Legendary Data Artist Jer Thorp Will Keynote CanUX 2025

 Living in Data
} Oct 4, 2025   TBD / 45 MINUTES

To live in data is to be incessantly extracted from, to be classified and categorized, statisti-fied, sold and surveilled. Data (our data) is mined and processed for profit, power and political gain. Our clicks and likes and footsteps feed new digital methods of control, and every word we type and image we take is used to train massive AI models. In this talk Jer propose a variety of answers to a crucial question of our time : how do we stop passively inhabiting data, and become active citizens of it?

 Speaker Bio: Jer Thorp
 Data Design

Originally from Vancouver, BC, Jer Thorp is one of the world’s foremost data artists, a leading voice for the ethical use of big data, a writer and a teacher. Currently living in Brooklyn, NY, he is best known for designing the algorithm to place the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. Jer was the New York Times’ first Data Artist in Residence, is a National Geographic Explorer, and in 2017 and 2018 served as the Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress.

Jer’s data-inspired artwork has been shown around the world, including most recently in New York’s Times Square, at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, at the Ars Electronica Center in Austria, and at the National Seoul Museum in Korea. His work has also appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Scientific American, The New Yorker, Popular Science, Fast Company, Business Week, Popular Science, Discover, WIRED and The Harvard Business Review.

Between 2010 and 2022, Jer was part of the organizing team of the Eyeo Festival, the premier festival for people working with art, code, and the ethics of emerging technology. Eyeo featured a hugely diverse set of speakers and drew a dedicated audience from all over the world, and for ten years, Jer guided the curation of the event’s speaker list.

Jer’s talks on TED.com have been watched by more than a half-million people. He is a frequent speaker at high profile events such as PopTech, and The Aspen Ideas Festival. Recently, he has spoken about his work at MIT’s Media Lab, The American Museum of Natural History, MoMA, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena.

Jer is a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, and an alumnus of the World Economic Foundation’s Global Agenda Council on Design and Innovation. He is an adjunct Professor in . New York University’s renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), and was the Co-Founder of The Office for Creative Research. In 2015, Canadian Geographic named Jer one of Canada’s Greatest Explorers.
Jer’s book, ‘Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future‘ was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2020.

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*Image credit: Jer Thorp and generative AI