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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.

50-Year-Old Japanese Man Uses FaceApp to Pass as a Woman, Live his ‘Cute Biker Girl’ Dream

“Nakajima said he doesn’t know how long he’ll keep Soya alive. But he said he’s grateful for the way she helped him feel: carefree, adventurous, seen.”
– Reporters Drew Harwell and Shiori Okazaki, about 50-year-old Japanese man Yasuo Nakajima, who transformed himself into the young female biker Soya no Sohi using FaceApp. When Nakajima came clean in March, his myriad Twitter followers liked him even more.

Digital Art Pioneer Manfred Mohr Celebrates 50th Anniversary of His First Museum Show

Digital art pioneer Manfred Mohr celebrates the 50th anniversary of his solo show “Computer Graphics: Une Esthétique Programmée,” that opened at ARC Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, on May 11, 1971. “I showed around 25 computer generated pen plotter drawings and demonstrated the use of a flat-bed plotter,” Mohr reminisces in his newsletter. “Thanks to the incredible foresight of Pierre Gaudibert, founder and director of ARC, this show became the first one-person show of digital art in a museum.”

Ryoji Ikeda on the Science that Drives His Artistic Work—and the World

“There is no Chinese mathematics and French mathematics. Mathematics is just one.”
Ryoji Ikeda, on his obsession with the science that drives his artistic work—and the world. To Ikeda, mathematicians “playing with numbers” are like composers organising their notes, writes interviewer Cleo Roberts-Komireddi. For his next exhibition, the Japanese media artist reimagined the exposed underbelly of London’s 180 The Strand as staves, notes, and bar lines, “orchestrating everything into a symphony.”

Patrick Blanchfield Puts ‘Cancel Culture’ in Perspective

“So we’re in a very psychotic moment, where we’re trying to figure out consequences. Humanity itself may soon be ‘cancelled’ by climate change … the fish are going to get cancelled in a couple decades and then we’re fucked, right? That’s all looming over this—death is the great canceller.”
– Author Patrick Blanchfield, on cancel culture’s very low stakes, in a panel discussion with Moira Weigel, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Daniel Denvir

Cat Haine Explores Minecraft’s Potential for Queer and Trans Intimacies

Combining photography, poetry, and monumental pixel builds, Ender Gallery’s inaugural resident Cat Haine opens the Minecraft exhibition space with a “playful transfeminist intervention.” Exploring the platform’s potential for queer and trans intimacies, Haine’s “(g)Ender Gallery” features a colossal reconstruction of the artist’s surgically-constructed vagina that contains text and images reflecting upon her transition.

Cyberscurity Expert Rob Lee: Hackers “Big Game Hunting” Critical Infrastructure

”These gangs figure out, here’s a bunch of internet-facing devices, here are vulnerabilities that give us access to them, and here are the IP ranges of a bunch of big industrial companies. Cool, let’s go big game hunting.”
– Critical infrastructure security firm Dragos CEO Rob Lee, on the Colonial Pipeline hacking, an “extreme randsomware” attack causing fuel shortages across the U.S. East Coast

SFMOMA’s Nam June Paik Retrospective Shows 200 Iconic Works

SFMOMA’s “Nam June Paik” presents 200 works by the pioneering video and installation artist in a major retrospective. It takes a show of this scale to weigh Paik’s influence on media art, and key works like TV Chair (1968), TV Garden (1974, image), and Sistine Chapel (1993) are included. The middle work of that trio “epitomizes one of Paik’s great strengths,” says co-curator Andrea Nitsche-Krupp, “the ability to revisit, permutate, and recombine ideas, images, and concepts into newly generative work.”

LuYang is Reborn Repeatedly at Jane Lombard Gallery

Opening at Jane Lombard Gallery, New York, “Doku: Digital Alaya” puts Chinese CGI artist LuYang’s latest digital avatar front and centre. Created with a team of scientists, technologists, and 3D animators using motion capture, the non-binary, androgynous Doku appears in six virtual environments, each representing a Buddhist realm of reincarnation. Displayed on light-boxes, in videos, and installations, “the artist is reborn repeatedly,” extending life’s cycle into cyberspace.

