Foregrounding daylight and circadian rhythms in an era of deleterious screen time, “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time” opens at EPFL Pavillions in Lausanne (CH). Featured are works both evocative and therapeutic, “to remind us of the necessity of regular light exposure for a healthy life,” from artists including Kirell Benzi, Olafur Eliasson, and Anna Ridler. Helga Schmid presents a full-on sleep pod (image: Circadian Dreams, 2022), in which visitors laze and soak up LED lighting calibrated to optimize natural body phases.

Eliot Higgins, Founder and Creative Director of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, rattles Twitter with a series of deepfakes depicting Donald Trump’s arrest. Created using the latest version of Midjourney in anticipation of the rumoured bust, the AI-generated images show dramatic (and dramatically convincing) scenes of the former U.S. president wrangling cops and being taken in. In the real world, the Manhattan grand jury investigating Trump has yet to vote on an indictment.

Generative art NFT platform fxhash announces a new feature that “enables collectors to collaborate in the creative process.” Entitled fx(params), the functionality allows artists to designate certain parameters (e.g. colour, geometry, velocity) within their code as adjustable for primary market buyers. Instead of leaving an NFT’s appearance entirely to chance, the collector can tweak the artist’s system to their liking before minting their copy (image: fx(params) interface for 1mpo$ter’s Smash, 2023).

Honouring his Mexican heritage and the Latinx community in San Francisco, “TECH-MECHS,” a survey of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive installations opens at Gray Area. Featured are lyrical works like Pulse Topology (2021, image), in which 3000 dangling LEDs blink the varying rhythms of visitors’ recorded heartbeats, as well as bleaker perspectives on mortality and self-sovereignty, such as Sway (2016), an upside-down noose that moves from side to side “every time ICE arrests a person, like a metronome.”

Brazilian researchers report the finding of “plastic rocks” on the remote island of Trindade, part of a volcanic archipelago about 1,100 kilometres off mainland Brazil. Chemical tests revealed the main pollutant forming these plastiglomerates to be synthetic fishing nets that wash ashore and ‘melt’ into the sediment when temperatures rise. “This is new and terrifying at the same time, because pollution has reached geology,” says Fernanda Avelar Santos, a geologist at the Federal University of Parana.

Internet artist, former Rhizome co-editor, and are.na co-founder John Michael Boling resurrects his 2007 net art piece 20 Years Ago Today along with other parts of 53 os, a collaborative mid-2000s catalogue of GIFs, videos, and quirky web experiments. Cleverly, 20 Years Ago Today moves a playing YouTube panorama sequence across the browser canvas at matching speed, resulting in what net art pioneer Olia Lialina, then, praised as “a shining example of distributed work and tactful appropriation.”

Lorna Mills’ solo exhibition “The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common Part 1” opens online at distant.gallery, populating your browser canvas with dozens of Mill’s eccentric GIFs. Hosted in collaboration with TRANSFER gallery, LA-based curator Kelani Nichole’s digital art imprint and long-time Mills representative, the show also serves as an in-browser gathering for net art enthusiasts: “COME TO THE OPENING,” the Canadian media artist tweeted to her followers. “BE A GIF. BE A FUCKING GIF.”

London-based light and media art collective United Visual Artists (UVA) celebrates the 20th anniversary of their studio genesis: Tasked with the (now iconic) stage design of Massive Attack’s 100th Window world tour (2003-4), UVA founders Chris Bird, Matt Clark, and Ash Nehru developed LED typographic displays for politically charged, location-specific real-time data feeds. “At the time, our way of working together was unique,” they write on Instagram. “It went on to inform our practice and studio culture.”