Swiss media artist Jürg Lehni shares a glimpse of his robotic drawing machine Otto (2015) at work at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. As part of “Planet Digital,” Lehni and historian Monika Dommann have the device trace historical diagrams that represent motion (e.g. traffic plans, ballet notation) to delineate “A Visual History of Flow.” The drawing in progress is the Dench Blues Double Pattern from the International Committee for Artistic Roller Skating rule book.

Pushing back hard against the NFT economy, Washington DC-based Vi Trinh releases An NFT Called Tyrian Purple. The short browser-based game prompts players to navigate a list of hypothetical NFTs with unflattering designations like snake oil, scientology, and tulip mania; each item links to a brief text explaining the reference. “This machine is being sold as a way to get away from previous systems of wealth when it is a recreation of existing power structures,” writes Trinh.

“New Art City Festival 2022” opens online, on the eponymous virtual exhibition platform. Leaning into its “Architectures of Abundance” subtitle, it bundles digital sculpture, audiovisual experiments, and code poetry from artists including Anna Nazo, Celine Lassus, Grimm, Henrique Fagundes—100 artists across 31 exhibitions. Of note: “Diffracted Sensibilities Artificial Gaze” (hatched within a Royal College of Art course), and the first issue of H1YBRID ART JOURNAL.

“Ultimate Vatos: Force & Honneur,” a solo show by French artist Sara Sadik opens at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany. Executed in her “Beurcore” style—reflecting working class North African diaspora youth culture—Sadik’s video installation chronicles pressures faced by young adult post-migrants. The CGI narrative sits “between The Hunger Games and voyeuristic survival training,” and is heavily inspired by first-person videogame playthrough videos.

Software artists and project co-founders Paloma Rodríguez Carrington and Harm van den Dorpel announce the discontinuation of Left Gallery. Active since 2015, the blockchain-based space for the display and dissemination of downloadable objects pioneered crypto art with a curated marketplace and exhibitions. Launched at Spike Art’s Berlin project space, Left Gallery fittingly concludes with NFT auctions of the magazine’s covers throughout the years.

“Robota,” a show featuring Matthew Angelo Harrison’s encasements of auto industry ephemera and African sculptures in sold resin blocks, opens at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. A Detroit native who worked as a clay modeller for Ford, Harrison “attends to the devaluation of human labour” by freeze-framing UAW strike ephemera and hardhats, headlights (image: Seer: Lay Bare, 2020), and African sculptures in vitrine-like forms.

A new iteration of Shirin Fahimi’s Umm al Raml’s Sand Narratives (2021–) opens at articule in Montreal. In this version, the Iranian artist conjures a “future of female prophecy” in VR by foregrounding two of her central motifs: the desert and divination. “I like to think about the connection of sand to technology, from the journey of silica sands to silicon used in computer chips,” she reveals to Akimbo (image: Sand and Silicon Studies, 2022).

A survey of seven performance and software works that explore human connection during COVID, Lauren Lee McCarthy’s solo exhibition “I Heard Talking Is Dangerous” opens at EIGEN+ART Lab, Berlin. In the 2020 piece the show is named after, for example, a masked McCarthy delivers text-to-speech monologues about safety and distancing to friends—on their doorstep. Captured in documentation and artifacts, the works reveal moments of augmented, but real, intimacy.

In the CLB Berlin exhibition “Assembly Strategies,” Chilean architect Pedro Serrano explores how JOYN MACHINE might help address local infrastructure needs sustainably. Developed by the research-driven Berlin-based Studio Milz, the portable all-in-one design and assembly system allows for low-cost, low-footprint fabrication of wooden architecture. During the inaugural JOYN residency in 2021, Serrano realized speculative spatial configurations “that have no site or client.”

A solo show by Russian digital artist Olia Lialina opens at Pasadena, California’s And/Or Gallery. Mixing long term project Online Newspapers (2004-18) with newer ones including False Memories (2020) and Lossless (2018-22, image)—browser studies, GIF fragmentation—the exhibition draws a through line connecting Lialina’s interests past and present. “She has become an expert and champion of free-form early net culture and aesthetics,” write the And/Or team.