James Bridle’s New Aesthetic Turns Ten

“Those ten years are also ten years of my life, a trajectory from books to web to art and round and round and round again, drones, datacentres, self-driving cars and flamingos; unnumbered conferences, weird conversations and C-Beams glittering in the dark.”
James Bridle, reflecting on a decade of The New Aesthetic, their (highly influential) research blog that documents “new ways of seeing the world” under the current technological regime

MSHR’s Instance Terrain Crawler is ‘Like Minecraft on Several Tabs of LSD’

An output of this year’s entirely online edition of Rewire festival (NL), Instance Terrain Crawler launches. A browser-based offshoot of MSHR’s (Birch Cooper & Brenna Murphy) “sculptural electronic systems,” its wonky 3D environs are both explorable and interactive. Full of blocky totemic forms—objects and waveforms oscillate in unison—its loud polychromy and gloppy synthesized sounds evoke a demented Minecraft world, the likes of which could only emerge from the Pacific Northwest.

Joshua Citarella on How Major Cultural Institutions Are Asleep at the Wheel

“The mainstream capial-A Art institutions are the Titanic, and crowdfunding, Discord, and the communities we’re trying to cultivate are a liferaft. In the long term, my objective is to re-dock with the institutions, once they’ve course-corrected to avoid the giant neoliberal iceberg.”
– Online subculture researcher Joshua Citarella, on how major institutions are asleep at the wheel and have neither the knowledge nor capacity to engage important grassroots cultural production

Cait McKinney on Cyberfeminism Index as “A Forever Project”

“It’s like a perpetual project that refers to the labour of building an archive that can sustain itself, and also being open to revision forever as a feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial project.”
– Queer social movement researcher Cait McKinney frames Cyberfeminism Index, in conversation with its instigator Mindy Seu, and writer and curator Rea McNamara

Data Artist Jer Thorp Links Early Flash Euphoria to Current NFT Boom

Known for translating complex cultural matter into tantalizing visualizations, data artist Jer Thorp shares a tongue-in-cheek Venn diagram that suggests a strong correlation between early Flash euphoria and the current NFT boom. Thorp also provides a data point for exceptions to the rule: “I had a Flash ‘experiments’ website in 2001,“ he disclaims on Twitter, ”and I am not really into NFTs.”

Tina Rivers Ryan on “the True Perversity of Using NFTs to Sell Digital Art”

“By asking his collectors to immolate their receipts, Klein took his immaterial works out of circulation, leaving the buyer with nothing but a sensibility; the NFT is the receipt’s revenge, leaving its collector with nothing but an asset.”
Tina Rivers Ryan, media art historian and curator at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, invoking Yves Klein’s Zones de sensibilité picturale immaterielle (1959–62) to elicidate “the true perversity of using NFTs to sell digital art”

Please Meet the Kybernaut!

“Who’s the spacesuit behind the wheel?”—“That’s the Kybernaut, of course.”
Zentrum für Netzkunst’s Anneliese Ostertag, answering visitor questions about KYBERNET, a programmable toy car included in the “Calculating Control” exhibition. Manufactured in East Germany in the 1970s, KYBERNET was supposed to introduce kids to the concept of cybernetics—which, at the time, was viewed as vital for the success of socialism.

Karsten Schmidt Advocates for Smart Contracts that Acknowledge Toolmakers and Open Source Projects

“As much as we celebrate digital art and its democratization—where’s the acknowledgement from the NFT crowd of the thousands of people who develop the tools used to make the hot-selling works NFT platforms are being flooded with?”
Karsten Schmidt, generative artist and prolific toolmaker, making an impassioned case for an NFT revenue-split feature to support open source projects on hic et nunc

Natalie Haddad on the “Oceanic Abyss” of Fred Eversley’s Lens Forms

Marking the wrap-up of “Recent Sculpture” at David Kordansky Gallery Los Angeles, Natalie Haddad reflects on Fred Eversley for Hyperallergic. Associated with the 1960s Light and Space movement, Eversley has explored lens-forms, related materialities, colour, and refraction for five decades. Losing herself in the parabolic sculptures, Haddad writes they “…appear to float in space; looking through the deep royal blue of one work feels like staring into the cosmos or an oceanic abyss.”

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