Amsterdam’s NEMO Science Museum unveils a giant meatball made from cultivated woolly mammoth flesh. Created to spark conversations around sustainable meat alternatives, food engineers from the Australian cultured meat company Vow inserted sheep cells with the mammoth myoglobin gene. “When it comes to meat, myoglobin is responsible for the aroma, the colour and the taste,” James Ryall, Vow’s Chief Scientific Officer explains. Where Vow’s mammoth DNA sequence had gaps, African elephant DNA was spliced in for completion.

Resurfacing fabled 18th century partially-dissected wax figures used in the study of anatomy, “Cere Anatomiche” opens at Fondazione Prada Milan, presenting four anatomical venuses and 72 drawings from the La Specola collection alongside a companion film by David Cronenberg. Entitled Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection, the Canadian director’s short dwells on how the figures’ uncanny “body language and facial expressions do not display pain or agony.”

Foregrounding daylight and circadian rhythms in an era of deleterious screen time, “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time” opens at EPFL Pavillions in Lausanne (CH). Featured are works both evocative and therapeutic, “to remind us of the necessity of regular light exposure for a healthy life,” from artists including Kirell Benzi, Olafur Eliasson, and Anna Ridler. Helga Schmid presents a full-on sleep pod (image: Circadian Dreams, 2022), in which visitors laze and soak up LED lighting calibrated to optimize natural body phases.

Honouring his Mexican heritage and the Latinx community in San Francisco, “TECH-MECHS,” a survey of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive installations opens at Gray Area. Featured are lyrical works like Pulse Topology (2021, image), in which 3000 dangling LEDs blink the varying rhythms of visitors’ recorded heartbeats, as well as bleaker perspectives on mortality and self-sovereignty, such as Sway (2016), an upside-down noose that moves from side to side “every time ICE arrests a person, like a metronome.”

“The future’s gonna be weirder than anyone can imagine,” Turkish AI artist Memo Akten writes about the effect TikTok’s newly released Teenage Filter has on people. “It makes you look young,” he demonstrates in an uncanny reaction video, “and now TikTok is full of middle-aged folks trying come to terms with this, trying to understand where their life went.” Facing your younger self can be “quite emotional,” says Akten and provides dozens of examples in a (now viral) Twitter thread.

www.grindruberairbnb.exposed, Canadian artist Jonathan Chomko’s performance exploring how apps choreograph bodies, premieres at Tangente Montreal. Responding to the ways popular digital services guide movement, a troupe of participants walk, gesture, and synchronize themselves in response to web app prompts. Staged in private during the pandemic (image, 2020), the performance marks the first time Chomko’s glued-to-their-phone “atomized actors acting as one” pace and pivot in front of an audience.

“From Body to Code,” a retrospective of pioneering Brazilian choreographer Analívia Cordeiro, opens at ZKM Karlsruhe. Included is her iconic video art piece »M 3×3« (1973, image), a trio of mid-1970s computer-dance works coded in Fortran, and Nota-Anna, the movement notation system she developed with Nilton Lobo in the 1980s. Collectively, the assembled works underscore what curator Claudia Giannetti describes as a “singular computerized method combined with a subtle and poetic language.”

A self-survey of Berlin-based bioartists Margherita Pevere, Theresa Schubert, and Karolina Żyniewicz, “Membranes Out of Order” opens at Kunstquartier Bethanien, bringing their research practices into conversation. The show presents key works that explore the ethics of emergent biotechnology and life’s tendency for “uncertainty, failure, surprise, and disobedience.” Also on view: a plethora of production paraphernalia that reveals the “unseen materials” of bioart.

Showcasing four women-identifying artists whose practices address feminized robots, “Can You Fuck It?” opens at Tokyo’s Ningen Gallery. Curator Elena Knox, Allison de Fren, Mika Kan (image: The Silent Woman, 2017), and Lin Xin’s contributed works—spanning documentary to digital illustration—demonstrate that “women’s ideas must begin to be acknowledged alongside those that present objectified feminine embodiment as a fait accompli,” writes Knox in her curatorial essay.

Ana Prvački’s Apis Gropius, a new site-specific species of bee, takes over the atrium of Berlin’s Gropius Bau. An AR experience hatched in collaboration with NEEEU during the museum’s residency program, the project draws on Prvački’s long-standing interest in bees, our dependence on them, and the venue’s history in taxonomical research. The goal: playfully explore “the manifold ways in which institutions and nature intersect and co-evolve.”

A retrospective of the feminist performance artist in her native France, “ORLAN Manifesto. Body and Sculpture” opens at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse. Collecting 100+ works from ORLAN’s archives, the show links 1960-70s photography and performance, the iconic cosmetic surgeries (image: 7th Surgery-Performance called Omnipresence, 1993), to works in bioart and robotics, underscoring how her practice “opposes morality, natural and social determinisms, and all forms of domination.”

Artist collective Keiken’s immersive installation Player of Cosmic Realms (2022) opens at Aspex Portsmouth (UK), inviting visitors to “test-drive alternative futures” with two works that harness computer simulation, wearable tech, and installation. The Life Game is an interactive CGI film series that explores gamification, digital assets, and “finding oneself” in the metaverse; while the abdomenal orbs of Bet(a) Bodies “stimulate empathy and a physical simulation of the experience of pregnancy.”