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Anicka Yi ’s solo exhibition “A Shimmer Through The Quantum Foam” opens at Esther Schipper, Berlin, evolving the Korean-American artist’s notion of the “biologized machine” with new works. Visitors enter a hybrid ecosystem of fleshy landscapes created with machine learning models and suspended luminescent pods resembling Radiolaria . As the soft glow of an aqueous ooze—indicative of life’s marine origins—sprawls across the gallery floor, a custom-made scent by perfumer Barnabé Fillion fills the air.
“This piece is a litmus test for whether the marketplaces or collectors really cared when they paid lip service on emissions. The answer is a resounding ‘no.’”
– American media artist
Kyle McDonald , reflecting on his futile Ethereum emissions mitigation artwork,
Amends (2022), on the one-year anniversary of the
Ethereum Merge . Launched in 2022 to offset the carbon footprint of major NFT platforms, the piece is now “a monument to inaction on behalf of Foundation, OpenSea, and Rarible.”
On the anniversary of the Ethereum Merge , a protocol shift that dramatically reduced the chain’s energy footprint, American media artist Kyle McDonald reveals the physical sculptures of his eco-critical NFT artwork, Amends (2022), to remind us of the 18.1 million tons of CO2 the use of Ethereum produced historically. If sold, the three handmade glass blocks filled with artefacts from associated mitigation projects would help repair the damage done by three major NFT marketplaces.
“Alluding to the physical laws of propagation of light particles and sound waves,” Carsten Nicolai ’s solo show “Strahlen / Raggi” opens at the Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (FMAV) in Modena (IT). Displayed are tributes to the German artist’s late friend and collaborator Ryuichi Sakamoto , a Geiger counter-driven reinterpretation of a Japanese Zen garden, and a pair of installations where sound causes water in rotating parabolic basins to ripple—cleverly warping reflected light (image: reflektor distortion , 2016).
David Golumbia (1963-2023)
Fierce digital culture critic David Golumbia dies after a battle with cancer. Author of
The Politics of Bitcoin (2016) and the forthcoming
Cyberlibertarianism , the American researcher examined financialization, language, and software. Golumbia was an Associate Professor in the English Department at
Virginia Commonwealth University .
Combining video, dance, and a flute quartet, Marianna Simnett ’s opera GORGON premieres at Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) in Berlin. Director Simnett’s narrative weighs “distresses and transformations” brought on by AI (tech writ large) by teaming up its namesake wailing mythic creature with a bored doughnut store employee. Technologist Moisés Horta Valenzuela puts the live flautists in conversation with AI-generated sound, and Holly Herndon ’s voice model Holly+ also makes a cameo.
“Neither communities or rivers need AI ‘to speak for them.’ This promotes ‘ecological AI’ by theoretically-informed sleight of hand, gesturing to the more-than-human while materially relying on Large Language Models.”
– British AI critic
Dan McQuillan , on the flaws of Superflux’ aspirational
Ecological Intelligence Agency (2023). The speculative governance model suggests that AI can make river health legible and aid policy, but “you can’t discuss sewage without mentioning privatization and debt,” McQuillan argues. [quote edited]
OUT NOW :
Sanela Jahić
Under the Calculative Gaze
The paperback adaptation of
Jahić ’s artistic research
shown at Aksioma in early 2023 expands on the entanglement of socially-applied technologies, systemic injustices, and creeping authoritarianism. Included: an essay by prominent AI critic
Dan McQuillan .
“As U.S. et al. v. Google goes to trial, the echoes of the landmark federal suit against Microsoft, a quarter-century ago, are unmistakable.”
– Tech journalist
Steve Lohr , reminiscing the last major American
antitrust trial (1998). Once again “a tech giant is accused of using its overwhelming market power to unfairly cut competitors off from potential customers,” Lohr writes, noting Google is not
quite as audacious though (a Microsoft exec famously planned to “cut off Netscape’s air supply”).
“The institution is drawn toward those who can leverage their racial identity into a curatorial practice, which the institution can then leverage (or co-opt) into its brand.”
