Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary
A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
Rice University‘s Moody Center for the Arts in Houston (US) presents “Imaging After Photography,” a group show probing algorithmic bias, synthetic image-making, and photographic truth in the era of generative AI. Coinciding with FotoFest’s 40th anniversary, the show features Refik Anadol, Sofia Crespo, Trevor Paglen, and others. Nouf Aljowaysir’s Ancestral Seeds (2025) subjects British archaeologist Gertrude Bell’s photographs of the Middle East to computer vision models, exposing biases embedded in AI.
“Protecting artists doesn’t just mean excluding ‘AI content.’ It means crafting policies with enough nuance to distinguish between automation and critique, extraction and deep engagement. Otherwise, we risk eliding some of the most thoughtful and important work being made with and about these technologies.”
“The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centres that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear.”
“All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.”
“Raytracing trained us to fear polygon debt, diffusion insists there is no debt at all because it siphoned centuries of artistic labour without consent.”
“The goal is to keep users engaged, meet message quotas, and never reveal who you really are. It’s work that demands constant emotional performance: pretending to be someone you’re not, feeling what you don’t feel, and expressing affection you don’t mean.”
“You will be shocked to learn that the AI George Washington created by Glenn Beck sounds exactly like what would happen if Glenn Beck built an AI George Washington to sound exactly like Glenn Beck.”
Building on cyberethnographer Ruby Justice Thélot’s ARTnews meditation on AI and digital folk art creation, critic Louis Bury lists ten examples—art, books, essays—that speak to this tension in 2025. Bury’s picks include Dean Kissick’s dissection of “The Vulgar Image,” Agent 5.5’s QAnon-esque John Pork TikTok lore, artist Maya Man’s “funhouse vision of TikTok vernacular’s over-the-top banality” for the Whitney, and Nadia Asparouhova’s cult hit book Antimemetics (2025).
“Uttered like an incantation, there is no term (other than porn, perhaps) more slippery in its definition yet identifiable in its ubiquity. Slop is everywhere; everything is very sloppy now.”
“If generative AI has done anything, it has freed the computer scientist and the GPU to calculate other trajectories—statistical, behavioral, speculative—far removed from the old cosmology of light.”
Hito Steyerl’s “The Island” deploys science fiction as a tool for critiquing the present at Milan’s Osservatorio. Threading together flood motifs—from Nobel laureate Osamu Shimomura’s research on bioluminescent plankton to a submerged Neolithic settlement off Dalmatia—the German artist’s site-specific video installation collapses “deep time and junk time” to estrange viewers from contemporary AI authoritarianism and ecological crisis.
“A society that uses automation to ‘build shareholder value’ while impoverishing everyone else will not be successful.”
“We must teach ourselves to navigate the torrent that is replacing consensus reality, this turbulent, treacherous mediatized flow.”
!Mediengruppe Bitnik’s “Computer Says No” takes over the Gothic nave of Kunsthalle Osnabrück (DE) with an exploration of the “ghostly corporeality” of artificial intelligence. In the Swiss duo’s titular installation, Qwen Stefani—an AI doppelgänger of the No Doubt vocalist—delivers affective sermons on the necessity of global unity in a moment of tech fascism. The duo also updates the Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944), offering new tactics for everyday digital resistance.
“Trump’s ICE Director wants to run mass deportation ‘like Prime, but with human beings.’”
“You could say that choirs already encode a ‘grammar of governance’: different parts, unequal ranges, a need for coordination, moments of tension, and an underlying commitment to making something together.”
“When I first arrived in Montreal, one of the first places my father took me was Expo 67. For me, the contrast between the old world of Milan—its historic buildings—and Montreal with Buckminster Fuller’s dome and the monorails left a profound impression.”
“It is a chatbot which will enable users to pose political, historical, social questions, problems of organization and tactical initiative, and receive a response which draws on the vast archive of Marxist thought.”
Feral File presents its first-ever solo exhibition, Maya Man’s “StarQuest.” The American artist’s titular AI-generated video series explores the high drama world of competitive dance, processing 111 eight-second scenes through custom software that recombines them into new choreographies. At its centre is “AI default girl”—a synthetic performer for whom “visibility depends on compliance, and the image must continually regenerate itself to stay seen,” writes curator Nora O’ Murchú.
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