Trevor Paglen’s audiovisual installation, Behold These Glorious Times! (2017), opens at Matadero Madrid as the second arc of “Synthetic Imaginaries,” a series of exhibitions curated by Julia Kaganskiy that examines non-human agency, intelligence, and complex systems. The piece, augmented with synthetic sounds and voices by composer Holly Herndon, confronts viewers with hundreds of thousands of AI training images in transition: from legible to machine-readable and, effectively, “invisible.”
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Adina Glickstein Parses Productive Refusal and Exiting the Matrix
“Like Bartleby, we would all ’prefer not to.’ Maybe it’s fatigue-induced, seeking relief from the incessant demands of 24/7 capitalism, careening towards meltdown. Terminally online, we ‘can’t even.’”
Brain Cell Biochips the Future of AI?
“Due to the high plasticity and adaptability of organoids, Brainoware has the flexibility to change and reorganize in response to electrical stimulation, highlighting its ability for adaptive reservoir computing.”
Freshly acquired by the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), American artist Jordon Wolfson’s Body Sculpture (2023) debuts in its permanent Canberra home. An unsettling performance in which an industrial robotic arm wields a chain tethered to a metallic box with animatronic arms, the robot pair executes a choreography of power and control. In the foreground, the torso-box affectively gestures with humanlike precision; in the background, the industrial arm plays puppeteer and pulls the strings.
Total Refusal’s solo exhibition “Every Strike Hits Dead Center” opens at Taipei’s Digital Art Center (DAC), presenting new and recent videogame appropriations that explore the representation of labour and leisure. Whereas Club Stahlbad (2022, image), for example, tunes into the frenetic escapism of NPC clubbers in Cyberpunk 2077, the Austrian machinima collective’s new piece, Loop Labor (2023), highlights—and liberates—Latin American field workers in Grand Theft Auto V.
Mommy Issues: Liara Roux Links AI Femmes to Patriarchal Anxieties
“Our technological culture keeps casting these artificial intelligences either as mothers, catering and caring, or as female demons that consume men, succubus-like, luring them to half-deaths, to a constant state of orgasm—a hijacked limbic system suspended in pleasure.”
Sougwen Chung Makes Meaning with Robots
“For me, drawing is a way of being in the world. When I draw and create with my machines, this creative process allows me to engage with the technology alongside my physical instincts to form a kind of gestural relation.”
Branch #7
Gentle Dismantlings
“Branch” Editors Invoke Jenny Odell’s Ancient Logic
“We do not live in a simulation—a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews—but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic.”
The third act in curators Dominique Moulon, Alain Thibault, and Cathernine Bédard’s exhibition series, “Endless Variation,” opens at the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, as part of the 2023 Némo Biennial. Works by ten artists including Nicolas Baier, Salomé Chatriot (image: Idol (Hydra 4), 2023), Nicolas Sassoon, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, and Timothy Thomasson explore nascent generative processes and the transition from artist studio to computer interface.
Immersive Art Experiences Expand Access, Writer Argues
“For every charge that immersive events are diluting our experience of artistry, there’s a counterpoint to be made that it’s opening that experience out to people who might not normally gravitate towards it.”
Lucy McRae Reminds Aspiring Artists, that Practice *Is* the Project
“The interdisciplinary art practice is your biggest project. Finding your people to nurture and grow together this idea of the practice being the project is what I’m thinking about right now.”
Complementing an eponymous symposium and Kunsthall Trondheim (NO) exhibition, “Attention After Technology” opens on the Tropical Papers platform. IRL exhibition participants biarritzzz, Vivian Caccuri, Shu Lea Cheang, CUSS Group, Kyriaki Goni, and Berenice Olmedo contribute browser-based works exploring shifting attention norms. Femke Herregraven’s Rewild the Wandering Mind (2023, image), for example, quotes literary sources to muse over “how attention evolved into a moralizing and disciplinary force.”
Golan Levin Teases Algorithmic Xenocytology
“Cytographia is an elegy for species we will never know, or will never know again, expressed through generative illustrations from an imaginary book about imaginary organisms.”
The NGV Triennial opens at Melbourne’s NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) International, showcasing 100 works from 120 artists and designers that epitomize contemporary practice. In addition to timeless pieces by Hito Steyerl, John Gerrard, SMACK, and Julian Charrière, NGV premieres several new commissions: Dunne & Raby’s Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival (2023) imagines future multi-species gatherings through speculative artifacts, while Agnieszka Pilat’s Heterobota (2023, image) enjoy playtime.
Dunne & Raby Imagine Multi-Species Festival Futures
“We appear more like clouds, or atmospheres, or energy fields, and our meatiness fades into insignificance. Our breath forms chemical swirls drifting through multiple umwelten. Strands of you stretch for miles, caressing the nervous systems of innumerable lifeforms.”
Karolina Żyniewicz’s Microscopy Mesmerizes People
“I have a lot of lab experience, so it’s always funny to me how excited people get when they are exploring things through the microscope. They’re overwhelmed looking at the materials—stones, flowers—they collected.”
“Glitch. The Art of Interference” opens at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne, offering a comprehensive institutional survey of “one of the youngest and most unpredictable forms of art.” Curators Franziska Kunze and Katrin Bauer present works by 50 international artists that trace the interrogation of media and its malfunction from the digital era (Rosa Menkman, !Mediengruppe Bitnik & Sven König, JODI) back to glitch art’s analog roots (Nam June Paik, Peter Weibel, Pipilotti Rist, Sondra Perry).