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Golan Levin Chides Christie’s for Ignoring Material Conditions of Andy Warhol’s Amiga Works

“Sadly, Christie’s missed the huge opportunity to get this right. However one feels about NFTs, Warhol’s Amiga images are a unique discovery. In their haste to take advantage of the NFT hype, they neglected to do the basic research that these works deserved.”
Golan Levin, chiding the auction house for ignoring the “material conditions” of Andy Warhol’s 1985 Amiga works by selling “altered, 2nd generation near-copies” as NFTs

Art Sonje Center’s “Host Modded” Explores ‘Upgraded’ Notions of Space and Embodiement

Bringing together artists Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Rachel Rose, and Jisun Kim, “Host Modded” opens at Seoul’s Art Sonje Center. The trio draw on an eclectic mix of source material including a 3D model of Keanu Reeves (Hansen), Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House (Rose), and AIBO the robotic dog (Kim) while exploring notions of space and embodiement. In aggregate, the works ask “whether advancements in technology have modded us into people who perceive in disparate ways,” writes curator Hyo Gyoung Jeon.

Doughnut Economics

Economics (⬆︎)
& energy + $ (⬇︎)
after K. Raworth
DISNOVATION.ORG &
Baruch Gottlieb

In April 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, Amsterdam’s city government announced it would recover from the crisis, and avoid future ones, by embracing the theory of ‘doughnut economics.’ Introduced by University of Oxford economist Kate Raworth in a 2012 paper and popularized in her 2017 book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, the economic model is a visual framework for sustainable development. Shaped like a doughnut—or lifebelt—it harmonizes planetary boundaries with human needs. The doughnut’s inner boundary represents the “social foundation,” where everyone’s necessities like food, healthcare, and education are being met. The outer circle describes “environmental ceilings”—air pollution, ocean acidification, climate change—that must not be overshot. The “sweet spot” in the middle is what Raworth defines as a safe and just space where humanity can thrive.

Apolitical and growth-agnostic, Raworth’s framework doesn’t lay out specific policies or goals. Instead, it relies on stakeholders—countries, cities, communities—to decide on doughnut benchmarks and ways of meeting them. Amsterdam, for example, committed to a five-year circular economy strategy that includes measures such as building supportive infrastructure with sharing platforms, thrift shops, online marketplaces, and repair services. The goal is to halve the use of new raw materials by 2030 and to achieve a fully circular economy by 2050. “In a doughnut world, the economy would sometimes be growing and sometimes shrinking,” Raworth explains in a TIME article, as GDP is put in service of reaching social goals within ecological limits, and not viewed as an indicator of success in itself. “When we think in terms of health, and we think of something that tries to grow endlessly within our bodies, we recognize that immediately: that would be cancer.”

“When we think in terms of health, and we think of something that tries to grow endlessly within our bodies, we recognize that immediately: that would be cancer.”

For “Post Growth,” DISNOVATION.ORG and Baruch Gottlieb interpreted Raworth’s theory with two models of their own: one shows how unaccounted externalities like unpaid labour, natural resources, and pollution fit into the standard macroeconomic model (top), and the other how economic activity is embedded within and dependent upon planetary energy flows (bottom).

Why Is Gaza So Blurry On Google Maps?

Satellite imagery of Gaza is conspicuously low quality compared to other dense cities. For the BBC, Christopher Giles and Jack Goodman detail why this lack of hi-res up-to-date images matters, and how the blurry state of Google and Apple’s satellite photography impedes journalists and human rights activists from keeping tabs on Israeli violence against architecture and infrastructure. “I see no reason why commercial imagery of this area should continue to be deliberately degraded,” comments investigator Nick Waters.

Within, Against, and Beyond Capitalism

“Ultimately, what is likely best for artists is what is best for all workers: universal high quality free public services and the abolition of the wage-discipline of capitalism. These demands seem possible surprisingly today and are in a strange way an actually existing fact in the emergency. If artists make common cause with others, we might be able to preserve and extend these, and so abolish capitalism as such.”

100+ Frustrated Light Artists Sign Manifesto

“Light festivals have become popular venues for promoting light art, but in most cases the audience is being misled. Light shows don’t obtain aesthetic, intellectual, or cultural value simply because the tag ‘art’ is assigned to them!”
– 100+ artists including fuse*, HC Gilje, Refik Anadol, and TUNDRA in the first-ever Light Art Manifesto. Released on the International Day of Light, it calls for better curation and more acknowledgment of the genre’s pioneers. [quote edited]

Performance, With Still Life? at the Walker Art Center

“The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance” opens at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center. Curators Vincenzo de Bellis and Jadine Collingwood mine the gap between ”still life and the living picture” through works by 60 artists active over a half century—from Joan Jonas to Jordan Wolfson. The strangeness of Haegue Yang’s Sonic Intermediates (2020, image) captures the lines blurred within the show—interactive, ‘viewers’ turn its eccentric forms, sounding metallic tones and textures.

