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“Quantum Soup,” a solo show surveying Libbey Heaney’s sustained exploration of quantum physics-informed aesthetics, opens at Basel’s House of Electronic Art (HEK). Curated by Sabine Himmelsbach, the show presents CGI works by the British artist including ENT (2022) and slimeQrawl (2023), and her mournful VR experience Heartbreak and Magic (2024). Heanny “visually tests scientific concepts such as contextuality, entanglement, and superposition, making them accessible,” writes Himmelsbach.

Mohawk multimedia artist Skawennati’s new machinima, They Sustain Us (2024), premieres at Gray Area, San Francisco, expanding a music video built and filmed in Second Life into an IRL garment collection and runway performance. Two years in the making and Gray Area’s biggest commission to date, the piece reimagines Three Sisters, beloved personifications of Indigenous staple crops (corn, beans, squash) as futuristic superheroes that celebrate food sovereignty, sustainability, and femininity.

The Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego (ICA) opens “Pınar Yoldaş: Synaptic Sculpture,” the Turkish-American artist and UC San Diego Professor’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition. Expanding her oevre of speculative biologies, Yoldaş presents several new works including an algae bioreactor brewing plastic alternatives that illuminate the technocene. “If we ask ourselves what drives technological progress,” Yoldaş explains, “we can see that it is as much our collective desires as it is our collective needs.”

Gala Hernández López’s sci-fi documentary for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world (2024) premieres at Berlinale. In the double-screen collage of YouTube videos, archival images, and 3D animations, the French artist-researcher and filmmaker explores the links between crypto culture and cryogenics as two speculative technologies that exploit the future. A key narrative figure: American extropian and cypherpunk Hal Finney, who, in a fictional future, implements societal biostasis for economic gain.

“TRANSFER Download: Sea Change” opens at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), flooding a panoramic ‘video chamber’ with reflections “on the accelerating changes across climate, culture, and time.” The 9th iteration of TRANSFER’s travelling immersive format compiles works by LaTurbo Avedon, Leo Castañeda, Fabiola Larios, Cassie McQuater, Lorna Mills, Rick Silva & Nicolas Sassoon (image: Signals 4, 2023), and Rodell Warner into a playlist of “watery warnings,” rendered as generative art, animated GIFs, videogames, and CGI.

Haha Real, a very site-specific installation by Rachel Rossin, opens at Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern in Houston. Illuminating a path through the subterranean reservoir with LED panels, the American artist draws on eclectic sources including The Velveteen Rabbit (a 1922 children’s book) and “The Creative Act” (a 1957 Marcel Duchamp lecture). Musician frewuhn contributes a score to set the mood for the 400 m journey, which culminates in a “cascade of uncanny sunsets within the darkness.”

B

With “My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard,” New York’s Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) opens the first major survey of pioneering net artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey. Featuring more than 40 works spanning early net-based interactives, videogames (created with Michaël Samyn under the Tale of Tales moniker), mixed media and AR sculptures, curator Regina Harsanyi celebrates Harvey’s capacity to “reflect the paradoxical power of computers to enable intimacy” over nearly four decades.

LaTurbo Avedon’s “Trust Your Technolust” opens at panke.gallery, marking the avatar artist’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. Examining “the wavering promises of virtual worlds” through AR sculptures and projection, Avedon presents past and present works from Club Rothko (2012-), a “virtual nightclub rendered at the end of the metaverse.” Meanwhile, IRL clubbers get to exlore Avedon’s site-specific AR sculpture Sky Queue (2024) while waiting outside of Berlin’s Tresor.

Carola Bonfili’s solo exhibition “Second Order Reality” opens at Aksioma, Ljubljana, exploring states of magical thinking and embodied otherness in virtual worlds. Drawing on the writings of Gustave Flaubert and H.G. Wells as well as videogame metaphors, the Italian artist tells the story of primate protagonist M’ling, The Stone Monkey (2022), across CGI video, an immersive VR experience (entitled Level 1, Illusions That We Should Have, But Don’t), and concrete sculptures.

