Jacky Connolly

Jacky Connolly (b. 1990, New York, NY) is an artist and filmmaker based in the Hudson Valley of New York. Working with artificial intelligence, machinima filmmaking, and the preexisting worlds and assets from video games, Connolly creates films, sculptures, and installations that explore slippages between real and simulated life.

Works such as Anhedonia (2017) and Descent into Hell (2021) treat the game engine as an instrument for thinking about spatial ideology, damaged subjectivity, and the afterlife of ordinary images. Descent into Hell, a post-capitalist vision of Los Angeles constructed within GTA V, was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

More recent projects, including The Mineral Kingdom (Dark Green), first presented at the 2025 Taipei Biennial, extend this approach through AI-generated imagery to imagine posthuman environments shaped by mineral consciousness and collective image memory.