– Writer and designer
Simon Wu , on the catch-22 of the art world finally embracing racialized curators. Drawing on his time at MoMA, Wu observes that the desire to confront labour and ethics issues within institutions often gets trumped by the stability (“healthcare, a living wage, parental leave”) that many curators of colour have only
just got access to for the first time.
“GEN/GEN: Generative Generations,” a generative art survey linking practitioners past and present, opens at Gazelli Art House London. Artists including Sougwen Chung , Licia He , Tyler Hobbs , Rhea Myers , Piter Pasma , Melissa Wiederrecht , and Stephen Willats contribute prints, plots, screen-based works, and NFTs. Multi-generational, visitors can take in 1980s paintings by Harold Cohen ’s prescient AARON program in one glance and Brendan Dawes’ sculpture You, Me And The Machine (2022), the next.
“If the last-ever California tiger salamander shuffles off this mortal coil, the odds are decent that it will happen on rain-slick blacktop one damp spring night.”
– Environmental journalist
Ben Goldfarb , on how traffic accelerates extinction. “Every year American cars hit more than 1 million large animals, such as deer, elk, and moose, and as many as 340 million birds,” Goldfarb writes, with at least 21 species under direct existential threat from traffic. The poster groups for roadkill’s hidden toll: reptiles and amphibians, which are vital for local ecosystems.
Time magazine identifies the 100 people that drive the current AI boom and the conversations around it in a special issue. In addition to staple industry names like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario and Daniela Amodei, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Time 100 AI also highlights the work of AI researchers Kate Crawford , Timnit Gebru , and Meredith Whittaker , and artists Stephanie Dinkins , Sougwen Chun , and Holly Herndon , who “grapple with profound ethical questions” and try to use AI “to address social challenges.”
“What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI” opens at New York’s Ford Foundation Gallery. Curators Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan enlist 16 artists including Algorithmic Justice League , Morehshin Allahyari , Kite , Lauren Lee McCarthy , Mimi Ọnụọha , and Caroline Sinders to counter pervasive “algorithmic worldmaking” models with “feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI.” Allahyari’s series Moon-faced (2022, image), for example, hallucinates genderless Qajar dynasty portraits.
“Alexandra Asanova Elbakyan has strived to shatter academic publishing’s monopoly-like mechanisms in which publishers charge high prices even though authors of articles in academic journals receive no payment.”
– Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) membership advocate
Christian Romero , heralding
Alexandra Asanova Elbakyan as the recipient of the 2023 EFF Award for Access to Scientific Knowledge. Launched in 2011, Elbakyan’s
Sci-Hub platform has opened access to more than 88 million research documents.
The Hole’s yearly thematic group show, “Fembot,” opens at the New York gallery’s Bowery location, celebrating technology and the female form. “Representations of the female body are as vast as the internet, from futuristic robots to porous, sweaty flesh,” writes gallerist Kathy Grayson about the works of Salomé Chatrior , Auriea Harvey , Jordan Homstad , Faith Holland , Nicole Ruggiero , and others that range from “cyborg goddesses” to post-human grotesques. Case in point: CGI artist Emma Stern ’s 3d-printed ‘amphemme’ Brooke (2023, image).
“The beetles reached Ohio in 1869. England in 1875. France, 1922, and wherever they went, a defenceless plant got thoroughly routed.”
– Science writer
Dan Samorodnitsky , on the rapid spread of the
Colorado potato beetle . In his essay about a scientist battling “perhaps the most notorious agricultural pest on the planet,” Samorodnitsky provides a crash course on global potato farming, the history of pesticides, and new
RNAi (RNA interference) gene-targetting formulations used against the stubbornly resilient insect.
American artist Aay Liparato ‘s “Small Acts of Violence,” an exhibition surveying intimate partner violence (IPV) fallout in VR, opens at ARGOS Brussels. Co-producers C0N10UR and V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media join in presenting the immersive piece, which centres testimonials from women, nonbinary, and non-cis male IPV perpetrators from the UK and Belgium. Emotionally challenging, viewers must choose which situations to “gaze on or turn away from” and “assert their boundaries.”
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