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Directed by Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala , the 13th Gwangju Biennale—“Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning”—opens, “challenging the divisions imposed upon corporeal, technological, and spiritual intelligence” with works by John Gerrard , Ana Prvački , Moon Kyungwon , Lynn Hershman Leeson , and others. Among the new commissions is Femke Herregraven ’s Twenty Birds Inside Her Chest (image), a choir of eight human larynx sculptures interpreting the “aquatic voice” of the haenyeo , a community of female freedivers on Jeju Island, Korea.
OUT NOW :
Dora Vrhoci & Florian Weigl
Art and Care
A reflection on the curatorial research behind “To Mind Is To Care,” an exhibition and “interdisciplinary study of care,” shown at V2_, Rotterdam’s Lab for the Unstable Media, earlier in the year
“One of the more exciting calls I get as an artist working in the field of new media is for editorial illustration work. It’s rare .” In a Medium post, software artist Zach Lieberman unpacks the cover and secondary artworks he created for this week’s New York Times Magazine . To accompany Kashmir Hill’s deep dive on Clearview AI and face recognition, Lieberman built on an earlier face fragmentation sketch , because “it feels like these companies are building portraits of us that are unsettlingly made from disparate pieces.”
“It was a remarkable turn of events. The relationships behind Clearview AI had germinated at an event celebrating Trump. Now, four years later, the app was being deployed in a domestic crackdown on lawbreaking Trump supporters.”
– Reporter
Kashmir Hill , uncovering the controversial facial recognition start-up’s secretive origins, the legal and ethical limits of its
AI-powered technology , and how its success in identifying U.S. Capitol rioters changed (some) opinions
Inspired by how SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) is used to ferment kombucha, MIT and Imperial College London researchers have produced several proof of concept living materials. Drawing on the flexibility of lab-grown yeast, Timothy Lu (MIT) and Tom Ellis (Imperial College) have produced microbe cultures that detect environmental pollutants, and glow in the dark when exposed to certain hues of light. “We foresee a future where diverse materials could be grown at home or in local production facilities, using biology rather than resource-intensive centralized manufacturing,” says Lu.
“What you’re offering by [encoding digital data as DNA] inside the cell is the machinery the cell has to protect its DNA.”
–
Harris Wang , system biologist at Columbia University, on successfully inserting binary code for “hello world!” into the DNA of living E. coli bacteria using CRISPR. In their
paper , Wang and team claim that, compared to other DNA-based data-storage methods that rely on in vitro synthesis, in-cell encoding can maintain information over many generations in natural open environments.
A spoof of 2019’s This Person Does Not Exist , the endless stream of AI-generated portraits by Philip Wang, software developer and journalist Vincent Woo launches This Person Exists . Created to “celebrate the actual humans who have served as the coal that we’ve shoveled into the AI GAN engine,” as Woo writes on Twitter , the website cycles through a collection of 70,000 photographs that have been used to train Nvidia’s StyleGAN, the same framework used by Wang.
“We are not promoting ‘eating ourselves’ as a realistic solution that will fix humans’ protein needs. We rather ask a question: what would be the sacrifices we need to make to be able to keep consuming meat at the pace that we are?”
“There’s no ‘healthy’ way to educate children entirely within structures of capitalist exploitation. There’s no way to entertain them safely either.”
– Artist and writer
James Bridle , on YouTube being “the perfection of a system of techniques held in common by Sesame Street, Teletubbies, and captology for the acquisition and retention of attention, stripped of all desire to do anything with that attention beyond profit from it”
The 2020 CHRONIQUES Biennale of Digital Imagination opens across Marseille’s museums and galleries, exploring the theme of “Eternity” in times of compounding crises. Nearly 50 artists, many from guest country Taiwan, present provocations that link technological progress and planetary precipice. UNBORN0X9 (2020, image) by Future Baby Production (Shu Lea Cheang and Ewen Chardronnet ), for example, integrates human reproduction into a dystopian cybernetic communication system that ‘tunes into’ artificial wombs.
A database of myriad cyberfeminism(s)—post-binary, feminist servers, cyborg witches—from 1990–2020, Cyberfeminism Index launches. Facilitated and gathered by Mindy Seu and commissioned by Rhizome , the site offers a deep archive of hundreds of critical gender studies texts, manifestos, and inititiatives. To aid in navigating its voluminous collection, its interface includes curated ‘collections’ by key voices including original cyberfeminists VNS Matrix , bio-hacker Mary Maggic , and the xenofeminist collective Laboria Cuboniks .
The 23rd Japan Media Arts Festival awards American artist Adam W. Brown the Grand Prize in the Art Division for his 2019 work [ir]reverent: Miracles on Demand Serratia Marcescens bacteria that then perform ‘blood miracles’ in a piece of bread, the artwork examines the impact of invisible microbial agents on the course of human history and belief systems. Other awardees include Lauren Lee McCarthy , Natura Machina, Nils Völker , and Sebastian Wolf .
Speaking on behalf of his brain-machine interface company Neuralink, Elon Musk introduces the world to Gertrude the pig. The star of Musk’s YouTube livestream, she demonstrates how the company’s skull implant prototype monitors neural firing related to her sensitive snout.
“The feat was repeated in November 2009 when Joe Davis, a self-described ‘bio-artist’ in residence at MIT, hooked his smartphone to the Arecibo telescope and sent the genetic code for RuBisCO—ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase / oxygenase, a common plant protein—in the direction of three nearby stars.”
–
Dennis Overbye , going through the iconic Arecibo Observatory’s history in the wake of a freak accident that left it damaged
The HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) published new guidelines for gene naming, including for symbols that affect data handling and retrieval. “For example, all symbols that auto-converted to dates in Microsoft Excel have been changed,” the HGNC announcement states. “Finally!!!” responded computational biologist Mudra Hegde—and many others—on Twitter.
OUT NOW :
Suad Garayeva-Maleki & Heike Munder (ed.)
Potential Worlds
The survey of 36 ecocritical works by, among others,
Carolina Caycedo ,
Mary Maggic , and
Pınar Yoldaş expands on the eponymous
two-part exhibition at Zürich’s Migros Museum with texts from Benjamin Bratton, T. J. Demos, Jussi Parikka, and others.
Inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure book series first popularized in the 1980s, Russian artist Dasha Ilina and screenwriter Sofia Haines launch Choose Your Own Quarantine , a browser game about navigating the uncertainties of the pandemic. “The user is presented with a scenario that initially follows the real timeline of COVID-19 development,” write the authors, “but as the game goes on, users will notice that the options become increasingly speculative and fictitious.” Which values, practices, and cultures will ultimately be enduring, and which may become outdated remnants of the pre-pandemic world?
“Research by the thinktank RethinkX suggests that proteins from precision fermentation will be around 10 times cheaper than animal protein by 2035. The result, it says, will be the near-complete collapse of the livestock industry.”
–
Guardian columnist
George Monbiot , on how farm-free food start-ups like the Finnish
Solar Foods will bring about “the biggest economic transformation, of any kind, in 200 years” and save the planet in the process
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