Postponed twice due to lockdown, “Sculpture in Search of Place” opens at Warsaw’s Zachęta National Gallery of Art, featuring the 2018 reassembly of Edward Ihnatowicz’ Senster. From 1970-4, the iconic robotic sculpture was the highlight at Evoluon, a Philips-run science museum in Eindhoven, where it wowed visitors with its uncanny responses to sound and movement. After disassembly, Senster was lost to time until art historian Anna Olszewska and team restored it to former glory.
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The Legacy of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock
“This whiff of insider trading presents the future as a commodity, an exercise in temporal arbitrage in which knowledge of new developments yields a financial edge.”
Drawing from the IDPW online community they’ve marshalled over the years, extremely online artist duo exonemo launches “Art Homepage Fair.” The online exhibition resurrects the bygone webring format, and offers an interface for navigating 100 bespoke websites. Including sites by forevermidi.com, Garry Ing, Lee Tusman, and dozens more, the show is organized around the rallying cry “to express yourself on the internet is not about being constrained by terms and conditions … while growing enslaved to numbers of likes.“
The End of Nature
“Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly if at all, is the result of a subtly warped perspective. Changes that can affect us can happen in our lifetime in our world—not just changes like wars but bigger and more sweeping events. I believe that without recognizing it we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change; that we are at the end of nature. By the end of nature I do not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall and the sunshine, though differently than before. When I say ‘nature,’ I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it.”
January 2021
January 2021
Your Photos Have Been Weaponized, Privacy Advocate Says
“People need to realize that some of their most intimate moments have been weaponized.”
Artist-researchers Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace, in collaboration with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), launch Exposing.AI, an online tool that lets users find out whether their Flickr photos have been used for training commercial face recognition and biometric analysis systems. The web app scans across twelve notorious datasets and provides deep analysis: MegaFace (image), for example, includes 3,311,471 Flickr photos used by Amazon, Google, and other corporate giants.
“Pas froid aux yeux,” an extensive retrospective of digital art pioneer Vera Molnar, opens at Espace de l’Art Concret (EAC) in Mouans-Sartoux, France. Curated by director Fabienne Grasser-Fulchéri in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts of Rennes, the show surveys seventy years of generative geometry, from Molnar’s earliest pencil drawings to her latest commission: Orthogonal (image) is a room-sized, glow-in-the-dark rendition of an eponymous line drawing series from 2011-13.
$GME GO BRR
Capping r/wallstreetbets’s triumphant pump of videogame retailer Game Stop’s stock (that torpedoed hedge fund Melvin Capital in the process), digital marketer Matei Psatta celebrates IRL.
General Motors Announces Zero-Emission Goal
“To be ready for 2035, I need to build battery plants, I need to do battery development, I need to develop electric vehicles.”
Ralf Baecker premieres A Natural History of Networks (SoftMachine), a performance streaming live from Berlin’s STATE Studio as part of CTM Festival. Inspired by the work of British cybernetician Gordon Pask, Baecker devised an electrochemical instrument—the SoftMachine—to modulate a liquid metal alloy inside an electrode-equipped petri dish. The emerging fractal patterns, controlled via algorithmic electrical signals, reveal what Baecker describes as an “alternative computational and technological material regime.”
Chloe Stead on Kinship vs. Reciprocal Exploitation
“What if, instead of using ethology to reaffirm our human-centric perspective on life, we looked to nature for ideas of how to do things better—particularly when it comes to growth?”
Two years after its original release in 2018, the Rafael Lozano-Hemmer documentary Megalodemocrat premieres in the U.S.. Shot over 10 years in 17 different countries, the Benjamin Duffield-directed film offers an intimate look into how the Mexican-Canadian media artist transforms public spaces such as Trafalgar Square, the Vancouver Olympics (image), and New York’s Park Avenue Tunnel with large-scale interactive works.
Nora O Murchú on transmediale’s Year-Long Exploration of Refusal
“It is more than no. It is not an exit, nor is it passive. Instead it is a beginning.”
