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“If you really wanted to boil down what artworks do, they’re essentially people having experiences between their consciousness and their physical selves.”
Belgian artist and provocateur Dries Depoorter introduces a fresh metric to the online dating game: brutal honesty. Browser.dating (2025) connects people via their browser histories, matching genuine interests rather than pretence and aesthetics. Finding your “digital twin” is done with utmost privacy: AI matching happens locally on dedicated GPUs (with transparent energy monitoring), and data is never shared or sold. Depoorter: “It’s a new kind of dating experience.”
American artist Jordan Wolfson presents Little Room (2025) at Fondation Beyeler, Basel, a VR installation where pairs of visitors undergo full-body scans and then experience virtual space, seemingly from the perspective of each other’s bodies. The latest in a series of virtuality provocations from Wolfson, the jarring, intimate work scrambles self and embodiment “while raising profound existential questions about consciousness.”
“Every user, and every resulting superbaby, is a Silicon Valley guinea pig.”
“Liquid Body” showcases Pamela Rosenkranz’s synthetic ecologies and unearthly atmosphere at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. The Swiss artist presents numerous paintings on experimental materials—plexiglass, mirrors, emergency blankets, and synthetic skins—alongside polymers and LED lighting exploring “the body’s interaction with the contemporary environment.” Our Product (2015, image), her installation first staged at the Venice Biennale, offers an uncanny pool of pink liquid mimicking standardized skin tones.
“Michelle Cotton lucidly outlines the ways in which women artists engaged with computers: as language and code games, as tools and an aesthetic, and finally, as intimate extensions of bodies, engendering dreams of post-gender otherness, but also technological nightmares.”
“Her key preoccupation is the trans body, meaning at once transgender, transhuman, and trans-species,” writes McKenzie Wark of Agnes Questionmark. For Art in America, Wark analyzes the Italian artist’s audacious performances, including CHM13hTERT (2023, image), in which Questionmark, seemingly mid-reconstruction into a mermaid-like creature, was suspended in a Milan subway station for 16 days. “Her work gives me hope that we can love things that turn out to be not what was expected,” Wark warmly concludes.
“In all of Ed Atkins’ work, there’s a kind of slapstick humour, a gallows humour; sometimes lots of cartoonish impact on bodies.”
“It’s an innate part of science that you try stuff. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not a conspiracy.”
“Described in blockchain terms, sex is not soulbound—it is a matter of stake. If you want more masculinity for yourself or your workplace, simply buy some.”
“It’s like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.”
“ATTENTION IS ALL I NEED,” the aptly titled online exhibition co-hosted by HEK Basel and OnCurating Academy, examines self-representation as artistic practice—not narcissism. Curator Jonny-Bix Bongers populates a browser canvas with new and recent works by allapopp, Kim Albrecht, Damjanski, Orhun Mersin (aka kekik), Charmaine Poh, and Carla Streckwall that, through deepfakes, 3D avatars, and social media performances, explore how technology shapes identity—oscillating between playful reinvention and capitalist determinism.
Amsterdam’s media art platform LI-MA concludes its “New Art on Screen” tour with a showcase of video works by emerging artists (“Bring Your Own File”) and treasures from LI-MA’s own collection at the 171project.space in Arnhem (NL). Featured artists include Luna Maurer & Roel Wouters, Katja Verheul, Broersen & Lukács, and Jessica Tucker, whose brand-new piece fickleporno (2025) leverages AI-generated deepfake workflows (trained on her own face) to explore the “hypermediated body in a world of excessive visibility and surveillance capitalism.”
“Lament is a death-bed: it remains on view after ‘the event’ takes place. Moss and soil microflora will grow during the time of the exhibition, manifesting more life and death entanglements.”
“Minion or Pokémon or Harkonnen, ragged or egg-bald, mimicking pop good and evil”: Spike columnist Travis Diehl traces the transformation of JD Vance’s head into a “sublime hyperobject.” Warped into grotesque forms by critics and supporters, the memefication of the U.S. Vice President captures “less a physical organ than a motivation—cancerous, monstrous, ultrahuman.” Whether done in protest or as tribute, JD Vance’s internet head is “reveling in its mutant will to power.”
“Hypercreatures: Future Mythologies” turns Max Ernst Museum in Brühl (DE) into a fantastical bestiary. Channelling the institution’s namesake pioneer of German dada and surrealism, 26 international artists including DISNOVATION.ORG, Libby Heaney, Kite, Eva Papamargariti (image: Mutants, Crawlers, Shapeshifters, 2025), Troika, Lex Rütten & Jana Kerima Stolzer, and Lu Yang unleash hybrid beings and fluid biologies that imagine more-than-human realities of co-existence, cooperation, and interdependence.
“As a health fanatic, I obsessively seek quantifiable data as a way to gain control over my chronically ill body. I laughed out loud at the pragmatic solution here.”
“If the idea of chewing plastic isn’t disturbing enough, consider what happens after you spit it out. It will harden, crack, and breakdown into microplastics, persisting in the environment for many years.”
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