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Jenny Odell
Saving Time
An analysis of how our sense of time is structured by the relentless demands of capitalism, and a counterproposition arguing for “different rhythms of life.”
“Chain Reaction,” a collection of NFTs curated by Christiane Paul , is released on Feral File. Artists including Stephanie Dinkins , Sara Ludy , and Jennifer & Kevin McCoy contribute NFTs that probe the “social, aesthetic, and environmental contexts and networks in which these assets are embedded.” Ira Greenberg & Marina Zurkow’s The Dorises
“We are thrilled to announce that our campaign to gather artist opt outs has resulted in 78 million artworks being opted out of AI training.”
– AI artist-activist group
Spawning , on the success of
haveibeentrained.com , a tool that allows artists to search for their works in the Stable Diffusion training set and exclude them from further use. “This establishes a significant precedent towards realizing our vision of consenting AI,” write Spawning founders
Mat Dryhurst and
Holly Herndon .
Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich’s single-channel video installation Onset (2023) opens at Aksioma, Ljubljana. Co-commissioned by transmediale , the film draws on medieval demonology, open-source intelligence, and CGI animation to ‘haunt’ Russian air bases the duo reconstructed from satellite imagery. “The true horror of Russian colonialism becomes manifest in the process of possession,” the artists write, “the imposition of external control that gradually destroys an organism from within.”
“Signals: How Video Transformed the World” opens at New York’s MoMA, showcasing over 70 media works from the past six decades that capture how “artists have posed video as an agent of global change—from televised revolution to electronic democracy.” Highlights include Nam June Paik’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984), Ant Farm’s Media Burn (1973), Martine Syms’ Lessons I–CLXXX (2014–18), and Dara Birnbaum’s Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission (1990, image).
“What we actually saw was a preview of what future products will look like. A lot of hype, a lot of misstatements, and an exploitation of people’s lack of knowledge about what cognition is and what artificial systems can do.”
– Tech critic
Edward Ongweso Jr. , on the ChatGPT launch. “The correct analysis is
they lied . They lied about its capabilities, they rolled out what was possible, and they’re going to keep lying,” he adds, describing how OpenAI cynically overhyped a half-baked product to capture the public’s attention—and drive up their valuation.
Paul Kremer ’s solo exhibition “Spring” opens at Library Street Collective (LSC) in Detroit, featuring a new body of paintings dependent on experiments in tool-making. Inspired by the simplicity of Henri Matisse’s découpés, Houston-based Kremer turned to ChatGPT to prototype a series of composition tools he then, with the help of digital artist Leander Herzog , developed into a “suite of personalized art-making software.” The resulting Blooms (2023) resemble abstract flower forms in striking colours.
“I’m hoping we can move away from this single-minded effort to financialize everything and start trying to develop a more diverse economy that, by virtue of diversity, would be a more stable economy.”
– Science fiction author
Neil Stephenson , on how Web3 needs to outgrow speculation. Discussing the metaverse (a term he coined in his 1992 novel
Snow Crash ), he notes that in virtual spaces “sooner or later people want to do something besides talk and do little emotes,” citing Epic Games’
Fortnite as striking a good balance of socializing and activity.
In memory of its longtime director and all-around media art titan Peter Weibel , who passed on March 1, ZKM Karlsruhe installs his 1970 piece Media May Rewind Reality in the entrance hall. In the work, a television set plays a video of a lighted candle in reverse, gradually growing as time passes, while a physical candle placed on its top slowly dwindles. “The work, which also won Weibel the BEEP Collection prize at ARCO Madrid just weeks ago, is a poignant farewell to a polymath who many thought to be immortal,” writes Frieze .
“Code Chronicles” opens at New York’s bitforms gallery, exploring how “generative systems mediate continuity.” Eight artists including Ana María Caballero , Sarah Friend , LIA , Sara Ludy , Maya Man , and Sarah Ridgley riff on themes of perception, impermanence, obscurity, and memory to highlight chance iterations. Friend’s gentle automata (touching grass) (2023, image), for example, pairs a swamp-like moiré of grass images with a touch-sensitive recreation of John Conway’s Game of Life .
“While it has its own story, I put that video there to make a link between the creatures and their origin point. A diagram to the parallel history from where my pantheon hails.”
“Refigured,” a group exhibition that collapses “today’s material and virtual realms,” opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Curator Christiane Paul brings together Morehshin Allahyari , American Artist , Zach Blas & Jemima Wyman , Auriea Harvey (image: SITE1 , 2023), and Rachel Rossin —artists engaged in “refiguring” material forms and bodies—to showcase sculptures that are “simultaneously physical and virtual,” and videos and animations that “extend beyond the screen and into the gallery.”
“Institutions make these standard statements, but oftentimes they address Indigenous communities as if they are from the past—when they are still present here today.”
Continuing his mission to call attention to the climate crimes unfolding at the Hambach and Garzweiler mines in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, French visual artist and activist Joanie Lemercier unveils Faces of Coal (2023), a series of plotter portraits of those responsible drawn in lignite coal. The first culprit: Markus Krebber, CEO of energy giant RWE, the German multinational operating the mines that, famously, laid waste to an entire region and are now the biggest source of CO2 in all of Europe.
Ian Cheng ’s solo exhibition “THOUSAND LIVES” opens at Pilar Corrias, London, presenting the American CGI artist’s 2022 real-time anime Life After BOB: The Chalice Study and a new simulation. Thousand Lives (2023) focuses on Chalice’s pet turtle, Thousand, a key character in Life After BOB . Driven by an inferential AI model, Thousand must reconcile internal urges with the affordances (and threats) of Chalice’s apartment environment in “a new kind of ‘slow story’ achieved only via simulation.”
“I’m really interested in systems of power, and it often feels like there’s a secret inside these systems, because they function in ways that are almost invisible.”
– Conceptual artist
Jill Magid , on how the nuances of power dynamics are often hidden in plain sight. Art that exposes these secrets, she says, “offers a way to slow down these systems and look at them in a different way.”
Peter Weibel
Austrian media artist, theorist, and curator
Peter Weibel dies in Karlsruhe, Germany. Making his mark with political, rebellious works in 1960s, Weibel’s curatorial legacy includes the Venice Biennale, Neue Galerie Graz, and Ars Electronica. In 1999, Weibel took on directorship of the ZKM Karlsruhe and helped make it the institutional force it is today.
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