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Laura Splan ’s Rhapsody for an Expanded Biotechnological Apparatus takes over an elevator of the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY, as part of the museum’s Elevator Music Series . The tactile sound installation “reenvisions the elevator as a biological cell and its visitors as proteins.” Sitting on a rug made from the fiber of laboratory llamas (used to produce antibodies for human drugs) they are invited to “consider the invisible” while listening to a sonic tour of a biotech laboratory.
“Telepathy becomes a puppet concept, intensifying surveillance by allowing private interest to become less conspicuous, while rendering the consumer more accessible.”
– Writer
Dolly Church , rejecting Big Tech’s notion that “conceptual telepathy”—or “mindspeak,” a term coined in Ursula K. Le Guin’s
Left Hand of Darkness —is the “natural conclusion of digital communication”
A new installation conceived for (and inspired by) the Tadas Ivanauskas Zoological Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania, artist duo Pakui Hardware ’s Skewed Taxonomy opens as part of this year’s Kaunas Biennial . The sculptures, hybrid creatures made of wasp nests, stainless steel skeletons, glass body parts, and textiles, are integrated into the museum’s insect section and invite viewers to speculate on life “born from human activities merging with the evolution of the natural world.”
“By putting my DNA sequence in the blockchain, I’m stating that I think we’re not fully prepared for the way our bodies and technology will intersect. Both our bodies and technology feel like these illegible black boxes that code runs through.”
–
Rachel Rossin , on minting her sequenced genome on OpenSea.
Rachel Rossin’s Raw DNA , the American multimedia artist explains, comments on an impending future where wetware (living tissue)—as opposed to software or hardware—serves as the building blocks of technology.
“Don’t catalogue eyeballs. Don’t use biometrics for anti-fraud. In fact, don’t use biometrics for anything. The human body is not a ticket-punch.”
–
Edward Snowden , on
Tools for Humanity ’s announcement of
Worldcoin , a forthcoming proof-of-personhood digital identity system and cryptocurrency made available in return for biometric data. “This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people’s iris scans, and waves away the implications by saying ‘we deleted the scans!’” warns the famous whistleblower.
“Our memories, our tastes, our life knowledge, might owe just as much to embodied cells and tissues using the same molecular mechanisms for memory as the brain itself. The mind, I conclude, is fluid and adaptable, embodied but not enskulled.”
– Canadian psychiatrist, writer, and academic
Thomas R. Verny , parsing research that suggests memory persists
outside the brain
“For the first time, I publicly stated my desire to take testosterone—not to become a man but to leave the body I currently exist in.”
“Far from being triumphantly automated, an autotelic system lays bare its vulnerable workings through fragments of machines left to care for nomadic organs.”
–
Ingrid Luquet-Gad , on Lithuanian artist duo
Pakui Hardware ’s recent body of sculptural works that delves into remote healthcare technologies and services “with an almost uncannily timely relevance.” The art critic and writer notes that “as ambiguous as a process without a subject intrinsically is, robotic and digitalized care is similarly so in its outcomes for humanity.”
Collaborating with microbiologists at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (AT), bioartists Anna Dumitriu and Alex May premiere Fermenting Futures at the 15th International Congress on Yeasts . The work explores a Pichia pastoris yeast that Dumitriu and May CRISPR-modified to capture carbon and output lactic acid for the creation of biodegradable plastic. The project aims to highlight the potential of yeast—“the workhorse of biotechnology”—and is scheduled for several major exhibitions in 2022.
Collaborating with bioengineers at Rice University, generative design studio Nervous System creates complex blood vessel networks using custom software and 3D-printed sugar. “After printing, these sugar templates are cast in a mixture of living cells and gel,” they write on their blog. “When the gel has set, the sugar is dissolved, leaving the intricate branching network that serves as blood vessels for the living cells.” According to their paper in Nature , the cells can be kept alive for two weeks.
Commissioned for the annual Arnsberg Kultursommer festivities, German media artist Aram Bartholl invites the visitors of Arnsberg’s historic city hall to a Hypernormalization photo session. After having their portrait taken and analysed by a custom face recognition software (provided by Tom-Lucas Säger ), participants get to chose an emoji, font, and colour to have their face ‘de-recognized.’ The results are then printed on fine art paper for people to take home.
Confronting the posthuman head-on, “From Creatures to Creators” opens at Kunsthaus Hamburg. Collecting works “going beyond the finite, conceiving the superhuman” artists including Ed Fornieles , Mary Maggic , and Tabita Rezaire contribute provocative, unsettling visions of life not as we know it, through installation, video, and VR. Pakui Hardware ’s Thrivers (image, 2019), for example, presents glass forms as “porous hosts of life,” that fuse elements of flora and fauna lifeforms into chimeric experiments.
The latest in his Pulse series of heartbeat-synched light works, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ’s Pulse Topology premieres at Kansas City’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. For the first time, the Mexican-Canadian artist integrated touchless photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors that use computer vision to detect visitors’ heartbeats. Another first: the use of LED filament light bulbs that lower the installation’s energy footprint while allowing for greater scale—instead of 100–300 bulbs, Pulse Topology is made of 3,000.
A bestiary of post-anthropocenic creations curated by Charles Carcopino , “Hyper Organisms” opens at iMAL, Brussels. In assembling objects, installations, prints, and video works by twelve artists including Jonathan Pêpe , Katherine Melançon , Ryoichi Kurokawa , Doug Rosman , Justine Emard , and Ujoo + limheeyoung (image: Machine with Pink , 2019), Carcopino looks for hope in the dramatic acceleration of technology and examines how species—natural or artificial—may influence and nourish one another.
LABORATORIA Art&Science Foundation opens its new exhibition space in the West Wing of Moscow’s New Tretyakov Gallery with “May the other live in me,” a group show bridging techno- and ecosphere curated by LABORATORIA founder Daria Parkhomenko. Assembling works by Marina Abramović , Agnes Meyer-Brandis , Ralf Baecker , Jenna Sutela , Saša Spačal , ::vtol:: , and others, the exhibition navigates the increasingly complex community of “living beings, technical systems, and hyperobjects” that, together, shape the modern world.
“Pakui Hardware’s work was timely pre-pandemic; it is in no need of conceptual frills to emerge as a strong indictment of our relationship to technology and the pervasive toxicity permeating contemporary methods of care.”
ENCOUNTER :
“We just accept that as a truth, that estrogen produces femininity and we don’t question it. For me, the best strategy as citizens is to reject these categories and to create room for more definitions, for more subjectivities.”
Artist and biohacker
Mary Maggic , on how they use hormones—a key material in their practice—to challenge monolithic conceptions of gender and biopower
“To consider the history of computing through the lens of computer pain is to center bodies, users, and actions over and above hardware, software, and inventors.”
– Scholar
Laine Nooney , following the “tide of bodily dysfunction that none of us opted into” all the way to the beginning of the information age. “That pain in your neck, the numbness in your fingers, has a history far more widespread and impactful than any individual computer or computing innovator.”
“It goes beyond scare tactics and overpriced face cream—this tool recommends needles and knives.”
–
Jennifer Strong , senior editor for
MIT Technology Review , on Shafee Hassan’s AI-powered beauty consultant
QUOVES that “will show you just how to nip and tuck your way to a better life”
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