How does generative AI’s carbon footprint fare against human creators? Pretty well, according to a recent paper shared by American software artist Kyle McDonald. Comparing text and image creation energy use, University of California researcher Bill Tomlinson and team found that BLOOM, ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E2 beat human writers and illustrators (and their computers) by wide margins: “An AI creating an image emits 310 to 2900 times less CO2,” states the paper. McDonald’s dark take: “New eugenics just dropped.”

“Moving as half-human half-machine, we enter the stage like Terminator robots hyping the crowd with claims of world domination,” Mary Maggic recalls opening “Climate Fitness” at Intermediae Matadero Madrid. Faster Higher Stronger (2022), a cross-species performance and installation, had Maggic and collaborators ride bicycle-powered bioreactors. “In the background, SCOBY flesh spins with us, synchronized to the tune of optimized aesthetics,” she writes. “The crowd films through their phones, peering like voyeurs into a mirror of their own reality.”

Aram Bartholl’s solo exhibition “Package ready for pickup” opens at Kunsthalle Osnabrück (DE), kicking off the church-turned-gallery’s 30th anniversary celebrations. Highlighting material flows and environmental degradation, Berlin-based Bartholl presents e-waste recycling crates, QR code climate alerts, and chandeliers made from salvaged TVs. The highlight: a pop-up DHL package station will service customers for the duration of the exhibition, drawing non-art audiences to the show and its themes.

Intermediae Matadero Madrid inaugurates a year-long research program on climate adaption rituals with the group show “Climate Fitness.” Expanding on their 2019 essay “Planet Fitness,“ exhibition designers Common Accounts and curator Maite Borjabad stage works by Faysal Altunbozar, Itziar Barrio (image: Robota MML, 2016-), Ibiye Camp, Irati Inoriza, and Mary Maggic as a gym—a place for visitors to test bodily and planetary boundaries, exercise mutuality, and build up agency.

Trent University and Experimental Methods and Media Lab (EMM Lab) researchers Sarah Rayner and Anne Pasek introduce a white paper on zine-based conferencing—“a low-tech, low-carbon, high-fidelity, and screen-free alternative to in-person gatherings.” Drawing on insights from the 2022 DIY Methods conference archived here, the guide provides a rationale and tips for conducting research exchange by mail. Pasek’s conclusion on Twitter: “A more convivial, sustainable, and affective academy is possible!”

Hayward Gallery within London’s Southbank Centre opens “Dear Earth,” a group show featuring 15 international artists including Agnes Denes, John Gerrard, and Hito Steyerl that explore “themes of care, hope, and connection” in times of planetary crisis. Denes, for example, recreated her iconic land artwork The Living Pyramid (2015, image) as a five-meter tall indoor architecture planted with wildflowers and grasses, invoking both “the past and the possible future we will invent.”

As part of LINZ FMR, a biennial festival for art in digital contexts and public spaces in Linz (AT), artist-activists Julian Oliver and Gordan Savičić turn their PerMillion (2022) CO2 web counter into a billboard. Every morning, the parts-per-million value is updated manually to match the website in what FRM calls “a non-digital performance.” Designed as a tool for protest, the website gets its numbers directly from the continuous readings at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, the atmospheric CO2 baseline station.

NEW NOW Festival returns to the industrial world heritage site of Zeche Zollverein in Essen (DE), once the world’s largest colliery, to conjure “Hypernatural Forces” in a major exhibition. Ten resident artists including AATB, Cinzia Campolese, Daniel Franke, Ali Phi, Sabrina Ratté, and Pinar Yoldas present new works that ponder the site’s political and environmental legacy. As visitors wander the caverns of the Mixing Plant, they encounter roaming robot packs and AI-generated ecosystems.

Julius von Bismarck’s solo exhibition “When Platitudes Become Form” opens at Berlinische Galerie, examining simplistic clichés of “how nature is seen and history is written.” For the sculptural piece I like the flowers (2017, image), for example, the German artist pressed dried plants of non-European origin into two dimensions. Bismarck’s critique of extractivist colonial world views also includes his own family history: A suspended 9 x 12 meter cloth, Landscape Painting (2022), invokes the moving waters of the Bismarck Sea.

Australian architect and filmmaker Liam Young premieres a new docu-fiction installation, The Great Endeavor (2023), at this year’s Venice Biennale. The piece offers glimpses of a longer forthcoming film that approaches planetary-scale carbon sequestration with radical optimism. Young and consulting scientist Holly Jean Buck turn humanity’s largest engineering project into an infrastructural imaginary, “chronicling the coordinated action to decolonise the atmosphere in our last great act of planetary transformation.”