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24th Sydney Biennale Radiates Heat of “Ten Thousand Suns”

Greg J. Smith
● 09/03/2024

“Ten Thousand Suns,” the 24th edition of the Biennale of Sydney opens at venues across the New South Wales capital. Artists including Mona Al Qadiri, Dumb Type, Özgür Kar, and Lawrence Lek are featured at the White Bay Power Station flagship exhibition, which repurposes the former coal-fired facility as a cultural hub. Excitingly, Australian cyberfeminism originators VNS Matrix present a selection of their works from the last four decades on banners, displays, and zines throughout the venue (image).

Biennale of Sydney

Critic Makes Connection Between Art Trope and Cultural Paralysis

Greg J. Smith
● 08/03/2024
“A default move within contemporary art over the past two decades: defunctionalized objects pulled out of usual circulation or infrastructural location appear to offer a kind of freezing and deictic insight.”
– e-flux Contributing Editor Evan Calder Williams, taking aim at white cube infrastructure porn. “As if a hunk of undersea internet cable on a gallery floor confronts us with the materiality of communication,” he writes in the second part of an essay on sweeping cultural paralysis. [quote edited]
e-flux

Artists Weigh Global Flows and Social Atomization in “Universal / Remote”

Greg J. Smith
● 06/03/2024

“Universal / Remote,” a show chronicling how “capital and data flow freely on a global scale,” opens at the National Art Center Tokyo (NACT). Artists including Xu Bing, Maiko Jinushi, Trevor Paglen, and Evan Roth contribute works addressing globalization and social atomization. Hito Steyerl, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, and Miloš Trakilović stage their video installation Mission Accomplished: Belanciege (2019, image), a sardonic reflection on post-Berlin Wall European culture—and the luxury brand Balenciaga.

NACT

George Legrady Cites Bauhaus to Frame AI-Generated Imagery

Greg J. Smith
● 05/03/2024
“László Moholy-Nagy telephoned instructions to a factory in the 1920s to produce images without the need to be on-site to direct production.”
– Artist George Legrady, reaching back to the Bauhaus to locate an early precedent for AI-generated imagery. Taking stock of his ongoing experimentation with MidJourney and Stable Diffusion, Legrady explores the aesthetic and critical concerns around prompt-based art.
Artillery

Critic Pits AARON against Matisse

Greg J. Smith
● 05/03/2024
“The line, when regarded close up, does not have the sweeping fluency or charm of the human hand, of a Matisse, for instance, whom some of the linear portraits seem to be channelling.”
– Critic Lilly Wei, conducting a close reading of the linework of AARON, late American artist Harold Cohen’s painting software. Taking stock of his Whitney retrospective, Wei concludes Cohen’s computer paintings “are animated by texture, touch, and the glow of colour, and better for it, so human artistry isn’t obsolete yet.”
Studio International

At Mois Multi, Festivals Futures Come Into Focus

Alexander Scholz
Festival Futures Come Into Focus, Heralding Action
Future Festivals Tour:
Mois Multi, Quebec City (CA), Feb 1-25, 2024
Audrée Juteau, Zoey Gauld, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, Ellen Furey, Mystic-Informatic (2024)
Méduse signage proudly signalling Mois Multi to Quebec City residents
Gilles Arteau, Le Carougeois (2024)
Images:
Mois Multi
2024

February in Quebec City is as ‘peak Canadian winter’ as you can get. Temperatures of -15°C are not uncommon, and as the wind ramps up, it gets much colder. Each and every winter, Mois Multi battles the deep freeze with a bold and experimental program of multidisciplinary art and performance. This year its warmth and joy could be felt most tangibly on the streets of the St-Roch district where, via augmented reality, residents could gawk at an elongated cartoon woman loafing beside a recreation centre or an abstract geometric assemblage craning over a hillside overlook. Mois Multi commissioner Emile Beauchemin poetically describes the festival’s 25th-anniversary edition, which ran from February 1st to 25th, 2024 as providing the “monsters, martyrs, and heavens” attendees needed to nurture their souls and imaginations. Likening its musical performances, installations, and mixed reality experiences to encounters with magical creatures and idyllic utopias, Beauchemin invokes the mythic to frame how Mois Multi “defies caution.”

