The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launches the Street Level Surveillance Hub, a resource for learning about invasive technologies used by U.S. law enforcement. The website contains accessible intros to cell-site simulators, gunshot detection systems, predictive policing, and other troubling technologies, and identifies related civil liberties concerns. “Understanding this panopticon is the first step in protecting our rights,” says EFF Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia.

The third edition of Japan’s Osaka Kansai International Art Festival ponders urban futures with a group exhibition that asks “STREET 3.0: Where Is The Street?” Curators Miwa Kutsuna and Yutaro Midorikawa present works by international artists that hack the city with technology (Aram Bartholl, Simon Weckert, AQV-EIKKKM), calligraphy, or olfactory. Bartholl’s over 1,400 node-strong network of Dead Drops (2010-, image), for example, inserts USB flash drives into the urban landscape for offline data sharing.

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.

Media artists and critical engineers Julian Oliver and Gordan Savičić show support for Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists by adding the group’s colours—orange and black—as a Permillion (2022) theme. The web app that doubles as a flashing protest display highlights the dramatic increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, from 315 ppm in 1958 to 416 ppm in 2022. Other climate advocacy groups supported with colour themes are Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise, 350, and Greenpeace.

“Waiting for climate activist to glue themselves to contemporary master pieces,” quips German media artist Aram Bartholl, after protestors—again—targeted old masters. To demonstrate, Bartholl ‘glued’ activists to one of Simon Denny and Karamia Müller’s Creation Stories (2022), currently on view at Gus Fisher Gallery. Want to see your favourite media art piece feature in a climate protest? Use the template Bartholl made available here.

Joanie Lemercier’s latest solo exhibition opens at Le Tetris in Le Havre, Normandy, France. The show gathers recent works (Slow Violence, Brume, Edges) and new creations, capturing the French artist’s sustained interest in light and activism. In Prairie, a new collaboration with curator Juliette Bibasse, the two change focus from big to small: tracing mundane roadside grasses with small lasers, they shed light on beauty that is often overlooked.

Three Doors—Forensic Architecture/Forensis, Initiative 19 opens at Frankfurter Kunstverein (FKV). Featuring London-based Forensic Architecture working with local partners, the show (re)presents evidence in three instances of racially motivated violence in Germany. Oury Jalloh’s Cell: Smoke Traces (2022, image), demonstrates the central architectural motif, by modelling the circumstances of an African asylum seeker’s burning death, while in police custody in 2005.