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“This digital effigy is a careless abomination, an amalgamation of gross stereotypes, appropriative mannerisms that derive from black artists, complete with slurs infused in lyrics.”
–
Industry Blackout , an activist nonprofit advocating for equity in the music business, calling out
Capital Records for signing Factory New’s virtual “robot rapper”
FN Meka in an open letter. “It is a direct insult to the Black community and our culture.”
“The robot broke the child’s finger. This is of course bad.”
– Sergey Lazarev, president of the
Moscow Chess Federation , on a recent
Moscow Open altercation between a chess-playing robot and its seven-year-old opponent. “The child made a move, and after that we need to give time for the robot to answer, but the boy hurried, the robot grabbed him,” Lazarev told TASS news agency, after video of the incident was published on Telegram.
Perhaps the first bike-friendly indoor exhibition (cyclists can enter via a ramp), “bike in head” opens at Städtische Galerie Bremen, Germany. Rather than focus on the aesthetic object, included works by Wolfgang Zach , Anne Krönker , Kosuke Masuda , Aram Bartholl and others shift attention to the bicycle’s entanglement with society and self. Bartholl’s Unlock Life
Showcasing four women-identifying artists whose practices address feminized robots, “Can You Fuck It?” opens at Tokyo’s Ningen Gallery . Curator Elena Knox , Allison de Fren , Mika Kan (image: The Silent Woman , 2017), and Lin Xin ’s contributed works—spanning documentary to digital illustration—demonstrate that “women’s ideas must begin to be acknowledged alongside those that present objectified feminine embodiment as a fait accompli ,” writes Knox in her curatorial essay .
Ana Prvački ’s Apis Gropius , a new site-specific species of bee, takes over the atrium of Berlin’s Gropius Bau. An AR experience hatched in collaboration with NEEEU during the museum’s residency program, the project draws on Prvački’s long-standing interest in bees, our dependence on them, and the venue’s history in taxonomical research. The goal: playfully explore “the manifold ways in which institutions and nature intersect and co-evolve.”
“To this childless writer, it was an eye-opening lesson—all the more acute in a post-Roe America—in just how much labor it takes to keep someone alive.”
– Critic
Jillian Steinhauer , on
Ani Liu ’s solo show “
Ecologies of Care ” in which the American artist turns her experience of new motherhood into thought-provoking works. For example: “
Untitled (Labor of Love) (2022) charts every feeding and diaper change during the first 30 days of Liu’s infant’s life through vials containing breast milk, formula and pieces of diapers.”
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, acquired the taxidermy of Cumulina , the world’s first successfully cloned mouse. Named after the cumulus cells vital to the cloning process, Cumulina was created by University of Hawai’i researchers in 1997 and died of natural causes in 2000. The specimen is now held at the museum’s Medicine and Science Division. “I’m happy that more people can see her there,” says Ryuzo Yanagimachi, Cumulina’s father.
Marshmallow Laser Feast ’s newest collective VR experience, Evolver , premieres at Tribeca’s Immersive showcase, dropping New York audiences “deep inside the landscape of the human body.” On their journey, narrated by Cate Blanchett , visitors follow the flow of oxygen through our branching ecosystem, to a single ‘breathing’ cell. The transcendental trip, the London-based collective argues, reveals our connection to the nature through the cycle of respiration.
“It stopped being something that resided only within the skull, only within the individual, and became something that mattered when it emerged between bodies, between species, between beings. Something that’s active in the world.”
– British artist and writer
James Bridle , discussing broader definitions of intelligence laid out in their newest book
Ways of Being with musician and
5×15 interlocutor
Brian Eno
OUT NOW :
Hertrich & Miyazaki
Following the Elephant-Nosed Fish
A
research -driven reimagination of the human sensorium that is part theory-poetry and part theory-fiction
“Our leaders have offered few spaces for reflection, so artists have stepped in to fill the gap.” In her piece on COVID memorials, New York-based writer Jillian Steinhauer considers four exhibitions that “offer us a place to put our grief.” Featured works by Jill Magid , the Zip Code Memory Project , Rafael Lozano-Hemmer , and Coco Fusco in particular (Your Eyes Will Be An Empty Word , 2022, image) go beyond puncturing the anonymity of numbers; they “memorialize those whose stories we don’t know.”
A retrospective of the feminist performance artist in her native France, “ORLAN Manifesto. Body and Sculpture” opens at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse. Collecting 100+ works from ORLAN ’s archives, the show links 1960-70s photography and performance, the iconic cosmetic surgeries (image: 7th Surgery-Performance called Omnipresence , 1993), to works in bioart and robotics, underscoring how her practice “opposes morality, natural and social determinisms, and all forms of domination.”
“Plastic can, in this light, be thought of as a medium, communicating with long-dead organisms to make their vital presence felt among the living.”
– Ecology researcher
Heather Davis , on how plastic is a
medium . “Settlers need to learn the lessons of haunting, even as we are being haunted by this material that refuses to let us go,” she advises, offering a path forward from the (material) glut of past mistakes.
“People extend computational systems by offering their bodies, senses, and cognition. Bodies and minds that can be easily plugged in and easily discarded later.”
– German media artist
Sebastian Schmieg , on “humans as software extensions.” In his eponymous
lecture at the 2017
34C3 , archived and resurfaced on Twitter by
OpenTranscripts , Schmieg discusses modes of algorithmic exploitation and how “being a part of software” presents an opportunity: “Once we’re plugged in, we can manipulate the systems that govern us.”
Artist collective Keiken ’s immersive installation Player of Cosmic Realms The Life Game is an interactive CGI film series that explores gamification, digital assets, and “finding oneself” in the metaverse; while the abdomenal orbs of Bet(a) Bodies “stimulate empathy and a physical simulation of the experience of pregnancy.”
Multimedia and sound artist Kat Austen ’s research on the effects of microplastics on plants is published in the journal “Science of The Total Environment.” In a pilot study done as part of her artwork Stranger to the Trees WRO Media Art Biennale ), Austen and colleagues demonstrate that woody plants like silver birches uptake and ‘store’ microplastics in their root tissue, effectively cleaning contaminated soil.
“How do we make room for extra limbs when the brain is already fully occupied with controlling the limbs we already have? Extra fingers and hands may actually end up harming the very bodies they’re designed to augment.”
– Writer and musician
Claire L. Evans , exploring the possibilities—and pitfalls—of prosthetics. In talking to
Plasticity Lab ’s Dr. Tamar Makin, Evans reveals cognitive failsafes that may prevent us from ever becoming cyborgs.
“The Modern Exorcist,” an exhibition steeped in techno-animism, opens at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan. Ten interdisciplinary artists including Yin-Ju Chen , Kate Cooper , Cécile B. Evans , Sidsel Meineche Hansen , Pakui Hardware , and Po-Chih Huang (image: Chair, Sandpaper, Cockroach, Ocean, Seven, Termite and Banana , 2021) interpret posthumanist vantage points through virtual bodies and networked systems that link people to objects and other species. After all, “what is human?”
“Perhaps, there is more common ground between the hackers and the witches, the programmers and the psychics. As Tolbert put it: ‘What is technology, if not a way for an individual person to uncover answers?’”
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