Danish interaction designer Bjørn Karmann premieres Paragraphica (2023), a camera that ‘captures’ images with location data (address, weather, time of day, etc.) and AI. Three dials control the data and Stable Diffusion parameters while the viewfinder displays a real-time text description of the place you’re at. Upon pressing the trigger, the AI will generate a ‘photo’ from that prompt. The project exists both as a physical, star-nosed mole-inspired prototype and a virtual camera for you to try.

Theta’s World (2023, image), an experimental videogame created by Lawrence Lek in the X Virtual incubator program, launches online. Commissioned by Beijing’s X Museum, the self-described simulation artist and sinofuturist is true to form here, presenting an imagined smart city—SimBeijing—that can be navigated in-browser. Between the floating architectural forms, urban geometries, and scattered text fragments, the experience presents “whispering stories that shift and morph with every journey undertaken.”

Formafantasma’s solo exhibition “Oltre Terra. Why Wool Matters” opens at Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, offering insight into the Italian design studio’s ongoing research “on the history, ecology, and global dynamics of the production of wool.” Curated by Hanne Eide and presented in six sections featuring objects, paintings, textiles, photographs, and videos, the show unravels the complexities of co-domestication that, Formafantasma argue, “have transformed humans as much as humans have transformed sheep.”

Julius von Bismarck’s solo exhibition “When Platitudes Become Form” opens at Berlinische Galerie, examining simplistic clichés of “how nature is seen and history is written.” For the sculptural piece I like the flowers (2017, image), for example, the German artist pressed dried plants of non-European origin into two dimensions. Bismarck’s critique of extractivist colonial world views also includes his own family history: A suspended 9 x 12 meter cloth, Landscape Painting (2022), invokes the moving waters of the Bismarck Sea.

In anticipation of the UN plastics treaty talks in Paris, Australian researchers at the Minderoo Foundation release the fist-ever plastics pollution weather forecast: Up to 48 kilograms of nylon, polyester, and car tire particles are estimated to blanket greater Paris every 24 hours. Based on 2015 studies rather than real-time data, the actual numbers are likely much higher, the researchers warn. Still, the forecast app “should sharpen the focus of negotiators,” hopes Minderoo’s Marcus Gover.

British composer and vintage computer music connoisseur Paulee Alex Bow takes to his Magical Synth Adventure! YouTube channel to revisit obscure software instruments on the Commodore Amiga, a 16bit home computer platform launched in 1985. Introducing viewers to the unique capabilities of the system’s 4-channel sound chip, Paula, Bow demoes a variety of early real-time soft synths including Aegis SONIX (1986, image), Sonic Arranger (1992), and OctaMED (1989-97, “my happy place”) that enthusiasts experiment with to this day.

Lawrence Lek’s solo exhibition “Black Cloud Highway” opens at Sadie Coles HQ, London, expanding the world of his 2021 CGI film into a ‘site-specific simulation.’ Black Cloud tells the story of a lone traffic surveillance AI in an abandoned smart city. At Sadie Coles HQ, the film’s highways become a cinematic landscape: Spanning two floors, Lek creates a “unified spatial environment of media and architecture” that incorporates sculptural elements—suspended car parts—and a new text-based role-playing game.

Australian architect and filmmaker Liam Young premieres a new docu-fiction installation, The Great Endeavor (2023), at this year’s Venice Biennale. The piece offers glimpses of a longer forthcoming film that approaches planetary-scale carbon sequestration with radical optimism. Young and consulting scientist Holly Jean Buck turn humanity’s largest engineering project into an infrastructural imaginary, “chronicling the coordinated action to decolonise the atmosphere in our last great act of planetary transformation.”