Watch Mark Zuckerberg Obsess About Growth for Four Weeks Straight!

Marking the 37th birthday of Mark Zuckerberg, The Wrong kicks off a four-week long 24/7 stream of Ben Grosser’s ORDER OF MAGNITUDE (2019), a 47-minute supercut of every time the Facebook CEO said the words “more,” “grow,” or metrics such as “one billion” between 2004 and 2019. The piece premiered as part of arebyte On Screen and “acts as a lens on what Mark cares about, how he thinks, and what he hopes to attain.” Now you can now subject yourself to 750 minutes of it—it’s “more more than ever before.”

Ezra Klein Enjoys the Spaciousness of the UFO Mystery

“I really don’t know what’s behind these videos and reports, and I relish that. In this case, that is my bias: I enjoy the spaciousness of mystery.”
– Journalist Ezra Klein, on the recent wave of declassified videos showing unidentified flying objects that senior military officials admit they can’t explain. “Even if you think all discussion of aliens is ridiculous, it’s fun to let the mind roam over the implications.”

At Mapping Festival, Ted Häring’s Antenna Totem Signifies the “Disturbing Majesty” of Cellular Towers

Hailing from the future, Mapping Festival “2051” returns to Geneva with “deviant art and electronics.” Over the course of ten days, works by Frederik de Wilde, Anne Horel, Jonghong Park, 1024 Architecture, Cie Ultra and others are exhibited and performed across the city. Robert Seidel, for example, is set to project his light work Tempest onto lake Geneva’s iconic water fountain while onshore, Ted Häring’s totemic sound sculpture ANTNA (image) imitates the “disturbing majesty” of cellular 4G/5G antennas.

Laine Nooney on How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body

“To consider the history of computing through the lens of computer pain is to center bodies, users, and actions over and above hardware, software, and inventors.”
– Scholar Laine Nooney, following the “tide of bodily dysfunction that none of us opted into” all the way to the beginning of the information age. “That pain in your neck, the numbness in your fingers, has a history far more widespread and impactful than any individual computer or computing innovator.”

Sarah Friend’s New NFT Project is Artist Edition, Artwork, and Multiplayer Game All at Once

Sarah Friend launches Off, an NFT project that is artist edition, artwork, and multiplayer game all at once. 255 collectibles, each the exact pixel dimension of various computer, smartphone, and tablet screens, contain both a public and a secret image. Hidden across all secret images is an encrypted essay and its key. With a majority of key shards required to decrypt the hidden sentences, the essay is revealed only if enough collectors are willing to share their images. “Will you choose to cooperate or defect?”

Jeremy Bailey on Seizing (and Queering) the Means of Production

DOSSIER:
“That would be the one thing I’d love to leave the audience with: this idea that to be a true anticapitalist you appropriate the means of production. That’s what I’ve always pursued—and queer it, if you can.”
– “Famous New Media Artist” Jeremy Bailey, in conversation with Artengine’s Ryan Stec in the first of a series of Digital Economy Lab ‘exit interviews’

Alaina Claire Feldman Sounds Off on “Songs of the Humpback Whale”

Songs of the Humpback Whale made waves in the 1970s, shaping new age culture and the environmental movement. For e-flux, Alaina Claire Feldman offers a definitive history—delving into the album’s cold war origins (surveillance for Russian submarines) and its artifice (assembled in an editing suite). Framing whales as “barometers of the traffic and health of our oceans,” she describes the “minor listening” we do, in reconstructing the ocean’s soundscape for human consumption.

Chloe Stead Debunks that Growth—or Happiness—Can Be Measured in GDP

DOSSIER:
“What if, instead of focusing on production capacity and economic growth, we started to take attempts to measure internal transformation more seriously? One result might be that more countries adopt universal healthcare, free education, and a higher minimum wage.”
– Writer and critic Chloe Stead, challenging our obsession with external growth and the notion that happiness can be measured in GDP

Internal Growth

“The U.S. has the biggest GDP in the world, but it ranks only 18th on the happiness scale—a pie in the face for economists or politicians who insist that GDP is the best way to measure progress.”
Chloe Stead is an art critic and editor based in Berlin. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Artnet, Art Agenda, Frieze, Spike, and Mousse Magazine.

