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“The room itself comes close to feeling like an instrument that is being played in real-time, one that sounds better the more bodies there are in the space to absorb its waves.”
– Critic and curator
Mariana Fernández , lauding
A Harmonic Algorithm , electronic music pioneer
Laurie Spiegel ’s exhibition at Mexico City’s Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC). “[It’s] as if Spiegel were pushing the sonic fragments around with her mouse behind the walls,” writes Fernández, referring to Spiegel’s
Music Mouse software (1986).
How (not) to get hit by a self-driving car , an installation and game by Tomo Kihara and Daniel Coppen , opens at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. Navigating a mock-street in the gallery, visitors try to make their way across a crosswalk without being detected by a computer vision system. A provocation in a city where autonomous vehicles are regularly involved in accidents , the game underscores “how going unseen by a similar AI system in an actual self-driving car could result in a tragic collision.”
“Apple selectively restricts access to the points of connection between third-party apps and the iPhone’s operating system, degrading the functionality of non-Apple apps and accessories.”
– U.S. Attourney General
Merrick Garland , describing the iPhone and App Store as an
anti-competitive walled garden. “Apple has held a dominant market share not because of its superiority, but because of its unlawful exclusionary behaviour,” he says in a speech announcing sweeping antitrust action against the tech giant.
OUT NOW :
Madhumita Murgia
Code Dependent
The intimate investigation of AI that we’ve been waiting for, Indian-British journalist and Financial Times tech correspondent Madhumita Murgia compiles the stories of marginalized people—BIPOC women, war refugees, gig workers, tribal communities—“living in the shadow of AI.”
“We’re artists. We’re not here to be reasonable, or to do what’s necessary, or to cater to regulatory appetites. We’re here to be unreasonable, unnecessary, and counter-appetite. If we stand for opt-in and all we get is opt-out, at least we tried.”
– American software artist
Kyle McDonald , pushing back against pragmatism when it comes to protecting creators from Big Tech’s thirst for AI training data. Whereas
some advocate for opting out of model data as the only realistic resolution, McDonald doubles down on artists granting permission first.
Presenting physics-informed work-in-progress, Carsten Nicolai ’s HYbr:ID opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO). A listening lounge featuring a sound piece that “oscillates between more stylized, dilated rhythms and dreamy atmospheres generated by low frequencies” inspired by Hermann Minkowski ’s 1908 model of spacetime takes centre stage. Also presented are related drawings and graphics in which the German artist pushes the limits of musical notation.
“This new report represents an immediate call for greater investment in infrastructure development, more promotion of repair and reuse, capacity building, and measures to stop illegal e-waste shipments.”
– United Nations senior scientific specialist
Kees Baldé , on new analysis showing the staggering numbers of global electronic waste production. According to the
report , the world generated 62 million metric tons of e-waste in 2022. That is up 82% compared to 2010, and on track to rise a further 32% to reach 82 million metric tons in 2030.
“Maybe creating practices and transmitting them through physical, social embodiment is actually a more resilient structure than any particular media might be.”
– Writer and AI researcher
K Allado-McDowell , speculating that person-to-person knowledge transfer is more enduring than any media format. “A way to commit something to the future is through practice—teaching people how to do things that they can pass on,” notes Allado-McDowell, discussing the fragility of books and hard drives with
New Models ’
Caroline Busta and
Lil Internet . [quote edited]
Consumer advocates Public Citizen release “Mushrooming Risk,” a report on the danger of AI tools to foragers. Spurned by recent hospitalizations, researcher Rick Claypool outlines the folly of using apps to identify species and gauge edibility. “Mushroomers must take the time to develop their skills at their own pace,” he writes, championing local knowledge over app reliance. Experimenting with DALL-E compounded his fear; when he prompted it to label basic mushroom anatomy, it hallucinated utter nonsense (image).
