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Tai Shani Explores Fungus as a Psychedelic Catalyst for Change
Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani’s first online artwork, The Neon Hieroglyph, premieres as part of Manchester International Festival’s Virtual Factory series. Drawing on her research into ergot, a grain fungus from which LSD is derived, Shani composed nine episodic films that explore psychedelics as a catalyst for change in what the curators describe as “a dreamlike CGI journey that takes us from the cellular to the galactic, from the forests to the subterranean, from the real to the almost unimaginable.”
“It’s a Huge, Dumb, Obvious Object Wedged into a Place it Shouldn’t Be.”
“Everything—capitalism, the economy, politics, the internet, supply chains—has become a terrifying, complicated mess that we can’t understand. But we can understand a ship blocking a canal.”
Out Now: A Computer in the Art Room
OUT NOW:
Catherine Mason
A Computer in the Art Room
Originally published in 2008, Catherine Mason’s chronicle of the birth of UK computer art between 1950 and 1980 is now available as an e-book with an updated introduction
“I’ve spent a lifetime wondering why the Amiga ‘Insert Workbench’ boot image looked kinda wonky,” confides Panic Inc. co-founder Cabel Sasser on Twitter. ”I always assumed it was hand-drawn pixel art.” It turns out it’s vector art. A surprised Sasser reveals that just 412 bytes of vector drawing instructions were needed to render the iconic (Sheryl Knowles-created) hand-held floppy disk. “Incredible!” Meanwhile, media artist Golan Levin verified the 1985 vector data with a “quick-and-dirty” Processing sketch.
Tobias Revell Considers the Crypto Imaginary—or Lack Thereof
“Technologies aren’t for anything. They emerge and are socially constructed as a mix of opportunity, problem-solving and chance, not some inevitable building block in the myth of progress.”
Opening at Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt, Germany, Daniel Canogar’s solo show “Latencies” explores a world of transient, fleeting memories, shifting media and continuously increasing data streams. Next to signature works from the artist’s Small Data and Echo Series, the show features five pieces from the new Latencies Series (image: Monocle), for which Canogar mapped discarded parts like lenses, heat sinks, and shredded aluminium onto animated screens.
Andreas Angelidakis ‘Softwalks’ at Oslo’s Fotogalleriet
“The ‘softwalk’ has long been the artist’s designation for the way avatars in 1990s simulation games traverse their fictional universe: an even, smooth step, unperturbed by the specificities of the environments they cross.”
Out Now: Stages 9—The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine
OUT NOW:
Stages #9
The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine
The Liverpool Biennial journal on art and automation feat. new and existing texts by Nora N. Khan, Suzanne Treister, Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver, and others
Gerhard Mantz
(1950–2021)
Famous for his dystopian landscapes, German CGI artist Gerhard Mantz dies at the age of 71 in Berlin. A successful sculptor before embracing 3D modelling software in the 1990s, Mantz’ renders showed at MIT, MoMA, and the LA Center for Digital Art. He was also one of five artists exhibited at HaW’s “Natürlich Künstlich” in 2001, one of the first digital art shows in Berlin.
Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter
“How many people do you need to put together a Manhattan Project? The relevant question is: how large of a population do you need to draw from in order to recruit enough scientists to staff such an effort?”
Indigenous computational media artist Jon M. R. Corbett is the subject of a fascinating interview with Daniel Temkin at Esoteric.Codes. Corbett delves into the syntax and epistomology underpinning his Cree#, Ancestral Code, and Wisakecak coding languages, which all circumvent the eurocentric (and latin alphabet) origins of “not just programming, but computing technologies in general.” His ambitious extending beyond software, he also speaks to his alt-keyboard design—based on the Cree Star Chart (image).
Big Oil Enters Crypto Game
“Flare gas could just as well power carbon capture machines, water desalination plants, or data centres that support more widely used applications. There’s a social value in those things that I don’t see for Bitcoin.”
Commissioned for transmediale’s “For Refusal” program, !Mediengruppe Bitnik releases Refuse to be Human, a web extension that changes your browser settings to that of a Yandex bot. Like Google, Russia’s primary search engine Yandex uses web crawlers to index online content. “Surfing as a bot gives you access to the grey web,” write the Bitniks, “a layer of content only visible to bots.” Image: RYBN’s Double Negative Captchas (2020)—the bot test that directly inspired Bitnik’s work.
Travis Diehl on Art, Money, and Metaphor
“Arcane financial maneuvers, only nominally attached to physical objects, regularly achieve a level of dematerialized abstraction to which most conceptual art only aspires: the transubstantiation of nothing into something.”
How Friction-Free Capitalism Eats into the Landscape
“Sites like these are where online shopping leaves its physical footprint—where capital, battling over space, inscribes itself in the landscape.”
Jean-Pierre Hébert
(1939-2021)
An explorer of algorithmic aesthetics since the 1970s, computer art pioneer Jean-Pierre Hébert passes away in Santa Barbara, California. Known for his minimalist plotter drawings, sound and mixed media installations, the trained computer engineer also co-founded famed digital art group The Algorists in 1995. In 2012, SIGGRAPH recognized Hébert’s Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art.
“Light and Language,” an exhibition showcasing the late land and conceptual artist Nancy Holt, opens at Ireland’s Lismore Castle Arts. Focused on 1960-80s works, it notably includes Electrical System (1982, image), a room-scale illuminated network shown for the first time in three decades that makes the gallery it is presented in “part of open-ended systems, part of the world.” The Lisa Le Feuvre-curated show also includes related (light)works by Dennis McNulty, Charlotte Moth, and Katie Paterson.
