A retrospective collecting 40 works by the Australian artist, “Patricia Piccinini: We Are Connected” opens at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum. Showcasing her unsettling sculptures and installations that morph contemporary biopolitics towards the grotesque, the show features works including The Bond (2016, image centre) and The Field (2018, image), which, respectively, depict a mother cradling a human-ish fleshy creature, and a (wildly) genetically modified crop.
Canadian curator Andrew Lochhead revisits the controversy around realities:united’ cancelled public artwork LightSpell (2017), installed at Toronto’s Pioneer Village subway station. The architectural light matrix was designed for visitor messages but never activated over fears of abuse. “We were commissioned to modify the installation’s software,” the artists reveal in the comments about extensive reworks, “but the Toronto Transit Commission stopped replying to us for unknown reasons.”
Researchers create the world’s first synthetic embryos—no sperm, eggs, or fertilization required. Molecular Geneticist Jacob Hanna and his team accomplished the feat by reprogramming stem cells from mice back to a naïve state, and simulating a placenta’s blood and oxygen requirements with a nutrient solution; the cells self-assembled into embryo-like structures with an intestinal tract, a proto-brain, and a heart. “Our next challenge is to understand how stem cells know what to do,” says Hanna.
“Entangled: bio/media” opens at Shanghai’s Chronus Art Center (CAC), exploring “the biophilic properties of artificial intelligence, electronics, algorithms, and informatics” in a group exhibition. Unveiled progressively in thematic chapters, eleven works by Ani Liu, Shuyi Cao, Etsuko Yakushimaru, Yunchul Kim, Xu Haomin (Rootless Tree, 2022), and others narrate a parable of “co-naturality” (see Eugene Thacker’s Biomedia) and “all beings comingling and co-existing in symbiosis.”
N∰menon, an installation by Melle Nieling and Amelie Mckee opens at Künstlerhaus Dortmund. Produced during a Plicnik-Collective summer residency at the German venue, it consists of a series of apparatuses intended to draw attention to the lack of a user. Drawing on video interviews that describe a mysterious event with spiritual and economic resonance, the spartan scene stokes “feelings of paranoid threat, in which the unknown opens the imagination.”
Bob Bicknell-Knight’s solo exhibition “Non-Player Character” opens at Galeria.Kollektiva, Kassel, linking NPCs in videogames and controlled existence in a hyper-capitalist, technocratic world. Expanding on the titular CGI film, a new commission and the show’s centrepiece, the British artist presents a series of hybrid paintings featuring NPC quotes from iconic games, 3D-printed sculptures of useless inventory items, and an interactive graveyard to mourn the “digital deaths” of NPC companions.
Concluding her PlatteForum residency, Raquel Meyers’ solo exhibition “Concrete Redundancy” opens at the Denver urban art laboratory. Meyers, a Spanish artist known for her work with obsolete technologies, organizes artifacts created with typewriters, teletext, and fax machines into “techno-rubble”—a tribute to Denver7’s soon-to-be-demolished brutalist landmark. “Concrete Redundancy is a tool for the struggle,” the exhibition text states, “an Anthropocene souvenir for the future.”
Iskra Velitchkova is a Bulgarian self-taught computational artist based in Madrid. She focuses her work on generative art but she is interested and inspired by all kinds of interactions between humans and machines. With a background in data visualization, first with her own studio and as a member of different scientific teams, Velitchkova grounds her work in understanding how we can design and use technology to better understand ourselves.
Q: Fairly recently, I reluctantly joined Twitter, and I stayed for your plotter drawings, which I encountered thanks to an algorithm. Not only are the works elegant, intricate, and graceful, but it was exciting to see the familiar movement of the plotter pen, in the form of a gif or a video clip, something so physically material interspersed with the hyper-digital generative art on my feed. Could you tell me more about your work with plotters, and how it relates to or is distinct from your digital generative art practice?
