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OUT NOW :
Flash Art #337
Includes a special section entitled “Crypto Art‘s New Ecology,” featuring a roundtable, a rumination on the prehistory of crypto, and a conversation with
Simon Denny
“Cities are the result of a meticulously managed infrastructure. They need a sanitation department to make sure that garbage doesn’t pile up in the streets, and transit authorities to keep the trains on time. They need bureaucrats, not visionaries.”
– Writer
Charlie Warzel , commenting on Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg’s retreat “from their bloated, boring second incarnations of the internet” for
Web3 ’s greener pastures. “It’s the dreamers moving on,” he writes of the CEO duo, abandoning the mess of Twitter and Facebook for shiny new vistas.
Curated by Chris Clarke and Anaïs Nony, “Data Streams: Art, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence,” opens at The Glucksman in Cork, Ireland. Featuring work from Benjamin Gaulon , Addie Wagenknecht , and Suzanne Treister (image: Post-Surveillance Art/NSA on Drugs , 2014) the show collects work from an eclectic mix of artists who explore lived experience after AI and data collection—practitioners who show “how these technologies are silently transforming our surroundings.”
In a post on his blog, designer Matt Webb offers unflinching analysis of the metaverse. Hashing out a rough definition that it is immersive , multiplayer , and has an economy , he challenges some widely held assumptions about what technologies are required (e.g. VR plus crypto does not a metaverse make). Beyond the obligatory Snow Crash vs. Meta commentary, he draws on his former studio ’s work during the web 2.0 era and his experience establishing London’s Silicon Roundabout tech cluster, noting how common goals create strange bedfellows. Now, Webb sees the same thing with the metaverse, observing “we have crypto-libertarians tech nerds from Web3 somehow aligned with platform monopolist VR-maximalists from Facebook. Their values couldn’t be more opposed yet they are boosters for the same trend.”
“AI needs to be brought back down to earth. It has been elevated to a superhuman level that leads us to believe it is both inevitable and beyond our control.”
– Ethiopian American AI scholar and computer scientist Dr.
Timnit Gebru , on the launch of her new Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research institute (DAIR). “When AI research, development and deployment is rooted in people and communities from the start, we can get in front of these harms and create a future that values equity and humanity,” she notes in the DAIR press release
Ethiopian American AI scholar and computer scientist Dr. Timnit Gebru announces the launch of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research institute (DAIR). With $3.7 million in funding from several foundations, the independent, community-rooted institute aims to “counter Big Tech’s pervasive influence on the research, development and deployment of AI.” The announcement comes on the one-year anniversary of her sudden ouster from Google, where she co-led the Ethical AI team.
“McKenna was dreaming new ways of being but he was also a technophile. He saw technology as producing the context for new consciousness and culture, a vision that was commercialized and amplified by Silicon Valley, and yielded our contemporary dystopia.”
Kyle McDonald shares a “bottom-up” estimate and tracker of Ethereum emissions and energy use that considers key variables such as hashrate and hashing efficiency, hardware and data centre overhead, grid loss, and power supply efficiency. According to the artist’s analysis, the popular cryptocurrency network consumes around 23 terawatt hours per year—as much as the entire state of Massachusets. “Ethereum is effectively operating two to three coal power plants,” McDonald writes on Medium.
“Who else tries to invent new universes? Who dares spin grand utopian fantasies? Artists don’t anymore. It’s Silicon Valley’s Promethean founders who try—and routinely fall short.”
– Arts writer
Dean Kissick , decrying Zuckerberg’s vision for art in the metaverse
The first-ever Binominale opens simultaneously at La Becque , Switzerland, and San Francisco’s Bass & Reiner gallery. A curatorial nod to 1960s conceptual art, instigating Swiss collective Fragmentin tasked two artist pairs from the respective countries, Bertille Laguet & Sherwin Rio and Bruno Aeberli & Rhonda Holberton , to recreate each other’s work remotely. The stated goal: minimizing the ecological impact by removing transportation.
“A neon-rose coloured room stinking nauseatingly of salmon farms; a series of melting ice blocks releasing the aromas of seeds from Svalbard Global Seed Vault; and a wall, which, upon being rubbed, releases the odours of 21 men who are afraid of being touched.”
Wolf Lieser’s DAM Gallery , one of the longest running entirely dedicated to digital art, reopens in a new location in Berlin Charlottenburg with “Discoveries” of never-before-seen plotter drawings from the early oeuvre of genre pioneers Vera Molnar and Manfred Mohr . Recovered during recent visits to the artists’ studios, the exhibited works date back to the early 1970s and 80s. Also on view: a new software homage to Vera Molnar, created by fellow pioneer Frieder Nake .
“As the camera keeps pixelating this fluctuating plane of oversaturated grays, a GPS dot tracks movements and we hear the buzzing of a device that makes electromagnetic radiation humanly audible.”
– Writer
Alexander Scrimgeour , parsing
Rosa Menkman ’s 2020 video piece
Whiteout , in which the Dutch artist narrates the loss of sensory reference points as she hikes up a mountain during a snowstorm—a sensation “theorized in hindsight with a riff on lines, scales, and reterritorialization”
“Terror Contagion” opens at Montréal’s MAC. Centre stage is Forensic Architecture ’s Digital Violence: How the NSO Group Enables State Terror , which probes the Israeli technology firm behind Pegasus , malware used to monitor the calls, emails, texts, and sensor data of activists and dissidents worldwide. At MAC, these findings are presented in an immersive installation featuring data sonification by Brian Eno and narration by Edward Snowden, and complemented by Laura Poitras ’ latest film, documenting the research.
“Through NTFs and the gold rush around them the term digital art has become less understood. It’s been reduced to singular digital images that don’t reflect the breadth of the medium, be it algorithmic drawing, software art, or installation art.”
– Digital art curator
Christiane Paul , detailing the “enormous confusion” that NFTs have created. “To be honest, it has been really, really frustrating for me,” Paul says.
“I think about it almost like big gusts of wind. The artists are in these small sailboats and can take the wind and go in the direction they want—or the wind is really overpowering.”
– Computational artist
Zach Lieberman , on how digital artists sail against (trade) winds emanating from Big Tech, and must either strike out on their own or be carried in the same direction as everyone else.
“The Modern Exorcist,” an exhibition steeped in techno-animism, opens at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan. Ten interdisciplinary artists including Yin-Ju Chen , Kate Cooper , Cécile B. Evans , Sidsel Meineche Hansen , Pakui Hardware , and Po-Chih Huang (image: Chair, Sandpaper, Cockroach, Ocean, Seven, Termite and Banana , 2021) interpret posthumanist vantage points through virtual bodies and networked systems that link people to objects and other species. After all, “what is human?”
OUT NOW :
Ludger Brümmer (ed)
The Hub: Pioneers of Network Music
ZKM
Hertz-Lab head
Ludger Brümmer contextualizes the work of American computer network music and live coding ensemble
The Hub in a monograph featuring annotated scores and extensive expert commentary.
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