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Artists Contemplate “Attention After Technology” For Tropical Papers

Greg J. Smith
● 06/12/2023

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.”

Tropical Papers

Golan Levin Teases Algorithmic Xenocytology

Alexander Scholz
● 06/12/2023
“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.”
X / Twitter

NGV Triennial Commissions Drawing Robots and Festival Futures

Alexander Scholz
● 03/12/2023

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.

NGV Triennial

Dunne & Raby Imagine Multi-Species Festival Futures

Alexander Scholz
● 03/12/2023
“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
NGV Triennial

Karolina Żyniewicz’s Microscopy Mesmerizes People

Alexander Scholz
● 01/12/2023
“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
Art Laboratory Berlin

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

Alexander Scholz
● 01/12/2023

“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).

Pinakothek der Moderne

Climate Summit Coopted by Fossil Fuel Industry, Climate Scientist Warns

Alexander Scholz
● 01/12/2023
“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.
Newsweek

In Memory: Animator, Entrepreneur, and Philanthropist Daniel Langlois

Greg J. Smith
● 01/12/2023
Daniel Langlois
1957 – 2023
Canadian animator and Softimage founder Daniel Langlois dies at 66. A National Film Board of Canada filmmaker, Langlois created Softimage 3D, VFX software used on blockbusters including Jurassic Park and Terminator 2. Shifting to philanthropy in middle age, he launched the Daniel Langlois Foundation, a major Montréal art-technology institution, in 1997.
Daniel Langlois Foundation

Tishan Hsu Summons Grotesque Posthuman Digital Forms At Secession

Greg J. Smith
● 01/12/2023

Dredging up grotesque imaginaries, Tishan Hsu’s “recent works 2023” opens at Secession in Vienna. Taking centre stage at the artist-run space, the American artist presents tablet-skin-screen (2023, image), an undulating moiré pattern-adorned sculpture that evokes both flesh and (video) feedback. Complementing the unnatural geometry, surrounding morphing videos and prints depict “the interpenetration of physical bodies with virtual digital forms.”

Secession

Marshmallow Laser Feast Resurrects Amazon Rainforest with Volumetric Data

Alexander Scholz
● 01/12/2023

Marshmallow Laser Feast premieres a new 3-channel video installation, Breathing with the Forest (2023, image), within Emergence Magazine’s “Shifting Landscapes” exhibition at Bargehouse, London. The show presents works by nine artists and filmmakers including Adam Loften, Kalyanee Mam, and Katie Holten, that “open our imaginations to our entanglement with the biosphere.” Laser Feast’s contribution, for example, invites visitors to ‘take in’ volumetric and ambisonic field recordings of the Colombian Amazon.

Emergence Magazine

Michelle Santiago Cortés Remembers When The Internet Was Still Legible

Greg J. Smith
● 30/11/2023
“The internet was loaded with earnest content and search engines proved vital to indexing and recalling every last morsel of it. There was a sense of abundance: you could read about anything and research everything.”
– Writer Michelle Santiago Cortés, reminiscing about when the internet was still legible. Recalling a simpler era of Tumblr and Vice, Cortés laments how Google and other search engines are increasingly useless given “the thickening muck of junk websites vying for programmatic ad money.”
Dirt

Critic Reconsiders Classic Dutch Media Art “Fossils”

Greg J. Smith
● 28/11/2023
“The works certainly carry historical significance, but in their new ‘commonplace’ state, they become fossils through contemporary eyes.”
– Critic Matthew Sturt-Scobie, assessing some of the older works featured in “REBOOT,” a survey of four decades of Dutch media art at Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Instituut. “It highlights what the dated works now lack in impact or affect,” he writes of his mild dissatisfaction that show organizers LI-MA don’t quite situate the aging work clearly enough.
Metropolis M

Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler Map “Calculating Empires” Over Six Centuries

Greg J. Smith
● 23/11/2023

“Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025,” a show by researchers Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler opens at Fondazione Prada Osservatorio in Milan. Picking up where their collaboration Anatomy of an AI System (2018) left off, the duo maps how “empires of past centuries are echoed in the technology companies of today.” Exhibited is a cabinet of curiosities, a map room, and ephemera related to data and control spanning six centuries.

Fondazione Prada

The Wrong Biennale Lets All the Costumes In

Alexander Scholz
● 20/11/2023
“Not having one theme imposed by a curator but multiple curators contributing their unique concepts and artist selections to the same event was unheard of at the time and remains uncommon today, even after a decade.”
– The Wrong Biennale founder David Quiles Guilló, on the “radical inclusiveness” that is at the core of the thriving online (and increasingly hybrid) art show he launched in 2013. “It’s like a costume party, and you decide to let all costumes join in,” Guilló tells Fakewhale. “It surely becomes a great party.”
Fakewhale

Zach Lieberman Defends The Humble Screensaver

Greg J. Smith
● 18/11/2023
“Screensavers are wild and showed all kinds of other possibilities with computation. Pipes? Flying toasters? Lissajous figures? As a kid the computer was most interesting when you didn’t touch it.”
– Software artist Zach Lieberman, defending the humble screensaver. A decades-old clichéd criticism of digital art (“it’s just a screensaver”), the tired trope resurfaced recently when critic Jerry Saltz sniped at Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised (2022), describing it as “mediocre spectacle” and “a banal screensaver.”
x / Twitter

Brooklyn Museum Shares “Copy Machine Manifestos” from Zine Golden Age

Greg J. Smith
● 17/11/2023

Documenting a half-century of DIY publishing, “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines” opens at the Brooklyn Museum. A tremendous undertaking, more than one thousand artists’ zines and publications emerging from the unruly 1970-2020 North American punk and queer underground are featured. Artist-publishers including Tom Jennings and Mimi Thi Nguyen present their Xerox handiwork and an online archive of selected zines opens access to the rich collection.

Brooklyn Museum

Artists Explore Soundscape As “Living And Permanently Changing Archive”

Greg J. Smith
● 17/11/2023

Exploring sound across the ages (and over the Atlantic Ocean), “Resonaciones. An embrace to awake” opens at IFA Gallery Stuttgart. Inspired by the ancient Peruvian whistling vessels in the Linden Museum collection, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen presents art and environments by artists and culture workers Carolina Arévalo, Francisca Gili, Nicole L’Huillier, and Bettina Korintenberg that weigh the impact of colonialism and how soundscapes function as “a living and permanently changing archive.”

IFA
$40 USD