Branching Kinship
“There is conflict in a forest, but there is also negotiation, reciprocity, and perhaps even selflessness.”—Ferris Jab, on the work of ecologist Suzanne Simard, in “The Social Life of Forests,” The New York Times
A few years ago, the writer and alt-right hero Jordan Peterson took some time out from ‘owning the libs’ to tweet his thoughts on a new study on ant behaviour. “30% of the ants do 70% of the work,” he wrote. “Not a consequence of the West, or capitalism, in case it needs to be said :)” It wasn’t the first time that Peterson has looked to the animal kingdom as an apologia for capitalism. The Canadian pundit is also fond of using lobsters to argue that hierarchies are ‘natural’ rather than the result of social constructs that give some groups power over others.
As anyone who spends time in the ‘manosphere’—a group of blogs and message boards populated by Incels, men’s rights groups, and pick-up artists—will know, the behaviour of wild animals is often used within these spaces to explain away the worst impulses of our species. Wolf pack behaviour, for instance, is frequently extrapolated onto humans, with the most obvious example being the popularity of the term ‘alpha’ to positively describe a male who is dominant in social or professional scenarios.16 But as many have pointed out, much of this thinking is based on a Darwinist theory of evolution, one which pits all living creatures against each other for limited natural resources while ignoring the many examples of non-human behaviour that “verges,” as a recent New York Times article put it, “on socialism.”17
Titled “The Social Life of Forests,” the article in question is based on the work of Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard whose research on subterranean networks between fungi and trees “upended” the idea of trees as “solitary individuals [that] competed for space and resources.”18 Instead, she found that “while there is indeed conflict in a forest, there is also negotiation, reciprocity, and even selflessness.” In the mid-90s, Simard’s research was seen, in the male-dominated field of forestry, as “girly.” The fact that over 15 years later it’s still controversial—some researchers see “reciprocal exploitation” in place of Simard’s “big cooperative collective”—shows how invested many people still are in a dog-eat-dog view of the world.
”What all of these works have in common, from Serre’s treatise on the humble parasite to Haraway’s brand of ecofeminism, is a move away from the idea that humans are categorically different from all other living beings.”
But what if, instead of using ethology, as Peterson does, to reaffirm our human-centric perspective on life, we looked to nature for ideas of how to do things better—particularly when it comes to growth? In one of his Post Growth Toolkit interviews, Geoffrey Bowker does just that. Finding inspiration from the collective thinking of ants, he argues that horizontal decision-making could be the best way to combat climate change. “There’s no solution that’s going to come from central government in any of this,” he says. “It’s going to be us, as a species, rethinking who we are, reworking who we are, replanning who we are and then rippling that out across the whole sets of relationships that we have. That’s what we see ants doing enormously successfully.”
Bowker’s thinking is informed by decades of research and writing on cross-species relationships by well-known figures such as Michel Serres and Donna Haraway, as well as younger academics like Merlin Sheldrake and Anna Tsing, both of whom recently released books on mushrooms. What all of these works have in common, from Serre’s treatise on the humble parasite to Haraway’s brand of ecofeminism, is a move away from the idea that humans are categorically different from all other living beings. If we can first get our heads around this shift, then, as Bowker recently told me “a rainbow of new outcomes becomes available.”
r/wallstreetbets vs. The Hamptons
“Instead of having ‘idea dinners’ or quiet whispered conversations amongst hedge funds in the Hamptons these kids have the courage to do it transparently in a forum.”
A commentary on the decreasing lifespan of consumer electronics, Benjamin Gaulon adds Internet Compression to his long-running series of tech artefacts entitled Tech Mining (2002–). The hand-sized brick, produced during France’s first lockdown, constitutes a beyond-repair wireless router the artist reverted into a state of “inert matter” by shredding. “The resource takes the front stage,” Gaulon writes on his website, “the design is abolished, the utility is gone, still, a plastic object is present in the form of ultimate waste.”