“Outside In,” a web-based, site-specific AR exhibition by Manuel Rossner and Damjanski opens near /rosa, panke.gallery and Zentrum für Netzkunst’s Berlin project space. Realized on Panke’s OpenAR.art platform, the two sculptures—Rossner’s Spatial Painting (image) and Damjanski’s Inside: Spatial Painting—stand in dialogue, where the latter takes visitors into the former—“a perspective that wouldn’t have been possible with AR technology.”
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“SPACE PROGRAM: Indoctrination,” a solo show by American sculptor Tom Sachs opens at Art Sonje Center in Seoul. The fifth in a series of exhibitions where the artist playfully reconstitutes the aesthetics of his nation’s rich aereospace history (image: Launch, 2010), the show evolves the format through indoctrination. After participating in “missions and tests of knowledge” visitors can join Sachs’ DIY space program—and those lacking ‘the right stuff’ can attend a reeducation centre.
New Push to CRISPR Our Way Out of Climate Crisis
“Plants are already extremely efficient carbon fixing machines, resulting from millions of years of evolution, so I still remain to be convinced that CRISPR can do much to improve carbon sequestration at the scale we need.”
Part of Serpentine’s long-term climate crisis program, “Back to Earth” opens in London with arresting propositions. Works by Agnes Denes, Brian Eno, Carolina Caycedo, Formafantasma, Sissel Tolaas, and others present research, experiences, and interventions: A new edition of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Pollinator Pathmaker (2021), for example, algorithmically arranged 62 plant species in nearby Kensington Gardens to “serve the greatest diversity of pollinators.”
Colossal Marble Hercules Head Recovered from Antikythera Shipwreck Site Not Just a Win for Art History
“The wreck is not just important to art historians or to the reconstruction of ancient trade routes, but also to our understanding of the travelers, merchants, and sailors of the ancient Mediterranean.”
“Pardon Our Dust,” a solo show by avatar artist LaTurbo Avedon, opens at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Vienna. The show’s titular work (image, 2022) riffs on a slogan used to describe 1990s websites as ‘under construction,’ revising that narrative of progress for nascent Web3. Serving as tour guide and critic, Avedon parses emerging decentralization and ever-present commercialization, in a narrative rendering virtuality torn between “construction and deconstruction.”
Sarah Friend drops the final chapter of her NFT “social sculpture” Off (2021) at Public Works, New York. “Off: Endgame,” a solo show commissioned by Rhizome, Fingerprints, and Refraction, also introduces Wildcards (image), a new work and key to Off’s secrets: The Canadian software artist offers customised card decks containing mint instructions for one of 52 NFTs; Wildcard tokens, however, will not become tradeable unless Off’s hidden message is revealed through cooperation.
Data Scraping an Underacknowledged Privacy Concern, Researcher Says
“Scraping can sound like intrusive hacking—because it is. It disregards contextual integrity and asserts a right to inhale entire data sets and process them.”
Out Now: David M. Peña-Guzmán Ponders the Philosophical and Ethical Repercussions of “When Animals Dream”
David M. Peña-Guzmán
When Animals Dream
Ed Yong Considers The Permanent Divide Between Our Umwelt and Another Animal’s
“You can play recordings of a whale’s song, but that doesn’t show what it means for whales to hear each other across oceanic distances. You can depict the magnetic field that envelops the planet, but that can’t begin to capture the experience of a robin using that field to fly across a continent.”
CGI Artist Saves Late Neighbour’s Op Art Legacy From Bin
As documented in his now viral Twitter thread, British CGI artist Alan Warburton recovers hundreds of op art drawings from his upstairs neighbour, George Westren. Westren, “a sweet guy” who battled addiction and anxiety but found solace in his art, died during Covid. As the clearance company got to work, Warburton rushed in to save Weston’s legacy from the bin. “It’s just such a privilege to see all this work that must have been carefully amassed over years,” he writes.
Ars Electronica announces this year’s Prix winners, awarding a prestigious Golden Nica to Jung Hsu and Natalia Rivera’s Bi0film.net. Selected from 2,338 submissions and inspired by bacterial resistance, the open platform aids the creation of decentralised, nomadic protest networks by turning umbrellas into parabolic Wifi antennas. Other awarded works include Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s Perfect Sleep, Cristhian Avila’s Eternal Return, and Kimchi and Chips’ Another Moon.
