After excursions into lenticulars and tapestries, Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal renders a new series of digital drawings (reminiscent of his trademark browser canvases) on enamelled steel plates at Amsterdam’s Upstream Gallery. These Mechanical Paintings explore “the abstraction of everyday objects and scenes through the lens of the early internet’s innocence and optimism,” contrasting the heavy, long-lasting material with Rozendaal’s spontaneous and playful compositions.

“Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952-1975” opens at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston. Featuring Roy Lichtenstein (image: Steak, 1960), Lee Lozano, Marjorie Strider, Idelle Weber, and other artists associated with pop art, the show chronicles the gradual erasure of gesture and the move towards a machine aesthetic informed by advertising and emerging reproduction technology. The selected works “upend the traditionally assumed connection drawing has to the hand of the artist,” writes curator Kelly Montana.

A heartwreching visualization of COVID-19’s impact, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s A Crack in the Hourglass (2020) debuts IRL at the Brooklyn Museum. An “anti-monument,” the installation renders portraits of pandemic victims with grains of sand, once realized the delicate images fall away. Commissioned by MUAC (Mexico City), NYC is a fitting first stop, given the city endured amongst the “highest number of pandemic-related deaths in the U.S.—and worldwide,” note the curators.

Software artists and VRAME.io collaborators Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace launch DFACE.app, “the first website that provides neural network face redaction in your web browser.” Using an “impressively small but performant 13MB face detection neural network” (source) called YOLOV5, DFACE allows users to easily anonymise profile pictures with a variety of effects while keeping their data private.

Trinity College Dublin announces the end of Science Gallery, stating that it no longer considers the venue for science and technology-based exhibitions and lectures to be financially viable. Opened in 2008 to encourage interest in scientific discovery and creativity and counting more than three million visitors to date, the gallery will permanently close on February 28, 2022. The current exhibition, “BIAS: BUILT THIS WAY,” on AI and algorithmic prejudice curated by Julia Kaganskiy will be its last.

For The Calvert Journal, Jonathan Bousfield revisits the “neo-abstraction, early premonitions of op-art, and the beginnings of computer art” seen in New Tendencies, an art movement in former Yugoslavia and one of “Europe’s forgotten avant-gardes.” Between 1961–73, five landmark exhibitions (feat. Julije Knifer, Vladimir Bonačić, Francois Morellet, Victor Vasarely, and many others) brought hundreds of artists, critics, and intellectuals to the city of Zagreb and “anticipated everything from video art to bio-art and robotics.”

The latest entry in the Whitney’s Sunset/Sunrise series of commissioned Internet artworks that mark sunset and sunrise in New York City every day, Ryan Kuo’s Hateful Little Thing overwrites the museum’s web pages with text snippets that reflect the artist’s experiences—“frustrations”—as an Asian-American. By creating its own version of exhibition labels, Hateful Little Thing addresses the act of taking up “white space” and highlights the complexities of hate, racism, and exclusion.

Silicon Valley venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, responsible for the phrase “software is eating the world,” invest in the Friends with Benefits (FwB) DAO. Perhaps the most well known tokenized community, FwB is praised as the “de facto home of web3’s growing creative class” and for onbarding influential artists and creatives into crypto ”by putting human capital first.” The exact details of the funding remain undisclosed, but presumably the ‘get’ here is access to innovative intellectual property, and an inside view of a 2000-member DAO as it evolves from insular community into a (more) prominent cultural producer. “In addition to borderless resource assembly, DAOs enable bottom-up innovation and community building, from which new ideas can be incubated and scaled” note the VC firm’s Carra Wu and Chris Dixon.