Multidisciplinary research-creation has been in Mois Multi’s DNA since its founding in 2000, yielding an impressive 48 experimental performances and installations.

The first edition of Mois Multi took place in 2000. The festival was the brainchild of Recto-Verso Productions, a production team that also co-founded Quebec City’s sprawling Méduse arts facility. Like fellow Future Festival MUTEK, Mois Multi commenced at the turn of the millennium moment when new media art broke away from video art and the moving image—from institutions into ephemeral and experimental spaces. The festival showcased this exciting new milieu, and from day one some of the headlining projects were homegrown. Recto-Verso developed artworks that didn’t fit into traditional definitions of stage design—weird environments and machines that took advantage of new technologies and required large teams to mount on both the artistic and technical sides. Basically, art that “defies caution.” Early highlights include lighting designer Caroline Ross’ elevated circular audiovisual performance chamber, Lumens (2000-04), and Rachel Dubuc and Berri R. Bergeron’s dadaesque Machine-E (E pure, if it moves!) (2001-02) that plays (and destroys) media with clockwork precision. Multidisciplinary research-creation has been in the festival’s DNA ever since, yielding an impressive 48 experimental performances and installations including Carole Nadeau’s LE MOBILE (2010), Herman Kolgen & David Letellier’s Eotone (2014), and Martin Messier & Yro’s Ashes (2018) that have been presented at Mois Multi and festivals worldwide.

Mykalle Bielinski, Warm Up (2024)
Club Efemeer, Voile (2024)
Ludovic Boney, Fonction Chromatique (2024)
Navid Navab (with Garnet Willis), Organism (2024)
Images:
Mois Multi
2024

The 2024 edition of Mois Multi continued the tradition of incubating key works in-house. Presenting the results of a month-long residency Belgian artist duo Club Efemeer staged the sublime Voile (2024) in a black box theatre within Méduse. A delicate, luminous veil articulated by lasers, smoke, and darkness, the immaterial form billowed like a curtain in the breeze. Literally performing degrowth, artist and composer Mykalle Bielinski built a stationary bike onstage in Warm Up (2024), and then pedalled it to generate power for her microphone and laptop. And at the former space of worship La Nef, sculptor-musician Navid Navab played a century-old pipe organ; not as a keyboard, but with chaotic machines and microcontrollers. The playfulness of eccentric performances and the AR takeover of the streetscape was echoed in the Volet Pro symposium. Curated by Amélie Laurence Fortin, it assembled a network of artists and cultural producers to situate the program within a broader field of discourse. In addition to addressing timely topics like post-generative AI creativity and virtual exhibition design, Volet Pro also platformed nuanced conversations in support of local and international art ecosystems. Directly related to Future Festivals, the producers of three new Quebec festivals (L’Écoute, Le Casse-Gueule, and Génèse, a student-organized festival at Laval University) shared programming highlights and learnings gleaned from their fledgling first editions. Independent media received airtime as well, with the publishers behind BLOK, Espace, and HOLO discussing their commitments to their respective art beats—and the challenges of building audiences in the attention economy.

Media art is not traditionally kid-friendly fare, but Mois Multi transforms some of its more playful offerings into activations for younger attendees.

The augmented reality cityscape sculpture garden “L’Espace suspendu” demonstrates how Mois Multi’s innovations are not limited to adventurous programming—they open up access. Beyond its public art mandate, the initiative onboards artists from more traditional mediums into AR. Contributing artists Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand, Ludovic Boney, Cooke Sasseville, and Fanny Mesnard came from illustration and sculpture backgrounds—they had never worked in AR before. Retro-Verso, together with local technologists ALTKEY, supported them throughout the ideation and production process, laying the ground for introducing more artists to the medium in the future. The festival also dedicates part of its program to families. Media art is not traditionally kid-friendly fare, but Mois Multi transforms some of its more playful offerings into activations for younger attendees. The interactivity of Vincent Fillion’s audiovisual drone synthesizer OCTOCOSM[E] (2023), for example, was leveraged to allow children to get hands-on with its central abstract and experimental instrument.

