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October 2021

Media artists and critical engineers Julian Oliver and Gordan Savičić show support for Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists by adding the group’s colours—orange and black—as a Permillion (2022) theme. The web app that doubles as a flashing protest display highlights the dramatic increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, from 315 ppm in 1958 to 416 ppm in 2022. Other climate advocacy groups supported with colour themes are Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise, 350, and Greenpeace.

“Usually I had to sell the idea of digital art to the upper administrative levels. Now trustees are coming to me and asking if the Whitney should be in the metaverse.”
– Stalwart digital art curator Christiane Paul, on the post-NFT buzz around digital art in American museums. In addition to Paul, curators Michelle Kuo and Paola Antonelli (MoMA), and Tina Rivers Ryan (Buffalo AKG Art Museum) comment on the newfound enthusiasm.

Mario Santamaría’s solo show “Gárgola” opens at Centre d’Art la Panera, Lleida (ES), wedging two metaverses into one exhibition space. An architectural structure marks the exact plot of land the Spanish artist purchased in Next Earth, a virtual 1:1 reproduction of the planet, while suspended screens render a 13,5 billion light-years drop (the fall, 2022) into the Voxels Ethereum virtual world. A winding liquid cooling system further reminds viewers of computing’s (very real) materiality.

“Three Parallels,” an exhibition centred on a new site-specific installation by Light and Space movement artist Phillip K. Smith III opens at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA). In it, Smith’s calibrated use of mirrors, translucent panes, and lighting yields a richly hued environment that responds to atmospheric conditions and suggests “a future … [where we enjoy] a more symbiotic relationship with the digital realm,” writes curator Jennifer McCabe.

“Might there be a role that institutions could play if we know that sound and music is healing? Can that open up new possibilities for arts funding, for policy, for what is considered a therapeutic experience or an artistic experience?”
– Writer and musician K Allado-McDowell, on the questions driving their new AI opera Song of the Ambassadors. The piece premiered at New York’s Lincoln Center on Oct 25th with the support of composer Derrick Skye, visual artist Refik Anadol, and neuroscientists Ying Choon Wu and Alex Khalil.
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“My blindness informs how I hear. And it’s really hyperactive and weird. My ADHD adds to that too. But I would never say I’m doing this to emulate what it sounds like to be blind.”
– Media artist Andy Slater, in a post recounting his journey into sound, engagement with Chicago’s disabled artist community, and advocacy work (e.g. The Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists Manifesto, 2017)

For the launch of Vertical Atlas, a book and exhibition capturing Hivos and Het Nieuwe Instituut’s joint research into digital geopolitics, South African artist Francois Knoetze unleashes the mythical e-waste creature from his 2018 short Core Dump ‘E-Revenant’. Shot in Dakar and the first in a series of four, the film “emerges from the dystopian landfills of consumer culture” to explore the links between digital technology and colonialism.

Italian computer scientist Giacomo Miceli launches The Infinite Conversation, an AI-generated, never-ending voice chat between filmmaker Werner Herzog and philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Described as a love letter to the two icons, the exchange aims to raise awareness of the ease of AI voice synthesis. “Any fool with a laptop can do this,” Miceli warns and wonders: “What would our favourite people do, if we had unlimited access to their minds?”

OUT NOW:
Vertical Atlas
The culmination of a four-year research project on digital geopolitics, with contributions from Benjamin Bratton, James Bridle, Cao Fei, Femke Herregraven, Maya Indira Ganesh, Metahaven, and dozens more
“Kim Jung Gi left us less than [a week ago] and AI bros are already ‘replicating’ his style and demanding credit. Vultures and spineless, untalented losers.”
– Comic-book writer Dave Scheidt, blasting the release of an AI model trained on the renowned South Korean illustrator’s work within days after his passing. “In effect, manga and anime are acting as an early testing ground for AI art-related ethics and copyright liability,” notes reporter Andrew Deck in his analysis.

“Futures Past,” a CGI-heavy survey of abstract imaginaries opens at London’s arebyte. Contributing esoteric artifacts and “excavated ruins” of distant and fantastical futures are artists including Morehshin Allahyari, Lawrence Lek, and Kumbirai Makumbe. Contributed works include Juan Covelli’s GAN-generated Speculative Treasures (2021, image), and Sandrine Deumier’s Beyond Matter (2022), an XR tableau of “animal orchids and mineral matter in expansion.”

“Dancing While Waiting (for the end of the world),” the 12th edition of Eastern Bloc’s Sight + Sound Festival, opens in Montréal. Curated by Nathalie Bachand and Sarah Ève Tousignant, it features Adam Basanta, Johanna Bruckner, Faith Holland (image: Detumescence, 2021), Max Lester, Sabrina Ratté & Roger Tellier-Craig, Florence To, and 30 others in a program that explores tensions between (pandemic) before times and “a ‘future’ that may or may not live up to its name.”

In the works since 2019 and then postponed during the pandemic, Kurt Hentschläger’s audiovisual performance EKO premieres at the Theatre Royal Plymouth, UK. Part of an ongoing series set in complete darkness, the Austrian artist’s composition interrupts the absence of light with intense millisecond-long bursts of “micro-animated geometric forms” emanating from an LED wall. As a maelstrom of ambient sound envelopes the viewers, “retinal afterimages unravel within their eyes.”

“AI art is, in my view, soft propaganda for the ideology of prediction. As long as it remains tied to the paradigm and politics of ever-large models, increasing capital and marketing hyperbole, its contribution to art practice will have little meaning, if any.”
– Artist and performer Marco Donnarumma, fiercely arguing that AI art is a direct manifestation of “prediction ideology … the operating system of the Global North”
“Yeah, we solved narrative generation, but it turns out that no-one wants to read five thousand fanfic stories unless they have an emotional connection to the authorship, and it flopped. Was a total Bach Faucet.”
– Artist and scholar Kate Compton, demonstrating the use of “Bach Faucet,” a new (David-Cope-inspired) term she coined for the burgeoning “fully fractal” era of AI-powered cultural reproduction

Known for inventive hardware hacks, Swedish musician and self-professed ‘mad engineer’ Linus Åkesson debuts his Commodordion: an 8-bit accordion made from two Commodore 64s. Both run QWERTUOSO, Åkesson’s programmable SID chip synthesizer, played via computer keyboard. As with a real accordion, the sounds are triggered by the bellows (that Åkesson improvised from 5 ¼ floppy disks): a sensor measures air flow as the virtuoso plays.

“Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere” opens at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. Featuring Jes Fan, Jenna Sutela, and Anicka Yi, and 11 other artists that reveal the “interspecies entanglements” that shape our world. Contributed works range from Špela Petrič’s poetic shadow study Confronting Vegetal Otherness: Skotopoiesis (2015)—cast on germinating cress—to Candice Lin’s “communal piss” fungal sculpture Memory (Study #2) (2016, image).

An output of the STARTS4Water art-science research initiative, “Faces of Water” opens at Bozar Brussels. Featuring works by Haseeb Ahmed, Anna Ridler, Theresa Schubert, and Joshua G. Stein, each artist highlights different water challenges from across Europe. For Schubert’s Glacier Trilogy—Part 1 (2022, image), for example, the artist mused about how glaciers “embed information” (radiation, pollution, organic matter)—her video installation mourns their replacement with a “synthetic archive.”

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