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Amsterdam’s NEMO Science Museum unveils a giant meatball made from cultivated woolly mammoth flesh. Created to spark conversations about sustainable meat alternatives, food engineers from the Australian cultured meat company Vow inserted sheep cells with the mammoth myoglobin gene. “When it comes to meat, myoglobin is responsible for the aroma, the colour and the taste,” James Ryall, Vow’s Chief Scientific Officer explains. Where Vow’s mammoth DNA sequence had gaps, African elephant DNA was spliced in for completion.
“In the same way that English language emotion concepts have colonized psychology, AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions.”
– American UX designer and health futurist
Jenka Gurfinkel , on the proliferation of the American smile as “distinct cultural histories and meanings of facial expressions become mischaracterized, homogenized, subsumed under the dominant dataset”
Resurfacing fabled 18th century partially-dissected wax figures used in the study of anatomy, “Cere Anatomiche” opens at Fondazione Prada Milan, presenting four anatomical venuses and 72 drawings from the La Specola collection alongside a companion film by David Cronenberg . Entitled Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection , the Canadian director’s short dwells on how the figures’ uncanny “body language and facial expressions do not display pain or agony.”
Foregrounding daylight and circadian rhythms in an era of deleterious screen time, “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time” opens at EPFL Pavillions in Lausanne (CH). Featured are works both evocative and therapeutic, “to remind us of the necessity of regular light exposure for a healthy life,” from artists including Kirell Benzi , Olafur Eliasson , and Anna Ridler . Helga Schmid presents a full-on sleep pod (image: Circadian Dreams , 2022), in which visitors laze and soak up LED lighting calibrated to optimize natural body phases.
Honouring his Mexican heritage and the Latinx community in San Francisco, “TECH-MECHS,” a survey of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ’s interactive installations opens at Gray Area. Featured are lyrical works like Pulse Topology bleaker perspectives on mortality and self-sovereignty, such as Sway
Saša Spačal ’s solo exhibition “[UN]EARTHING” opens at Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken (DE), presenting works that trace the deep links between human biology and the soil. “Every time we breathe, we pull the world into our bodies,” the Slovenian artist and researcher writes about the planetary metabolic flows on view. The Meta_bolus Streptomyces
“The future’s gonna be weirder than anyone can imagine,” Turkish AI artist Memo Akten writes about the effect TikTok’s newly released Teenage Filter has on people. “It makes you look young,” he demonstrates in an uncanny reaction video, “and now TikTok is full of middle-aged folks trying come to terms with this, trying to understand where their life went.” Facing your younger self can be “quite emotional,” says Akten and provides dozens of examples in a (now viral) Twitter thread.
“Even though © doesn’t provide for any protection against biometric use, it does prohibit the redistribution of the image file. CC allows it. Ideal for packaging files into datasets.”
– Software artist
Adam Harvey , warning about the use of
Creative Commons licenses. Photos of people shared with the latter “can be freely redistributed in biometric AI and machine learning databases with virtually no legal recourse,” writes Harvey, referencing his
2022 research for the Open Future think tank’s
AI_Commons project.
www.grindruberairbnb.exposed , Canadian artist Jonathan Chomko’s performance exploring how apps choreograph bodies, premieres at Tangente Montreal. Responding to the ways popular digital services guide movement, a troupe of participants walk, gesture, and synchronize themselves in response to web app prompts. Staged in private during the pandemic (image, 2020), the performance marks the first time Chomko’s glued-to-their-phone “atomized actors acting as one” pace and pivot in front of an audience.
“They found a 95% similarity between the Madonnas in the two paintings and an 86% similarity in the Child.”
“My Body, a Coral Reef?” asks curator Julia Katharina Thiemann in a new evocative group exhibition at the Rudolf Scharpf Galerie of Ludwigshafen’s Wilhelm Hack Museum (DE). Works by Imayna Caceres , Alicia Frankovich , Dominique Koch , Pei-Ying Lin , Theresa Schubert , Saša Spačal , and others radically de-centre the self to remind us that “all living beings are meta-organisms and cannot exist on their own.” Spačal’s biotech installation The Library of Fallen Tears
“From Body to Code,” a retrospective of pioneering Brazilian choreographer Analívia Cordeiro, opens at ZKM Karlsruhe. Included is her iconic video art piece »M 3×3« Nota-Anna , the movement notation system she developed with Nilton Lobo in the 1980s. Collectively, the assembled works underscore what curator Claudia Giannetti describes as a “singular computerized method combined with a subtle and poetic language.”
“I’m watching a process 20 times more efficient than photosynthesis, by which Solein uses renewable energy to turn hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide into a replacement for eggs, milk, cheese, mayonnaise, and meat.”
– Food writer
Tamar Adler , touring the bioreactor of Finnish microbial fermentation start-up
Solar Foods . Compared to agriculture, Solein and similar microbial protein products could feed humanity at a fraction of the environmental cost, Adler writes.
A self-survey of Berlin-based bioartists Margherita Pevere , Theresa Schubert , and Karolina Żyniewicz , “Membranes Out of Order” opens at Kunstquartier Bethanien, bringing their research practices into conversation. The show presents key works that explore the ethics of emergent biotechnology and life’s tendency for “uncertainty, failure, surprise, and disobedience.” Also on view: a plethora of production paraphernalia that reveals the “unseen materials” of bioart.
“CONTACT ZONES,” an exhibition emerging from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics INHABIT artist-in-residence program, opens at Frankfurt’s Museum Angewandte Kunst. Murat Adash , Céline Berger , and Syowia Kyambi share work emerging from three months of dialogue with institute researchers that, respectively, explores the politics of bodies, the aesthetics of quantification (image: still from Berger’s film AND I MEASURE , 2022), and colonialism.
Jenna Sutela ’s solo exhibition “Stellar Nursery” at Schering Stiftung, Berlin, explores the science and poetics of human breast milk with a new sculpture and video work: HMO nutrix (2022) is a breast-pump-powered fountain of synthetic human milk that ponders cultivation; in Milky Ways (2022), a narrative video created with Danish art-science platform Primer , the Finnish artist retells the genesis of human microbiomes and the galaxy through Greek mythology.
“Common Measures,” a show featuring three installations by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer , opens at Pace Gallery in New York. Included are interactive crowd favourites Cloud on Water Pulse Topology Hormonium
“This Unfathomable Weight,” a lightbox and billboard project parsing the trauma of “the massive crises of recent years,” opens at University of Toronto Mississauga campus. Curated by Farah Yusef for The Blackwood , the show invites Jessica Thalmann , Christina Battle , and Erika DeFreitas to sequentially contribute works; Thalmann’s opener, cut between the supports and collapse
“We believe AI is the future of corporate management. Our appointment of Ms Tang Yu represents our commitment to truly embrace the use of AI to transform the way we operate our business, and ultimately drive future growth.”
– Dr. Dejian Liu, chairman of the Chinese metaverse company
NetDragon , announcing the world’s first (female) robot CEO. “Tang Yu is an AI-powered virtual humanoid,” reports
Anugraha Sundaravelu , and “will be at the forefront of the company’s ‘organizational and efficiency department’.”
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