Mois Multi’s anniversary edition was also a pivotal moment for Future Festivals. Scheduled at the project’s critical halfway point, it reunited the associated festival makers for some serious reflection. What have we learned about the state of cultural infrastructure—our needs and wants—at past Future Festival sessions? What are the project’s blind spots, the unknowns outside of our own (largely Western) festival realities, that we have yet to cover? Have our findings changed the group’s initial visions for the future and, most importantly, how do we translate them into action?

Focus: Multidisciplinary and electronic art
Location: Kébec / Quebec City, Canada
Launch: 2000
Frequency: Annual
Visitors: numbers forthcoming
Team: numbers forthcoming
Structure: NPO (nonprofit organization)
Funding: Public (national, provincial, municipal)
Formats: Exhibitions, performances, public art, conference

Lauren Lee McCarthy Opens Saliva Bar at Mandeville Art Gallery

Alexander Scholz
● 02/03/2024

UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery opens “Bodily Autonomy,” Lauren Lee McCarthy’s largest solo show in the U.S. to date. Curator Ceci Moss brings together two major series of works—Surrogate (2022) and Saliva (2022)—in which the Chinese-American artist examines bio-surveillance through performances, videos, and installations. A newly commissioned Saliva Bar, for example, invites visitors to reflect on data privacy, race, gender, and class as they pertain to genetic material over traded spit samples.

Mandeville Art Gallery

Massive Attack Chides Toothless Guardian Editorial about Festival Funding Ethics

Alexander Scholz
● 02/03/2024
“We’d have kept our fossil fuel funding sponsors AND curated poetry competitions on climate change if it wasn’t for those pesky school strike kids.”
– English trip hop juggernaut Massive Attack, ‘decoding’ a Guardian op-ed on ethics and precarity in the cultural sector. The piece cites the criticism and climate activism offered by Bergen’s recent International Literary Festival as an example for why festivals matter, but fails to explore the Faustian bargain that sustains a lot of cultural infrastructure.
Twitter / X

AI-Generated Kara Swisher Biographies Flood Amazon

Alexander Scholz
● 01/03/2024
“So literally, I was like, what the fuck? Get these down. What are you doing? It’s as if I was the head of Gucci, and there’s all these knockoffs.”
– Veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher, on AI-generated clones of her memoir, Burn Book (2024), flooding Amazon. First reported by 404 media, the rip-offs have since blossomed in variety, sporting alt titles (Tech’s Queen Bee With A Sting), different authors, and illustrious synthetic cover photography. “So I, of course, put them all together, and I sent Andy Jassy [the CEO of Amazon] a note and said, what the fuck? You’re costing me money.”
Hard Fork

Oliver Ressler Documents How Climate Crisis “Dog Days Bite Back”

Greg J. Smith
● 01/03/2024

Underscoring the direness of the climate crisis, Oliver Ressler’s “Dog Days Bite Back” opens at Belvedere 21 in Vienna. Featured are works spanning photography, film, and installation by the Austrian artist that lament the state of stalled climate policy and fossil fuel crony capitalism run amok. His 2-channel video installation Climate Feedback Loops (2023, image), for example, starkly documents the ice melt around Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago that is rapidly disappearing into the Arctic Ocean.

Belvedere 21

Critic Derides Jeff Koons’ Moon Sculptures as “Space Junk”

Greg J. Smith
● 29/02/2024
“I hate this project. The idea that Jeff Koons may be the first point of contact when we encounter extraterrestrials—when they discover his crate left on the Moon—what a statement by humanity.”
– Artnet critic Ben Davis, lamenting the gaudiness of American artist Jeff Koons’ Moon Phases (2024). Recently deposited on the Moon by a SpaceX rocket, it entails 125 stainless steel sculptures (each named after a historical figure), which Davis derides as “space junk.” [quote edited]
The Art Angle

NFTs Become “SOUND MACHINES” in Feral File Exhibition

Greg J. Smith
● 29/02/2024

“SOUND MACHINES,” a show exploring the untapped sonic potential of NFTs, opens on Feral File. Curated by MoMA, it features 0xDEAFBEEF, American Artist & Tommy Martinez, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, and Yoko Ono. Their works playfully introduce sound to tokenized art, as evidenced by 0xDEAFBEEF’s PAYPHONE (2022-, image), which allows collectors to purchase a phone card granting priority access to participate in a performance by the artist.

