Zach Blas (b. 1981, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, USA) is an artist and writer whose practice contends with computational technologies, their industries, and the powers that constitute and animate them. Forefronting critical inquiry, technical experimentation, and concept engineering, Blas creates moving image installations, films and videos, lecture-performances, publications, and web-based media.
Since 2006, his practice has addressed power and queer resistance in digital, networked systems. Works include protest masks against biometric facial recognition (2012–14), a queer programming anti-language (2008), and a sex dungeon recast as a temple to security and surveillance (2018). In 2018, he commenced Silicon Traces, a trilogy of immersive moving image installations and related works that explore the philosophies, beliefs, fictions, and fantasies that shape Silicon Valley’s visions of the future as means to domination. CULTUS (2023, part two) is a techno-religious computer that invokes a patheon of AI gods; The Doors (2019, part one) is a psychedelic trip on nootropics as an AI liquid light show in an artificial garden; and Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 (2018, prologue) is a science-fiction film that depicts Ayn Rand time-traveling to a future Silicon Valley overthrown by queer militants. Currently, Blas is developing the final installment of the trilogy, which features a think thank and CGI counter-fantasy film that challenge the ways in which the Californian tech industry has constructed a vision of the world’s end–what he terms “apocalyptic futurism.” At the same time, he is at work on an installation that expounds upon the elusive AI mystic Salb Hacz, particularly Hacz’s heretical visions of god’s ass.
Blas has exhibited in major international exhibitions including the 1st MUNCH Triennale, Oslo (2022); 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2022); British Art Show 9, Aberdeen (2021); and 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018), and at venues including Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2024); Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2023); KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2023); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2022); de Young Museum, San Francisco (2020); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2015); transmediale, Berlin (2015); Eyebeam, New York (2013); Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool (2011); and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2006). He has also presented solo exhibitions at Vienna Secession (2024); arebyte Digital Art Centre, London (2023); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2020); Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg (2019); Art in General, Brooklyn (2018); Gasworks, London (2017); among others. Blas’s work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. His films and videos have been screened at Royal Film Archive of Belgium, Brussels (2025); Conversations at the Edge, Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago (2019); International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2019); Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (2018); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2018); Anthology Film Archives, New York (2018); and Forum Expanded, 68th Berlin International Film Festival (2018). Select works are distributed by the Video Data Bank in Chicago and Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst in Berlin.
Blas has published books, essays, and texts, in which he has created and developed a range of theoretical concepts, including queer technology (2007), queer darkness (2012), viral ascesis (2012), informatic opacity (2014), contra-internet (2014), utopian plagiarism (2015), metric mysticism (2017), xeno-telos (2021), and informatics of domination (2025). His artist books include Ass of God: Collected Heretical Writings of Salb Hacz (Vienna Secession and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2024), The End of the Internet (As We Knew It) (2017), and Gay Bombs: User’s Manual (2008). His 2021 artist monograph Unknown Ideals was published by Sternberg Press and Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg. With Melody Jue and Jennifer Rhee, he is co-editor of Informatics of Domination, published by Duke University Press in 2025. Additional writings have appeared in e-flux Journal, Mousse Magazine, Women Studies Quarterly, and numerous edited volumes and exhibition catalogues.
His practice been supported by awards, grants, and fellowships from organizations including Canada Council for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council, Arts Council of England, and Creative Capital (USA).
Blas is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto (2021–present) and was previously a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London (2015–21). Blas holds a Ph.D. from The Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University (2014) and an M.F.A. in Media Arts from University of California, Los Angeles (2008).
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