In anticipation of the Steamboat Willey (1928) version of Mickey Mouse entering the public domain in 2024, Matthew Plummer-Fernández’ hack of the cultural icon, Every Mickey, resurfaces on X. First shown in 2015, at the British-Colombian artist’s solo show “Hard Copy” at NOME, Berlin, the 3D-printed composite of found 3D models “circumvents copyright by being a compilation,” Plummer-Fernández explains on X. Compilations constitute “an exception in copyright law for the creative compiling of other works.”

“Copyright only works above a certain threshold of importance. That’s something you learn as an artist. Your voice doesn’t matter.”
– Artist and experimental filmmaker Robert Seidel, on how little leverage artists have against data-hungry AI companies compared to major institutions like The New York Times, which sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement the day before Seidel’s talk at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37c3)

In a love letter to Deluxe Paint, the popular pixel editor Electronic Arts published from 1985 to ’95, Swedish programmer Carl Svensson dissects and celebrates the package’s powerful drawing, animation, morphing, and colour cycling features that defined the workflow of pixel artists and game developers well into the PlayStation era. “If you’re an old school DOS, Amiga or even console gamer, it will have helped create some of your fondest memories,” writes Svensson.

The “Unleashed” edition of panke.gallery’s recent AR group exhibition, “Animal()City,” pops up at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37c3) in Hamburg (DE), releasing CGI creatures by Joachim Blank (image: The restless lion/ess, 2023), Eva Davidova, Meredith Drum, exonemo, Jonas Lund, Sahej Rahal, and Ingeborg Wie Henriksen. The show, curated by panke’s Sakrowski, draws inspiration from the ghostly presence of urban critters that, like people being siloed by online platforms and AI, seem to live in parallel worlds.

Martina Menegon’s interactive self-portrait I’m sorry I made you feel that way (2023) opens at discotec, Vienna, exploring new forms of care for our hybrid selves. Menegon’s blobby CGI avatar, generated with AI and personal biometric data, will show signs of deterioration the more the artist’s physical needs are neglected. When stressed, for example, the virtual portrait will refuse interaction and, eventually, dissolve into glitched abstraction. An AR extension adds a sculptural layer, spilling Menegon’s failing frame into the gallery.

The third act in curators Dominique Moulon, Alain Thibault, and Cathernine Bédard’s exhibition series, “Endless Variation,” opens at the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, as part of the 2023 Némo Biennial. Works by ten artists including Nicolas Baier, Salomé Chatriot (image: Idol (Hydra 4), 2023), Nicolas Sassoon, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, and Timothy Thomasson explore nascent generative processes and the transition from artist studio to computer interface.

“For every charge that immersive events are diluting our experience of artistry, there’s a counterpoint to be made that it’s opening that experience out to people who might not normally gravitate towards it.”
– Writer Róisín Lanigan, weighing in on the post-pandemic rise of immersive media spaces like Frameless, Outernet (both London), and Sphere (Las Vegas). They empower creators, offer communal experiences, and yes, “they’re geared towards the gram—the number of views can attest to that,” Lanigan notes.
Daniel Langlois
1957 – 2023
Canadian animator and Softimage founder Daniel Langlois dies at 66. A National Film Board of Canada filmmaker, Langlois created Softimage 3D, VFX software used on blockbusters including Jurassic Park and Terminator 2. Shifting to philanthropy in middle age, he launched the Daniel Langlois Foundation, a major Montréal art-technology institution, in 1997.
“Screensavers are wild and showed all kinds of other possibilities with computation. Pipes? Flying toasters? Lissajous figures? As a kid the computer was most interesting when you didn’t touch it.”
– Software artist Zach Lieberman, defending the humble screensaver. A decades-old clichéd criticism of digital art (“it’s just a screensaver”), the tired trope resurfaced recently when critic Jerry Saltz sniped at Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised (2022), describing it as “mediocre spectacle” and “a banal screensaver.”
Debrief:
New Art City Virtualizes The Gallery, Abolishes Gatekeepers, and Increases Access

The duo behind the California-based artist-run virtual space discuss their yearly showcase “MEMORY CARD,” and the politics and aesthetics of online exhibitions

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