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What Just Happened? :
Total Refusal Collective Casts NPC Workers in Critique of Contemporary Labour
The Austrian pseudo-marxist media guerilla discusses their award-winning Machinima film Hardly Working (2022) and videogame interventions writ large
“This study could pave the way for a transformative shift in climate communications and science communications in general. Highlighting the power of art to provoke emotions and promote self-reflection.”
– University of Wisconsin researcher
Nan Li , discussing her team’s
analysis of the real-world impact of eco art. In their survey, Li and team tasked 671 people to look at both
Diane Burko ’s
SUMMER HEAT (2020) mixed-media series and the
Keeling Curve it is based on. The result: Burko’s artwork was perceived just as credible, sparked positive emotions, and moved participants to the middle, politically.
Ars Electronica announces the 2023 winners of the prestigious Golden Nica media art prize, awarded in New Animation Art, Digital Musics & Sound Art, AI & Life Art, and other categories. Winning projects, selected from 3,176 submissions, include Atractor Studios and Semántica Productions ’ sonification of Colombian agricultural soils, A Tale of Two Seeds (2022), and Winnie Soon ’s Unerasable Characters Series (2022, image), that reveals the chilling scale of censorship on China’s biggest social media platform, Weibo.
“Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah.”
– Security engineering expert
Ross Anderson , on the dangers of
model collapse as AI trains on AI-generated content. In a
new paper , Anderson and team demonstrate a rapid degenerative AI feedback loop where “true underlying data distribution” is forgotten. “This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web,”
Anderson warns , “giving an advantage to firms that already did, or that control access to human interfaces at scale.”
Trevor Paglen ’s solo exhibition “Hide the Real, Show the False” opens at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), presenting new works on mind control, disinformation, and psychological operations (PSYOPS). Case in point: Doty (2023, image), a video installation and the show’s centrepiece, features testimony by former US Air Force counterintelligence officer Richard Doty, who recounts his efforts targeting UFO researchers in disinformation campaigns while actual UFO programs ran in secret.
“Shouldn’t You Be Working? 100 Years of Working from Home,” a group show about the blurring of domesticity and labour, opens at Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum in East Lansing (US). Featured are photos of 20th-century domestic labour from the museum’s archives alongside works contrasting “newfound freedom” and “the threat of total digital surveillance and exploitation” by contemporary artists including Keiichi Matsuda , Marisa Olson , Theo Triantafyllidis , Jon Rafman , and Angela Washko .
“I’m so grateful that the AI revolution came along if for no other reason than that it showed us what it looks like when consumers actually get excited about something. It truly revealed that the crypto story was about 98% hype.”
– Tech columnist
Casey Newton , chiding crypto boosters who keep saying that ‘it’s time to build!’ “There is not one crypto product to my knowledge that has, say, 100 million users,” Newton vents. “Meanwhile, ChatGPT comes along and gets 100 million users, allegedly, within the first couple of months or so.”
“I think the Bitcoiners that are celebrating these enforcement actions tend to be later on the adoption curve and lower on the IQ spectrum than folks that actually know what’s going on. They’re cultists.”
– Crypto analyst
Ryan Selkis , on the Bitcoin purists vocally celebrating recent SEC
lawsuits that claim (at least as far as America is concerned)
other leading cryptocurrencies are securities
German media artist and Post-Internet purveyor Aram Bartholl unveals Delusion And Survival (2023), a collection of custom-made steel paper clips in @ sign form. Created in collaboration with The Internet Shop for an upcoming group show at Berlin’s A:D: Curatorial , the whimsical artifact fuses two concepts whose overlapping histories permeate contemporary digital culture—the paper clip that lives on in our interfaces and as a metaphor for AI dystopia , and the now ubiquitous @ sign , first introduced in 1971.
“Chasing the Devil to the Moon: Art Under Lunar Occupation Today” opens at Tallinn Art Hall (ES), constructing post-colonial cosmic imaginaries. Inspired by the 19th-century Estonian folk tale The Moon Painters , curator Corina L. Apostol presents six artists including Agate Tūna, Amélie Laurence Fortin , and Pau/a that explore social and political notions of “recolouring” the Moon. Fortin’s new CGI video The Blue Moon Project (2023, image), for example, offers a utopian vision of sustainable (blue) energy.
“If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cyberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns.”
–
LA Times tech columnist
Brian Merchant , channelling media scholar
David Karpf ’s critique of Apple’s “anti-metaverse,” where people disappear into a “totally immersive computer on their face”—alone. “If the world keeps getting worse,” Karpf says, “this will eventually have a lot of appeal.”
German AI artist Mario Klingemann releases A.I.C.C.A. , short for Artificially Intelligent Critical Canine (2023), into the current exhibition of Madrid’s Colección SOLO. Equipped with a camera, thermal printer, and ChatGPT, the furry AI art critic on wheels is designed to roam galleries and offer analysis—from its butt. The performative sculpture pokes fun at punditry but isn’t cynical, Klingemann assures. “Art critics play a very important role. The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be ignored.”
“Unfortunately it has become too late to save Arctic summer sea ice. This is now the first major component of the Earth system that we are going to lose because of global warming.”
– German climatologist
Dirk Notz , on the inevitability of breaching a major climate tipping point. In a
new paper published in
Nature Communications , Notz and team project that, even with dramatic emission cuts, Arctic sea ice will fully melt during the summer months as soon as the 2030s—much sooner than expected.
As part of LINZ FMR, a biennial festival for art in digital contexts and public spaces in Linz (AT), artist-activists Julian Oliver and Gordan Savičić turn their PerMillion (2022) CO2 web counter into a billboard. Every morning, the parts-per-million value is updated manually to match the website in what FRM calls “a non-digital performance.” Designed as a tool for protest, the website gets its numbers directly from the continuous readings at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory , the atmospheric CO2 baseline station.
“I believe that we’re moving away from surveillance capitalism and into PSYOP capitalism, where the media we consume will be increasingly not only targeted at us, but generated for us by AI systems. And being done in a way that’s intended to manipulate us.”
– American artist
Trevor Paglen , on the dangers of next level extractivism. In talking about “
Hide the Real, Show the False ,” his upcoming solo exhibition at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Paglen parses next generation “psychological and deception operations” and why they terrify him.
The London-based artist duo dmstfctn launches GODMODE EPOCHS (2023), a “multi-player AI frustration game.” Set among the lined shelves of an infinite, simulated supermarket, players race against time to train an AI to identify products. When frustrated, the AI seeks refuge in its memories—a separate game map where players can collaborate to cheat. The “reciprocal training program”—players train and are trained—is part of a long-term research project supported by the Alan Turing Institute and Serpentine Galleries .
“Introducing iPhone, on your face,” quips ‘Famous New Media Artist’ Jeremy Bailey about the reveal of Apple’s Vision Pro. Bailey anticipated the company’s mixed-reality goggles after coming across a 2015 patent (image), while patenting (whimsical) AR interfaces of his own . “Current AR and VR patents,” Bailey wrote in 2016 , “are hilariously broad and forecast a future where culture itself belongs to the world’s largest tech companies.” The new Apple face computer still gets a thumbs-up (“this is incredible”).
“We may one day possess tools that keep us plugged in all the time, yet trick us into believing we’re not. The beauty of these ugly goggles is that they show what’s really going on.”
– Tech reporter Molly Roberts, on Apple’s newly announced
Vision Pro mixed-reality goggles. “We will be able to be not present while also being present—to fail to pay full attention to what’s around us without technically having to look away from it,” Roberts writes. “Welcome to the future.” [quote edited]
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