A: The plotter work is completely different from my digital work. A few years ago, when I decided to quit my job and begin my journey in art, I spent a year entirely focused on exploring where I wanted to go. I had the clear vision that whatever I would do, it would be connected to and based on technology, but I needed to link to something physical. My work—my life—is always based on roots, connections, and relationships. After several months of theoretical explorations I decided to take action. I bought a pottery wheel without knowing what I was going to do with it, but I started to learn about clay and porcelain. I was so intrigued by how to bring my algorithms into something that is pure and simple as clay. Then I bought a plotter and I started to explore how to use it to paint on the irregular surface. And I just fell in love with it and I forgot my original mission! Both artisan activities allow me to escape from the normal perception of time. The experimentation became the work itself.
Generative art has something very different from other art movements. In generative art we explore with a huge lack of control. It sometimes feels like there is some kind of a divine power on the other side. We guide the machine but then the machine gives us an inhuman result—and sometimes it’s cryptic as to how it is made. One way I like to explore this complexity is plotting the output. A composition appears on screen in less than a second, but once you plot it, the course of time changes. You can observe for hours and see the rationale behind the drawing—you begin to understand it. If you use this as a process, the plotter feels like a translator—a teacher—I create a piece, I plot it, I understand it, and then I go back to the computer with stronger directions. And this is why I love to film the process and share it—it feels like a story about time and a dialogue between me and the machine.
I like to compare this process to photography, which I have loved since I was a child. After training the eye for many years, I decided to dive more into the theory of it and learn how the camera actually works. Once I started to explore with the digital camera I realized I didn’t understand anything (the light, the shutter speed, etc.), so I decided to buy a film-based camera. First of all there is huge friction, since you are constrained to a roll, you have to be intentional about each photograph and then develop it. This period opened me to the need to always get to the roots of any activity I do. The plotter is my analogue camera now. You cannot get crazy if you don’t master your tools.
Q: Your website opens with a proposition: “I don’t think we should make technology more human, I believe that we have to push technology forward to understand us better.” This reminds me of Vera Molnar’s attitude toward computing technology; from the beginning, when she was met with criticism for using such a ‘cold’ machine to make art, she argued that using the computer could actually bring us closer to the human aspects of creativity. In what ways have systems, algorithms, and neural networks helped you understand yourself better, as an artist and/or as a human?
A: After many years working and dealing with data, at some point I realized I was more interested in the algorithms themselves than in the data. I had the chance to work with very talented people from whom I learned a lot about the science behind our technological processes today. Techniques like Deep Learning opened to me a new world of possibilities to map our world. Understanding how machines trace our behaviours and classify them into several dimensions (not just the three we are used to), understanding how we are establishing distances between ourselves and our context (which book the algorithm recommends to me, which song, which person). it’s something bigger than what we used to think. It’s about finding a new kind of distance, which is not physical distance but it is still a distance.
I mean, formalizing these connections between us and things we belong to, the people we love or potentially do, it feels like somehow, an unprecedented encyclopedia about ourselves. Even if we are far from having true intelligent machines, we are building the basis for that. I really don’t think all this work has to be focused on a mission to replicate human identity—there are enough people on Earth—but I think technology is how we unlock mysteries. We are limited in our perceptions, we can not even understand our own feelings sometimes. We tend to be more rational because we have learned this is the way we deal with complicated situations; but we are much more than a brain and our emotional side—our passions—guide us ultimately. This is why, my utopian dream, is that after a long history of human explorations and deviations, our ultimate goal is to process who we are and what makes us human. And if machines can help with that, it would be a welcome change.
German duo Mouse on Mars (MoM) performs using ROBODYNAMIC DIFFUSION: RDD (2021, image), as part of “Technobodies,” a program across Munich venues Lenbachhaus, Haus der Kunst, and Museum Brandhorst. Jointly developed by MoM’s Jan St. Werner, Michael Akstaller, Nele Jäger, and Oliver Mayer, RDD is a directional speaker bot that projects sound in a tightly focused beam, creating opportunities to induce “controlled disorientations and sensory redirections” in audiences.
Exploring how medicine and shamanism can begin to blur into one another, “Post-Human Narratives—In the Name of Scientific Witchery” opens in Hong Kong. Featured artists include Betty Apple, Mayumi Hosokura, and Yu Shuk Pui Bobby, with contributed works ranging from Liv Tsim’s biomatter fabrications (2022, image) to Florence Lam’s Zirca, an extremely witchy performance about channeling energy—applying so much of it to materials that they produce light.