Feral File

AI Zombie Content Floods Internet, Turning Platforms into Ghost Towns

Alexander Scholz
● 27/02/2024
“The internet is filling up with ‘zombie content’ designed to game algorithms and scam humans. It’s becoming a place where bots talk to bots, and search engines crawl a lonely expanse of pages written by artificial intelligence.”
– Technology reporter James Purtill, on the accelerating degradation of the Web. Bot-overrun platforms like X were “never designed for a world where machines can talk with people convincingly,” says digital media scholar Timothy Graham of the deluge of AI-generated content. ”The platforms have no infrastructure in place. The gates are open.”
ABC News

Tomás Saraceno Makes Visible the Hues of the Cosmic Web

Alexander Scholz
● 24/02/2024

Tomás Saraceno’s solo exhibition “Live(s) on Air” opens at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles, showcasing, among other works, new cloud and foam sculptures that manifest as clusters of iridescent geometries suspended in mid-air. Juxtapozed with a series of infrared photography that suggests a new era of climate-neutral aerosolar flight, the Argentinian artist’s floating colour fractals “make visible the spectral hues and synaesthetic vectors that shape the cosmic web,” inviting meditation on “forms of life and eco-social interdependence.”

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Desires vs Needs: Pınar Yoldaş Charts Technocene at ICA San Diego

Alexander Scholz
● 24/02/2024

The Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego (ICA) opens “Pınar Yoldaş: Synaptic Sculpture,” the Turkish-American artist and UC San Diego Professor’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition. Expanding her oevre of speculative biologies, Yoldaş presents several new works including an algae bioreactor brewing plastic alternatives that illuminate the technocene. “If we ask ourselves what drives technological progress,” Yoldaş explains, “we can see that it is as much our collective desires as it is our collective needs.”

ICA San Diego

Beware the Swarming AI Killer Robots: Security Scholar Warns of Emergent Behaviour in Autonomous Military Systems

Alexander Scholz
● 24/02/2024
“Neither side in the debate on ‘killer robots’ has addressed the most potentially unnerving aspect of using them in battle: sooner or later, they’ll be able to communicate with each other without human intervention.”
– World security scholar and author Michael Klare, on the dangers of emergent behaviour in autonomous weaponry as DARPA expands efforts to create military AI systems capable of true swarming. “Autonomous weapons might jointly elect to adopt combat tactics none of the individual devices were programmed to perform”, warns Klare, “conceivably engaging in acts unintended and unforeseen by their human commanders.”
Salon

Rosa Menkman Maps the Lost Colours of Nature’s Original Glitch

Alexander Scholz
● 23/02/2024

Rosa Menkman’s mixed-media installation, A Spectrum of Lost and Unnamed Colours (2024), opens at EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne (CH), concluding the “speculative dialogues” with computer and environmental scientists that informed the work and guided her EPFL residency. In a series of translucent, lens-like sigils, the Dutch artist and researcher tells the story of a future media archaeologist who, in mapping colour loss, uncovers how air pollution and AI deluge ‘dimmed’ the atmospheric rainbow—“nature’s original ‘glitch’.”

EPFL Pavilions

Aura Satz Describes Noisemaking Sirens as “Circuits of Ear and Mouth”

Greg J. Smith
● 22/02/2024
“Many technologies are modelled on our anatomy—they are extensions of us. I wanted to get closer to the sirens, to see them as a ‘circuit of an ear and a mouth, listening out for threat and broadcasting it to the population,’ to quote the film.”
– Artist Aura Satz, describing the noisemaking subject at the heart of her debut feature film Preemptive Listening (2024). In conversation with associate producer Tendai John Mutambu, Satz discusses sonic aesthetics and how adopting an abolitionist framework impacted her narrative.
Ocula
$40 USD