After two years of extensive renovations, Brussel’s art and technology centre iMAL reopens with “Quantum: In Search of the Invisible,” an exhibition exploring the world of quantum physics. Featuring works by Julieta Aranda, James Bridle (A State of Sin, 2018, image), Yunchul Kim, Semiconductor, Suzanne Treister, Yu-Chen Wang, and others, the show assembles artist-scientist collaborations that emerged from the Arts at CERN residency program.
After 21 years, Berkeley’s SETI Research Center announced that it will shut down its distributed computing project SETI@home on March 31st, 2020. Launched in May 1999, the popular (screensaver) software allowed users to donate CPU time to analyzing data from the Arecibo radio telescope in search of alien life.
Another test of SpaceX’s next-generation rocket, Starship, ended in failure over the weekend, after a major test article imploded at the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
Beyond Scrolls & Screens is a new experiment by Christine Surgue and Google Arts. Using object recognition, it allows users to explore and jump back and forth between reoccuring visual elements in high-resolution scans of screens and scrolls from the Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, and Tachibana Museum collections.
“Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI” opens at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, proposing “new ways of thinking about intelligence, nature, and artifice.” In showing works by Zach Blas, Ian Cheng, Simon Denny, Stephanie Dinkins, Trevor Paglen (image), Hito Steyerl, Martine Syms, and others, curator Claudia Schmuckli brings together essential artistic positions that parse the strange and unsettling intricacies of human-machine relations.
Eyal Weizman, the founder of the activist research studio Forensic Architecture, has been barred entry into the United States. Informed by email that his right to travel to the U.S. had been revoked, he learned in a subsequent embassy visit that an algorithm had identified a security threat that “could be related to something he was involved in, people he had been in contact with, places he had visited, hotels at which he had stayed, or a pattern of relations among those.” These unsubstantiated claims have left him unable to attend his retrospective exhibition at Dade College’s Museum of Art and Design in Miami, that opens next week.
Celebrating the 30th anniversary of one of Humanity’s most iconic (and existentially wrought) images, NASA releases a new version of the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ photo of Earth.
Thanks to a grant from the American Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the Asheville Art Museum will digitize more than 1,600 materials from its Black Mountain College Collection, giving the public access to previously unseen archival documents, literature, and works of art. Active from 1933 to 1957, the legendary experimental art school in North Carolina attracted and inspired artists like Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, and Willem de Kooning.
“The Dead Web—The End” opens at the Ludwig Múzeum in Budapest, bleakly imagining the digital detritus after the internet’s collapse. Curators Nathalie Bachand and Béla Tamás Kónya expand on previous iterations of the show with early web-based artworks from the C3 Foundation archive, and new Hungarian contributions from an open call. Brigitta Zics’ Semiosphere (2020, image), for example, teleports vistors into a “busy waiting room” filled with post-collapse chatter.
A dozen artists, designers, and cultural producers including Suzanne Kite, Tim Maughan, and Kofi Oduro converge in Ottawa to kick off Artengine‘s Digital Economies Lab (DEL). At the weekend workshop, hosted by Jeremy Bailey, invited participants begin their “year-long exploration of the wonders and anguish of making art and culture in the twenty-first century.” The goal: prototyping more sustainable, resilient, and equitable financial futures for creatives.
Raphaël Bastide’s URL installation otherti.me (2019) shows at the transmediale Vorspiel opening at Acud Macht Neu, Berlin at the invitation of panke.gallery. The work, presented as a URL mural, invites viewers to explore a corpus of 30 online works Bastide made over 30 consecutive days, starting on November 16, 2019. Drawing inspiration from daily life, the French artist’s online experiments include emoji clocks, Wikipedia modifications, animated GIFs, and HTML hacks.
