Swiss artist collective Fragmentin unveils Global Wiring, a new permanent sculpture extracted from a hypothetical Alpine future. A stratified column of recycled glass, realized during a recent residency, resembles a glacial ice core sample contaminated with contemporary infrastructure: water piping, electricity cables, fiber optics. Part of the collective’s Obsology series, the work points a post-digital archaeology lens at modern hyper-connectivity.
Martine Syms’s solo exhibition “She Mad Season One” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), marking the U.S. premiere of the fifth and newest episode of the artist’s titular sitcom project. She Mad tells the story about a young woman trying to make it as an artist in Los Angeles, “dissecting the ways Black experiences are mediated on television, in film, and online.” Shown in its entirety for the first time, the museum situates each episode within an immersive sculptural installation.
Exonemo’s CGI puppy mill Metaverse Petshop opens at NowHere in New York City. Building on a May beta test, this version adds NFT functionality and complicates transactions. Purchasers of virtual pups are faced with an ethical dilemma: keep their ‘metaverse pet’ in its entirety or strip off its 3D texture map and sell it on OpenSea. “It is like catching an actual animal and processing its skin to make it live much longer than the original,” the artist duo (ominously) note.
Art Safiental, a biennial outdoor exhibition of land and environmental art, returns to Grisons, Switzerland, to inspire “Learning from the Earth.” 15 artists including Ursula Biemann, Julius von Bismarck, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, and Dharmendra Prasad contribute works that are “both campaign, methodology, and intervention.” Bismarck’s Trees Without Borders (2022, image), for example, permanently transplants a native larch above the local tree line, anticipating the effects of a warming climate.
The American designer and researcher in conversation about “WETWARE,” her Cyberfeminism all star NFT collection that’s currently on Feral File
American art historian (and HOLO collaborator) Zsofia Valyi-Nagy demos her ‘re-enactment’ of Vera Molnar’s Lettres de ma mère (1981-1991) on a vintage Tektronix 4052 computer at Humboldt University, Berlin. Valyi-Nagy, currently a visiting doctoral student at media theorist Stefan Höltgen’s Signallabor, reverse-engineered the digital art pioneer’s famous plotter drawing series in BASIC code, “a programming language Molnar would have used at the time.”
Berlin’s panke.gallery and Zentrum für Netzkunst celebrate the 10th anniversary of iPhone live, the one-year art performance by Johannes P Osterhoff. From June 29, 2012, the German media artist broadcast screenshots from his jailbroken iPhone to a public website whenever he pressed the home button, aggregating 13,567 snapshots (about 40 per day) of his digital life. In commemoration, Osterhoff and invited experts reflect on the iconic project at /rosa, Berlin.
John Gerrard’s solo show “Endling” opens at Pace, New York, presenting three new and recent large-scale simulations. Flare (Oceania) (2022, image), the exhibition’s centrepiece, links fossil fuel extraction and rising sea levels in the South Pacific, as documented by Tongan activist and artist Uili Lousi. Programmed in the Unreal game engine, Gerrard’s virtual environment runs on local Tonga time, resembling an evocative video feed from the affected region.
Igor Štromajer’s hybrid installation ƒ(x)=ax³+bx²+cx+d*, realised together with German art historian and curator Sakrowski, opens at the Aksioma project space in Ljubljana. The titular cubic function is expressed in a 1 m³ concrete cube balancing on one of its vertices, as did the cube in the iconic GIF animation the Slovenian net artist (also known as intima) created in 1996. Through AR, the two can exist together (image), traversing materiality, technologies, and time.
