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.
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.”
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.”
To demonstrate Ethereum’s greener future, software engineer and Rocket Pool contributor Joe Clapis runs lightweight proof of stake validator Nimbus on a Rasberry Pi, a 10,000 mAh power bank, and SSD—powering 10 validators for 10 hours. “The Pi consumes 5 watts, so that comes to around 0.1 KWh of energy per day, or 0.01KWh per validator,” notes the Status Network. “In other words, 3600 times more energy efficient than Bitcoin proof of work—a 99.97% reduction in power.”
From Chile’s Cybersyn to the AMLO in East Berlin—with “Calculating Control,” Zentrum für Netzkunst launches an exhibition and symposium that explores the links between 1960s socialism and cybernetics in the context of today’s network society. Taking over the former lobby of Berlin’s Haus der Statistik, works by Suzanne Treister, Roland Kayn, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeld, and others invite site-specific reflection: in the 1970s, the high-rise at Alexanderplatz housed a data center that helped steer the former GDR’s central planning using mainframes and cybernetics.
“Plunging the viewer in an aquatic atmosphere where blue-green algae are cultured in handmade glass containers that grow on metal structures,” AnneMarie Maes’ solo show “Woven by Nature” opens at iMAL, Brussels. In the second chapter of what curator Camilla Colombo conceived as a double exhibition (see “Sensorial Skins”), the Belgian artist-researcher through sculptures and installations explores the potential of algae and bacteria as ways to “build with nature” and “making the invisible visible.”
Aptly illustrated with Richard Prince’s 2014 series of New Portraits (image), an essay by writer and critic Jacob Barnes concludes that in the arts, social media clout does not equal market value. On Instagram, he notes, art school students regularly outperform established names while selling work for relative peanuts. As boundaries between art, artist, and process dissolve, Barnes identifies two metrics that signify value: “the maturity of an artist’s practice and the photogenicity of a given work.”
After years of R&D, Rhizome’s online archive of born-digital art, the ArtBase, relaunches with a new Wikibase infrastructure, improved metadata, and presentation. Initiated in 1999 to preserve internet art from technical obsolescence, the archive now holds more than 2,200 artworks, including early treasures such as Maciej Wisniewski’s Scroll Bar (1998, image). “With this relaunch, we are not presenting a final version of the ArtBase,” writes Rhizome, “but an open and dynamic one, that will be developed further.”
