Trained as a software engineer, Sam Hains is a 3D artist whose practice centers around the critical examination of digital tools and their connection to modernity. His work explores the oft-forgotten spaces that have come to define our contemporary era: abandoned netscapes, machine-created mistranslations, and uncanny simulated realities. 

Though he often employs post-cyberpunk aesthetics that are informed by science fiction, Hains’s practice is less about understanding speculative futurity and more about unpacking authenticity in a technologically-mediated world. 3D rendering is a primary tool in Hains’s digital workbench, but he also integrates newfangled, popularly lauded techniques and technologies—like artificial intelligence, generative algorithmic processes, and software-enabled data analytics—with a critical eye to their points of breakage. At times seduced by technology, his work seeks realness while constantly wading through artificiality. 

Human-machine interfaces play a particularly important role in his practice; and the slippages in between the cracks of biological and artificial interactions shine through in his pointed examinations of the production of sociality and labor in late techno-capitalism. Fantastical virtual landscapes and shiny machine renders belie an, at times, cynical view of the role of the human in a world no longer designed for them.  

In the past, his commercial collaborations have included creative work for PAPER Magazine, music videos with live simulation elements for artists like Antiboy and Sean La’Brooy, and live experience visual design for theater productions.