Seoul-based light artist and Kimchi and Chips Co-Founder Elliot Woods teases a new image—or “worlding”—system that renders “an imagined future out of the present day reality” using machine learning, optics, and electromechanics. In a nutshell: A matrix of opto-mechanical cells that “independently pick out features, colours, textures, aesthetics” paired with prisms creates a remix of features in its background. The new system, Woods notes, will premiere in Seoul later this year.

Positioning the slaughterhouses as a space “where the boundary between human, animal, and machine is produced and reproduced,” Aria Dean’s “Abattoir, U.S.A.!” opens at The Renaissance Society in Chicago. In her new film of the same name (image), the American artist takes viewers through an empty CGI slaughterhouse, probing “modernism’s intimacy with death.” Accompanying it in the gallery are abattoir architectural motifs to unsettle visitors: rubber flooring, side walls, an aluminum door.

“Value Flows,” a pop-up show curated by the decentralized JPG community opens as part of NFT Paris. Artists including 0xDEAFBEEF, Kim Asendorf, Dmitri Cherniak, Simon Denny & Guile Twardowski, and Sarah Friend contribute works revealing the “on-chain transactions and mechanisms, or off-chain interactions between humans, that live at the core of every blockchain system.” Rippling with DIY energy, it juxtaposes ad-hoc pyramids of analogue displays (image) with the backdrop of a bustling trade show.

Saša Spačal’s solo exhibition “[UN]EARTHING” opens at Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken (DE), presenting works that trace the deep links between human biology and the soil. “Every time we breathe, we pull the world into our bodies,” the Slovenian artist and researcher writes about the planetary metabolic flows on view. The Meta_bolus bioreactor (2017, image), for example, invites visitors to sniff the seductive geosmin aroma emitted by Streptomyces bacteria which evokes “the memory of a forest after rain.”

“NOw/here,” an exhibition foregrounding two new large format material study series by Gian Maria Tosatti, opens at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. In the first, the Italian artist presents rust and gold encrusted iron panels, using oxidation to “restore a sense of the passing of time” while evoking the gold leaf of Byzantine mosaics (image left: Portraits, 2023); the second, is austere fields composed in graphite and charcoal, which “move from the real to the imaginative dimension” (right: NOw/here, 2023).

“The future’s gonna be weirder than anyone can imagine,” Turkish AI artist Memo Akten writes about the effect TikTok’s newly released Teenage Filter has on people. “It makes you look young,” he demonstrates in an uncanny reaction video, “and now TikTok is full of middle-aged folks trying come to terms with this, trying to understand where their life went.” Facing your younger self can be “quite emotional,” says Akten and provides dozens of examples in a (now viral) Twitter thread.

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.”