Determined to not let lockdown blues get the better of me, I started 2021 by buying myself a gratitude journal. Turquoise and hardbound with gold lettering on the cover, this rather beautiful object has quickly become part of my morning routine, and while I wouldn’t say it’s changed my life, I have noticed that taking a few minutes each day to write down what I’m grateful for has produced a subtle shift in how I think. In the past, I’ve been guilty of treating success as a constantly moving goalpost, but regular journaling has encouraged me to celebrate even the smallest of wins, which, during lockdown, might be as simple as preparing myself a healthy lunch or checking in on a friend.

It might sound a little sentimental, but what my new routine has taught me is to value internal as well as external growth. It’s a realization that I’m sure anthropologist Valerie Olson, who I quoted in the introduction to this dossier, would be happy to hear. Speaking with DISNOVATION for the project’s interview series, Olson argued that western society has a “prejudice or a bias toward thinking about growth externally,” which blocks us from “using other knowledges than western knowledges to think about internal growth, or internal transformation as being another valuable focus for energy.”

Watching this interview again, I couldn’t help but think of the UN’s World Happiness Report, which measures countries on factors such as social help and freedom to make life choices rather than solely on their GDP. Unsurprisingly, it’s poor countries in long protracted conflicts, such as Yemen and Afghanistan, which fair the worst, but the fact that it’s Finland that has won the top spot for the last three years suggests that the size or power of a country has a limited effect on the happiness of its citizens. Take the U.S. as an example. It has the biggest GDP in the world, closely followed by China, but it ranks only 18th on the happiness scale—a pie in the face for economists or politicians who insist that GDP is the best way to measure progress.

What if, instead of focusing on production capacity and economic growth, we started to take attempts to measure internal transformation more seriously? What would change if the American media reflected on these reports rather than mock or underplay them, such as one article in which the author called a Pew Research Center survey “complete crap” because Nicaragua was above “wealthy Japan”?20 One result might be that more countries adopt universal healthcare, free education, and a higher minimum wage, all of which are common in the countries that repeatedly top these lists. It might seem like a pipe dream right now, but it’s something that we should strive for, nonetheless. To quote a motivational phrase from my gratitude journal: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.”21

Jeremy Bailey & Ryan Stec

DEL Reflection: Jeremy Bailey

“I think what we’re seeing right now is a golden age of artists cooperating to own the means of production. That would be the one thing I’d love to leave the audience with: this idea that to be a true anticapitalist you appropriate the means of production. That’s what I’ve always pursued—and queer it, if you can.”

Liner Notes:

Taking stock as DEL begins to wind down, “Famous New Media Artist” and Steering Committee member Jeremy Bailey and Artengine’s Ryan Stec muse over the persistant mythologies around the comingling of art and money that continue to cloud perceptions of aura and value—especially now, as we struggle to assess a world full of freshly-minted NFTs. Speaking to “the big C” of capital—the strange anxities it provokes within the art world—the duo dispell the romantic notion that money is a blight or intrinsically ‘impure,’ and pragmatically discuss what art plus capitalism (plus a critical agenda, of course) looks like.

These quotes, notes, and references are highlights from a 40-minute conversation that took place between Jeremy & Ryan in Spring 2021. Click through below and watch the entire exchange.

01 – Lean Artist

“The world’s first seed accelerator for artists,the Lean Artist initiative has run at A/D/A Hamburg (2016, image) and MCA Chicago (2018). Adopting the startup world’s agile approaches and the minimum viable product model, 10 creators have worked with Jeremy to conceive and monetize projects.

02 – Fluxus

The Fluxus sentiment that art is not for the bourgeoisie is cited as being crucial. Inspecting the score for George Maciunas’ performance Trio for Ladder, Mud and Pebbles (1964) evokes that movement’s inherently messy, visceral, and embodied nature—a full-on rebellion against the elitist positioning of ‘art as rarified commodity.’

Kenny Schachter Lays Out Breadcrumb Trail of CryptoArt, Proclaims NFTs Here to Stay

A trail of early and recent cryptoart laid out by curator Kenny Schachter, “Breadcrumbs: Art in the Age of NFTism” opens at Cologne’s Galerie Nagel Draxler. Works by 16 artists including Rhea Myers, Kevin Abosch, Anna Ridler, and Sarah Friend are presented in an eccentric installation—photos, paintings, objects, and screens are augmented with written commentary—and soon as NFTs. “The show will put to rest two demonstrably false assumptions: that this is a fad, and/or not art,” writes Schachter.

$40 USD