sound, video, painting, and publishing. His multidisciplinary approach begins at the user level—the level at which individuals interact with consumer technologies and media—and challenges dominant technologies by reimagining and transforming them into creative tools. Hoff has employed computer viruses, inaudible data signals, earworms, and hacked software as tools and framing devices to produce works situated in the overlapping modes of artistic and technological production. As such, his practice elevates the political, historical, and material context of the software and media consumers interact with daily by redirecting their output to aesthetic ends. Artists’ publications have been central to shaping his concerns in distributed media and Hoff co-founded the nonprofit organization Primary Information in 2006 to publish historical and contemporary artists’ books and support artists working in the medium. He has edited over one hundred publications under the imprint. Hoff was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2026.