Olia Lialina Tells Us How She Really Feels about Marina Abramović’s Gushing Praise for the NFT Community
“I can barely type an email and they’re raising millions to help people and save the rainforest. They are heroes.”
Much to the delight of writers, concrete poets, and ASCII artists, creative coders Play and EREN launch Typed, a text-based NFT market place on the Tezos chain. Featuring a spartan interface reminiscent of the Hic et Nunc glory days, Typed allows minting of bare-bones text entries, inviting all kinds of character-based experimentation. Within hours of being announced on Twitter, the platform was bustling with activity (image: Leander Herzog’s adaption of his generative art hit Agglo).
Clunky AI-Generated Images an Internet Art Form in Itself, Researcher Says
“There’ll be all kinds of crazy subcultures of image generation. So if it produces these kind of hazy, slightly mangled images with people’s arms in the wrong places, that’s OK, we just get used to that aesthetic.”
“Biotopia,” an exhibition that “questions the central position of humans in the world,” opens at Le Pavillon in Namur, Belgium. Curated by KIKK Festival’s Marie du Chastel, the show features Thijs Biersteker, Design I/O, Teresa van Dongen, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, AnneMarie Maes, Zimoun, and others. Thomas Thwaites’ GoatMan (2015, image), for example, chronicles the artist’s life amongst a herd of goats in the Swiss Alps, outfitted with prosthetic limbs and an artificial stomach.
Enemies and Cover-Ups
“[In the early days] people said I was ruining art, by taking such an artificial approach to something that was so fundamentally human. It felt like I only had enemies. It makes for a good story, though. I very rarely exhibited, very very rarely. But when I did, then these computer drawings, you know the ones that have holes along the sides because they had to roll through the [drum] plotter? At the top you can see the day, the hour, the minute the calculation was made. And I was told to cover this up, to put a passe-partout over it so that all you could see was the drawing. And I had to sign it, by hand. But now, that [timestamp] is all the collectors care about. Anyone could forge my signature but that, no one can forge that. They only want drawings where the computer is visible. The paper with the holes in it? They don’t use a passe-partout anymore. They frame it with the holes showing!”
Vera Molnar to Zsofi Valyi-Nagy (translated from Hungarian), Paris Oct 31, 2019
Anne Spalter is a digital mixed-media artist, founder of the digital fine arts courses at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s, and author of The Computer in the Visual Arts (1999). Her artistic process explores imagery of the modern landscape. She is currently creating crypto art, with works auctioned by Sotheby’s and Phillips, and featured in the New York Times. She is also co-instigator of the Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection.
What if Vera had decided thirty years ago that her art wasn’t selling enough or being shown in the right places and had stopped creating? It would have been a tragic loss for all of us. It is a lesson for any artist. I particularly hope that artists who have come to digital art through the NFT world, where everything moves so quickly, take note. Aesthetically my work and Vera’s are usually quite different but I have also been influenced by her commitment to unending quality. I truly can say I’ve never seen a ‘bad’ Vera Molnar.
As an aside, it is a common misunderstanding that artists working with technology gain some extra benefit from using the computer–that it is somehow cheating or making up for a skill gap or some other negative perception. A closer look at their work inevitably disproves this, of course. Artists like Vera Molnár and Manfred Mohr were creating work that looked like their computer work, and that was conceptually related, long before they ever touched a computer.
Collecting pieces from before Vera had access to a computer and through long after she could have brought in a range of new features and tools demonstrates the strength of her specific vision.
“Absolute Beginners,” a Factory Where West London Youth Are Trained to Make Goods That Used to Be Produced Locally
“We chose to make a product—tire sandals—which are made across the developing world, where the tires are solely made of rubber. But in Europe, tires are reinforced with steel wire, which meant we couldn’t cut through them.”
McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology Working Group Asks “What Would Ursula Franklin Say?”
What Would Ursula Franklin Say?, a collection of 17 essays emerging from a working group supported by the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, is published. From 2019-21, scholars including Sara Grimes, Katie Mackinnon, and Leslie Regan Shade, deployed the pioneering technology critic’s “unique materialist, practice-based” methods to engage contemporary discourses of innovation, algorithmic bias and inequity, and social resilience.