Net art veterans Cory Arcangel, JODI, Dirk Paesmans, and UBERMORGEN playfully probe the gamified mechanics of the attention economy in “Entertainment at all costs” at Wouters Gallery Brussels. UBERMORGEN contributes slogans decrying platform dynamics—“Drama Marketing,” “Trauma Dumping”—while Paesmans’ Pokemon Go Museum (2025) uses AR to riff on the commodification of cultural spaces. The show dissects how leisure has been weaponized into perpetual engagement—the churn of an endless content economy.

“Patterns and Politics” surveys three decades of playful experimentation by Claudia Hart at Francisco Carolinum Linz. In her first museum retrospective, the American artist presents major works including the gonzo VR environment The Flower Matrix (2016) and her Alice in Wonderland-inspired dresses (2014) and quilts (2014). Hart’s aesthetic invites viewers to engage “virtual space as sculpture and reinterpret ornamental structures as political texture,” writes curator Julia Staudach.

“The City of Nam June Paik: The Sea Fused with The Sun” surveys media overload at Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin (KR). Gijeong Goo, Yiyun Kang, Hyewon Kwon, and Inhwa Yeom present works engaging reality as a ”vast interface with unending flows of image and sound.” Beyond picks from Paik’s archives, featured works include Goo’s nature-tech hybrid fusing LED substrates and plants, while Yeom presents an installation based on her Solarsonic Band (2024-25) AR/VR environment.

“When Body Is Not Enough” at SOMA Art Berlin is a deeply personal showcase of allapopp’s experimentation with identity, digital embodiment, and cyborgism. Known for their queer, non-binary, and tech-positive hacktivism, the Tartar interdisciplinary artist presents AI-generated avatar distortions and expanded selfs that critically examine how bodies—particularly female bodies—are mediated, augmented, and commodified by digital technology.

“Screen Time. Leipzig Video Art since 1990” at Leipzig’s Museum der bildenden Künste (MdbK) explores the evolution of time-based media art, with a focus on post-Wall East Germany. The exhibition showcases three generations of artists, including Paula Ábalos, Maithu Bùi, Nadja Buttendorf, Alba D’Urbano, and Charlotte Eifler, whose works reflect the shift from single-channel video to multi-channel installations, expanded cinema, CGI, AR, and internet art.

After 20+ years, Jeremy Bailey’s Dolflute (2025) is a reality! First imagined “as a helpless reaction to the Iraq war” in 2003, and then patented in 2014 to critique how corporate protections increasingly encroach upon free expression, the world’s first all-in-one dolphin, flute, bubble launcher, and virtual-vape offers a “practical solution to an absurd world.” Dolflute comes in three fashion-forward colours; the pro version includes stereo laser pointer eyes.

Hosted by Regina’s MacKenzie Art Gallery (CA) as part of their digital exhibition initiative, “Sedimentary Futures” showcases the 2024 Emerging Digital Artist Award winners. Francisco Gonzalez-Rosas, Moni Omubor, Carmilla Sumantry, and Studio Ekosi stage works in a 3D navigable bog. The eclectic selections span videogames and the moving image, with Quinn Hopkins’ Stellar Narratives (2024, image), for example, presenting a calendar-based AR interface for sharing Anishinaabe night sky stories.

In her solo exhibition “GHOST_WORLD” at Slash, San Francisco, Taiwanese-American artist Jen Liu problematizes labor activism and women electronics workers in South China. Inspired by the 2023 social media phenomenon of “frog mothers”—unlicensed street vendors in China wearing inflatable frog costumes and selling frog-shaped balloons—Liu presents videos, AR paintings, and amphibian glass sculptures that are “haunted by the workers making the phones, and the greater violence of compression in a digital existence.”

With “My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard,” New York’s Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) opens the first major survey of pioneering net artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey. Featuring more than 40 works spanning early net-based interactives, videogames (created with Michaël Samyn under the Tale of Tales moniker), mixed media and AR sculptures, curator Regina Harsanyi celebrates Harvey’s capacity to “reflect the paradoxical power of computers to enable intimacy” over nearly four decades.

LaTurbo Avedon’s “Trust Your Technolust” opens at panke.gallery, marking the avatar artist’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. Examining “the wavering promises of virtual worlds” through AR sculptures and projection, Avedon presents past and present works from Club Rothko (2012-), a “virtual nightclub rendered at the end of the metaverse.” Meanwhile, IRL clubbers get to exlore Avedon’s site-specific AR sculpture Sky Queue (2024) while waiting outside of Berlin’s Tresor.

The “Unleashed” edition of panke.gallery’s recent AR group exhibition, “Animal()City,” pops up at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37c3) in Hamburg (DE), releasing CGI creatures by Joachim Blank (image: The restless lion/ess, 2023), Eva Davidova, Meredith Drum, exonemo, Jonas Lund, Sahej Rahal, and Ingeborg Wie Henriksen. The show, curated by panke’s Sakrowski, draws inspiration from the ghostly presence of urban critters that, like people being siloed by online platforms and AI, seem to live in parallel worlds.

Martina Menegon’s interactive self-portrait I’m sorry I made you feel that way (2023) opens at discotec, Vienna, exploring new forms of care for our hybrid selves. Menegon’s blobby CGI avatar, generated with AI and personal biometric data, will show signs of deterioration the more the artist’s physical needs are neglected. When stressed, for example, the virtual portrait will refuse interaction and, eventually, dissolve into glitched abstraction. An AR extension adds a sculptural layer, spilling Menegon’s failing frame into the gallery.

Ismael de Anda III and Eugene Ahn’s collaborative exhibition “Revolution Generators” opens at panke.gallery, Berlin, investigating territorialization at the U.S. and Mexican border, where Anda was raised, and the once divided German capital. 25 digital collages, printed on aluminium, capture real and fictional landscapes and are paired with projections and AR sculptural forms. A recurring motif are (hostile) metal turnstiles lifted from U.S. border crossings and cast into the sky as colourful satellites.