Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani’s first online artwork, The Neon Hieroglyph, premieres as part of Manchester International Festival’s Virtual Factory series. Drawing on her research into ergot, a grain fungus from which LSD is derived, Shani composed nine episodic films that explore psychedelics as a catalyst for change in what the curators describe as “a dreamlike CGI journey that takes us from the cellular to the galactic, from the forests to the subterranean, from the real to the almost unimaginable.”

“I’ve spent a lifetime wondering why the Amiga ‘Insert Workbench’ boot image looked kinda wonky,” confides Panic Inc. co-founder Cabel Sasser on Twitter. ”I always assumed it was hand-drawn pixel art.” It turns out it’s vector art. A surprised Sasser reveals that just 412 bytes of vector drawing instructions were needed to render the iconic (Sheryl Knowles-created) hand-held floppy disk. “Incredible!” Meanwhile, media artist Golan Levin verified the 1985 vector data with a “quick-and-dirty” Processing sketch.

Opening at Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt, Germany, Daniel Canogar’s solo show “Latencies” explores a world of transient, fleeting memories, shifting media and continuously increasing data streams. Next to signature works from the artist’s Small Data and Echo Series, the show features five pieces from the new Latencies Series (image: Monocle), for which Canogar mapped discarded parts like lenses, heat sinks, and shredded aluminium onto animated screens.

Indigenous computational media artist Jon M. R. Corbett is the subject of a fascinating interview with Daniel Temkin at Esoteric.Codes. Corbett delves into the syntax and epistomology underpinning his Cree#, Ancestral Code, and Wisakecak coding languages, which all circumvent the eurocentric (and latin alphabet) origins of “not just programming, but computing technologies in general.” His ambitious extending beyond software, he also speaks to his alt-keyboard design—based on the Cree Star Chart (image).

Commissioned for transmediale’s “For Refusal” program, !Mediengruppe Bitnik releases Refuse to be Human, a web extension that changes your browser settings to that of a Yandex bot. Like Google, Russia’s primary search engine Yandex uses web crawlers to index online content. “Surfing as a bot gives you access to the grey web,” write the Bitniks, “a layer of content only visible to bots.” Image: RYBN’s Double Negative Captchas (2020)—the bot test that directly inspired Bitnik’s work.