All

Glory and Control: Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon Crack Open AI Black Box at Matadero Madrid

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.”

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.’”
– American writer and Spike editor Adina Glickstein, contemplating exhaustion and melancholia in a terminally online, crisis-ridden world. Existential inertia can engender a productive refusal, Glickstein writes in her final (deeply personal) “User Error” column: “a wildcat strike of the soul, against a world where all manner of activity is increasingly apt to be flattened into work.”

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.”
– Indiana University Bloomington engineers, on the AI potential of (lab-grown) human brain cells on a chip. In their research, published in Nature Electronics, the team trained brain organoids connected to an array of high-density microelectrodes to master tasks like speech recognition and nonlinear equation prediction.

Jordon Wolfson’s “Body Sculpture” Asks ‘Who Is Pulling The Strings?’

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 Juxtapozes Videogame Representations of Labour and Leisure at Taipei Digital Art Center

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.”
– American author, filmmaker, and sex worker Liara Roux, on the “sublimated patriarchal anxieties and revenge fantasies” AI femmes like Siri reveal about their creators: “Dark Enlightenment, PayPal Mafia, CEO types.”

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.”
– Chinese-Canadian artist Sougwen Chung, on her robot collaborations. “I’ve come to think of my approach of learning through systems—deemed intelligent or otherwise—as a creative catalyst,” Chung writes. “There is meaning in the data, but it’s not the meaning we are given; it’s the meaning we make.”

“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.”
Branch magazine editors Kit Braybrooke, Julia Kloiber, and Michelle Thorne, citing Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) in their “Gentle Dismantlings” opening letter

Némo Biennial Exhibition Explores Endless Computation

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.”
– Writer Róisín Lanigan, weighing in on the post-pandemic rise of immersive media spaces like Frameless, Outernet (both London), and Sphere (Las Vegas). They empower creators, offer communal experiences, and yes, “they’re geared towards the gram—the number of views can attest to that,” Lanigan notes.

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.”
– Australian sci-fi artist and body architect Lucy McRae, reminding SCI-Arc students to prioritize hybridity and collaboration as they develop their art-research practices

Artists Contemplate “Attention After Technology” For Tropical Papers

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.”
– American media artist and lecturer Golan Levin, on his forthcoming Art Blocks release of algorithmic, cursor-interactive cells. Every aspect of the “xenocytology” is computationally generated, reveals Levin, “including the simulated behaviour of the depicted creature, the poiesis of its anatomy, the calligraphic quality of its lines, the asemic letterforms of its labels, and the (ahem) virtual ‘paper’ on which it is rendered.”

NGV Triennial Commissions Drawing Robots and Festival Futures

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.”
– Designers Dunne & Raby, on their NGV Triennial commission Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival (2023), a set of speculative totems and mementos which illustrate how human-produced sound, fragrance and matter is experienced by other species

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.”
– Polish bio artist Karolina Żyniewicz, reflecting on “Capturing Leakage: Body Flows and Material Investigations,” an Art Laboratory Berlin (ALB) workshop she co-hosted with Charlotte Roschka, in the fifth episode of Sonic Ecologies

Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne Assembles Glitch Art All-Stars for Major Institutional Survey

“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).

Climate Summit Coopted by Fossil Fuel Industry, Climate Scientist Warns

“Instead of being in charge, these executives and lobbyists should be behind bars. At the very least, the UN should ban them from climate summits.”
– American climate scientist and author Peter Kalmus, on the annual United Nations climate summit, COP28, being overrun by fossil fuel industry figureheads. Worse yet, COP president and oil executive Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber is reported to actively use the event for striking dirty energy deals. “It’s hard to imagine anything more cynical or more evil,” writes Kalmus.
$40 USD