“Ten Thousand Suns,” the 24th edition of the Biennale of Sydney opens at venues across the New South Wales capital. Artists including Mona Al Qadiri , Dumb Type , Özgür Kar , and Lawrence Lek are featured at the White Bay Power Station flagship exhibition, which repurposes the former coal-fired facility as a cultural hub. Excitingly, Australian cyberfeminism originators VNS Matrix present a selection of their works from the last four decades on banners, displays, and zines throughout the venue (image).
“A default move within contemporary art over the past two decades: defunctionalized objects pulled out of usual circulation or infrastructural location appear to offer a kind of freezing and deictic insight.”
–
e-flux Contributing Editor
Evan Calder Williams , taking aim at white cube infrastructure porn. “As if a hunk of undersea internet cable on a gallery floor confronts us with the materiality of communication,” he writes in the second part of an essay on sweeping cultural paralysis. [quote edited]
“Universal / Remote,” a show chronicling how “capital and data flow freely on a global scale,” opens at the National Art Center Tokyo (NACT). Artists including Xu Bing , Maiko Jinushi , Trevor Paglen , and Evan Roth contribute works addressing globalization and social atomization. Hito Steyerl , Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze , and Miloš Trakilović stage their video installation Mission Accomplished: Belanciege (2019, image), a sardonic reflection on post-Berlin Wall European culture—and the luxury brand Balenciaga.
“László Moholy-Nagy telephoned instructions to a factory in the 1920s to produce images without the need to be on-site to direct production.”
– Artist
George Legrady , reaching back to the Bauhaus to locate an early precedent for AI-generated imagery. Taking stock of his ongoing experimentation with
MidJourney and
Stable Diffusion , Legrady explores the aesthetic and critical concerns around prompt-based art.
“The line, when regarded close up, does not have the sweeping fluency or charm of the human hand, of a Matisse, for instance, whom some of the linear portraits seem to be channelling.”
– Critic
Lilly Wei , conducting a close reading of the linework of AARON, late American artist
Harold Cohen ’s painting software. Taking stock of his Whitney retrospective, Wei concludes Cohen’s computer paintings “are animated by texture, touch, and the glow of colour, and better for it, so human artistry isn’t obsolete yet.”
UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery opens “Bodily Autonomy,” Lauren Lee McCarthy ’s largest solo show in the U.S. to date. Curator Ceci Moss brings together two major series of works—Surrogate (2022) and Saliva (2022)—in which the Chinese-American artist examines bio-surveillance through performances, videos, and installations. A newly commissioned Saliva Bar , for example, invites visitors to reflect on data privacy, race, gender, and class as they pertain to genetic material over traded spit samples.
“We’d have kept our fossil fuel funding sponsors AND curated poetry competitions on climate change if it wasn’t for those pesky school strike kids.”
– English trip hop juggernaut
Massive Attack , ‘decoding’ a
Guardian op-ed on ethics and precarity in the cultural sector. The piece cites the criticism and climate activism offered by Bergen’s recent
International Literary Festival as an example for why festivals matter, but fails to explore the Faustian bargain that sustains a lot of cultural infrastructure.
“So literally, I was like, what the fuck? Get these down. What are you doing? It’s as if I was the head of Gucci, and there’s all these knockoffs.”
– Veteran tech journalist
Kara Swisher , on AI-generated clones of her memoir,
Burn Book (2024), flooding Amazon. First reported by
404 media , the rip-offs have since blossomed in variety, sporting alt titles (
Tech’s Queen Bee With A Sting ), different authors, and illustrious synthetic cover photography. “So I, of course, put them all together, and I sent Andy Jassy [the CEO of Amazon] a note and said, what the fuck? You’re costing me money.”
Underscoring the direness of the climate crisis, Oliver Ressler ’s “Dog Days Bite Back” opens at Belvedere 21 in Vienna. Featured are works spanning photography, film, and installation by the Austrian artist that lament the state of stalled climate policy and fossil fuel crony capitalism run amok. His 2-channel video installation Climate Feedback Loops (2023, image), for example, starkly documents the ice melt around Svalbard , a Norwegian archipelago that is rapidly disappearing into the Arctic Ocean.
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