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In honour of the 75th anniversary of Germany’s constitution, the weekend edition of one of the country’s major newspapers, Süddeutsche Zeitung , comes infused with its DNA—literally. Researchers from Munich and Zurich’s technical universities synthesized genetic code containing millions of copies of the legal text and mixed it into the printer ink. DNA is the data storage medium of the future, the researchers say. Whether the ink’s contents can be decoded , however, is subject to further experimentation.
Dagmar Schürrer ’s solo exhibition “Symbiotic Synchrony” opens at SOMA, Berlin, inaugurating the gallery’s two-year ”Becoming Future” program with post-digital meditations on consciousness, ecology, and technology. Curated by Peer to Space ’s Peggy Schoenegge, the show comprises digital animations, large-scale projections, and mixed reality applications that explore the scientific concepts of symbiosis and neural synchrony by conjuring CGI metaorganisms and bespoke hybrid experiences.
MacKenzie Art Gallery’s online exhibition “Wake Windows: The Witching Hour” goes live with interactive and time-based works that highlight “the missing datasets in our collective understanding of the labour that is mothering.” Led by a rebellious AI chatbot, the Rea McNamara -curated show traces how care work has shifted the outputs of eight artists that are parents, caregivers, and educators including Alejandra Higuera, Faith Holland & Ben Bogart , Wednesday Kim , Lauren Lee McCarthy , Rory Scott , and Skawennati .
UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery opens “Bodily Autonomy,” Lauren Lee McCarthy ’s largest solo show in the U.S. to date. Curator Ceci Moss brings together two major series of works—Surrogate Saliva Saliva Bar , for example, invites visitors to reflect on data privacy, race, gender, and class as they pertain to genetic material over traded spit samples.
Gala Hernández López ’s sci-fi documentary for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world Hal Finney , who, in a fictional future, implements societal biostasis for economic gain.
“I wasn’t creating work that was about technology or about the internet or about computers, but about the humans using the computers, myself using computers, my body in front of the computer.”
– Artist and sculptor
Auriea Harvey , on using digital tools to explore personal narratives, embodiment, and intimacy. “It’s a constant circularity between putting myself in and taking something out, like finding this organic way inside and outside of the screen,” she says of the net art pieces, videogames, and AR sculptures on view in her major
Museum of the Moving Image survey.
“I was cosplaying masculinity for years, sometimes pretty well frankly, but the suit literally never fit. So that gives you a different way of thinking, like what’s a better fiction? This is not my true self. This is a better fiction that I would so much rather play.”
– Theorist
McKenzie Wark , on the fluidity of gender and identity. “There’s no such thing as a true self,” says Wark, in conversation with
Jordan Kisner about transitioning and its profound impact on her writing practice.
“Tishan Hsu evokes the twinned ways that technology both estranges and enlivens our bodies. It’s work clearly born of an era in which cyborgian devices—pacemakers, nebulizers, insulin pumps—are enabling longer lives. How miraculous, and how bizarre.”
– Critic
Emily Watlington , describing
Tishan Hsu ’s
current exhibition at Secession Vienna. The posthuman digital forms in the show are so grotesque Watlington found herself asking a disquieting question when viewing the work: “Which orifice am I looking at?”
Martina Menegon ’s interactive self-portrait I’m sorry I made you feel that way
“Due to the high plasticity and adaptability of organoids, Brainoware has the flexibility to change and reorganize in response to electrical stimulation, highlighting its ability for adaptive reservoir computing.”
– Indiana University Bloomington engineers, on the AI potential of (lab-grown) human brain cells on a chip. In their research, published in Nature Electronics , the team trained brain organoids connected to an array of high-density microelectrodes to master tasks like speech recognition and nonlinear equation prediction.
“The interdisciplinary art practice is your biggest project. Finding your people to nurture and grow together this idea of the practice being the project is what I’m thinking about right now.”
– Australian sci-fi artist and body architect
Lucy McRae , reminding
SCI-Arc students to prioritize hybridity and collaboration as they develop their art-research practices
“I have a lot of lab experience, so it’s always funny to me how excited people get when they are exploring things through the microscope. They’re overwhelmed looking at the materials—stones, flowers—they collected.”
Dredging up grotesque imaginaries, Tishan Hsu ’s “recent works 2023” opens at Secession in Vienna. Taking centre stage at the artist-run space, the American artist presents tablet-skin-screen (2023, image), an undulating moiré pattern-adorned sculpture that evokes both flesh and (video) feedback. Complementing the unnatural geometry, surrounding morphing videos and prints depict “the interpenetration of physical bodies with virtual digital forms.”
“My theory is that the glitches are very similar to our subconscious. There is too much or too little wanted from us, and we react with psychosomatic problems. When our body glitches, it’s telling us we have to make a decision or change something.”
– Artist
Pipilotti Rist , connecting the glitches in her early video art with embodied knowledge. “Analog glitches and mistakes are much nicer than digital ones. They are more physical,” she elaborates.
“Our physical realities, the human body and the planet, are no less real just because technology is taking up more of our attention. We are still embodied, we still look with our eyeballs, we still type with our hands, and we are still sitting here getting bad posture.”
OUT NOW :
Zara Rahman
Machine Readable Me
Technology and justice researcher
Rahman argues that the surveillent database, biometric, and social platform regime is ill-equipped to “fully capture our complex, fluid identities over decades of our lives.”
For MIT Technology Review . Cassandra Willyard surveys the state of rapidly advancing artificial womb research. As a promising prototype nears readiness for trials with human embryos, researchers and bioethicists are weighing potential implications on child-rearing. “The most challenging question to answer is how much unknown is acceptable,” says FDA neonatologist An Massaro to Willyard, of concerns that include gauging risk for premature infants and shifting discourse about a woman’s right to choose.
OUT NOW :
Kashmir Hill
Your Face Belongs to Us
New York Times tech reporter
Hill chronicles
Clearview AI , the facial recognition company with far right ties that emerged during the Trump era and whose technology has been at the centre of numerous privacy and civil liberties controversies.
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