Brazilian researchers report the finding of “plastic rocks” on the remote island of Trindade, part of a volcanic archipelago about 1,100 kilometres off mainland Brazil. Chemical tests revealed the main pollutant forming these plastiglomerates to be synthetic fishing nets that wash ashore and ‘melt’ into the sediment when temperatures rise. “This is new and terrifying at the same time, because pollution has reached geology,” says Fernanda Avelar Santos, a geologist at the Federal University of Parana.

An intervention into the fabled novel Moby-Dick, “Of Whales” opens at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. American artist and MacArthur fellow Wu Tsang flips Herman Melville’s 19th century script, presenting a video installation that renders the novel’s unseen ocean depths from the White Whale’s perspective (image). A postcolonial and anti-extractivist reframing, instead of dread and death, Melville’s antagonist now offers visitors an “oceanscape-cosmos for respite, contemplation, and provocation.”

“Anoxic Memory,” a show by Maria Simmons, maker of “art that eats itself,” opens at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (VAC) in Bowmanville, Ontario (CA). Foregrounding their interest in peatlands, the Canadian artist continues to bring the bog into the white cube, here recreating its three strata—anoxic, oxic, atmospheric—vertically. One on floor Simmons evokes “the anaerobic underbellies of Canadian peatlands” in fermentation jugs, on another they fashion “sculptural ponds of brine” (image).

“Data Garden,” an exhibition by Kyriaki Goni, opens at Blenheim Walk Gallery in Leeds, UK. In it, the Greek artist presents her eponymous ongoing series (image), which uses CGI and sculpture to chronicle Saxifraga depressa and Micromeria acropolitana, plant species native to the Dolomites mountain range and the Acropolis. Presenting plant DNA as a communication protocol that links communities, Goni centres “deep time, geological transformations, and plant history.”

Marco Barotti‘s solo exhibition “Rituals of Wasted Technology” opens at silent green, Berlin, presenting two mythical techno-species in defiance of obsolescence: As tower-mounted APES (recycled Wi-Fi sector antennas) perform ”quasi-rituals” from data input—Facebook likes, Google searches, tinder swipes—SWANS (used satellite dishes) float about, propelled by sound. Barotti’s show is part of “Speaking to Ancestors,” a two-year series on ritual curated by Pauline Doutreluingne and Keumhwa Kim.

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.

The Hong Kong Design Institute (HKDI) Gallery opens “Hylozoism,” a group exhibition of five “neo-nature” ecologies. The included works by Philip Beesley, Keith Lam, Ellen Pau, Ryuichi Sakamoto & Daito Manabe, and fuse* propose a state of techno-symbiosis—“an endless cycle of mutual benefits and coexistence.” Lam’s newly commissioned TTTV Garden, for example, reimagines Nam June Paik’s 1974 TV Garden as a vertical farm that feeds on the 24-hour news cycle.

After exploring “Water” as a major exhibition theme in 2019-20, the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) opens “Air,” featuring more than 30 artists including Dora Budor, Nancy Holt, and Katie Paterson that probe the cultural, ecological, and political dimensions of Earth’s atmosphere. “Air” is anchored by Tomás Saraceno’s Drift: A cosmic web of thermodynamic rhythms (2022, image), a new commission that suspends 13 partially mirrored spheres in GOMA’s central atrium.

American software artist Everest Pipkin releases The Barnacle Goose Experiment, an “abiogenesis body horror idle clicker” where you play as researcher Dr. Evergreen G. Branca locked in a biodome and tasked with generating a working world with objects, music, and living things out of her own body. The browser game is inspired by the medieval barnacle goose myth that had people, then unaware of bird migration patterns, believe that geese emerge fully-formed from barnacles.

Daniel Franke’s CGI short Ich sitze in der Wolke (2022) premieres at the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival in Kassel, Germany. In his film, the German artist and researcher takes viewers deep into the digital cloud, a GAN-generated post-nature dreamscape where semiconductors, bitcoins, electricity, rare earth minerals, and crystals manifest to force questions about “environmental sin and digital evolution.”