Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary
A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
THE DELUSION
“Many people will say that citations are the ultimate feminist technology—a social network of how ideas come together through community, not because of some individual genius. Adding a financial component felt like an extension of that.”
Do virtual bodies and AI chatbots broaden our perceptions of the body, gender, and sexuality, or do they reduce them to clichés? In “KI LOVE,” artists Arvida Byström, Stine Deja, Marie Munk, and Lotta Stöver present works at Galerie Mitte in Bremen (DE) that offer techno-feminist perspectives on surrogate technologies and mixed realities. An extended version of Stöver’s Latent Imaging and Imagining (2023-24), for example, uses AI-altered personal photographs to re-imagine—queer—childhood memories.
“Consent is an ongoing, enthusiastic social contract that is mutable. You can agree to something, experience it, and then decide you don’t actually like it, and then you change the terms. But all of this needs to be in discussion in perpetuity.”
“For us, feminism is a mandate—to work on the world out there and on ourselves. To outsource this work to AI is to shirk responsibility. ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,’ wrote Gil Scott-Heron; nor will our feminism be automated. And that’s a good thing.”
“Our two primary material references were the iPhone and the little black book. It’s like a brick—the dimensions of an iPhone extruded to 3 inches.”
“A dreamhouse feels attainable. It might take work, but people think they can achieve it. I wanted to say with this show, this concept, this title, that a peaceful and just future is attainable.”
“I hoped to carve out space for a different kind of future, one where speculative thinking, intersectional feminism, and digital aesthetics could meet on equal terms.”
Artist Ana María Caballero highlights the increasing significance of curatorial studios within the digital art ecosystem in Forbes. Operating outside the conventional gallery framework allows groups like synthesis, HERVISIONS, The Second Guess, EPOCH, and TRANSFER “the freedom and flexibility to be bold,” Caballero writes. Zaiba Jabbar, for example, founded HERVISIONS in 2015 to “address the flagrant absence of femme-identifying voices in the art and tech world.”
“When Body Is Not Enough” at SOMA Art Berlin is a deeply personal showcase of allapopp’s experimentation with identity, digital embodiment, and cyborgism. Known for their queer, non-binary, and tech-positive hacktivism, the Tartar interdisciplinary artist presents AI-generated avatar distortions and expanded selfs that critically examine how bodies—particularly female bodies—are mediated, augmented, and commodified by digital technology.
“Here, Sleeping Beauty is not the maiden waiting for others to direct her life—she is the witch who nurtures it. Hart’s work is not a fairy tale; it is a feminist invocation of a multispecies future.”
“Michelle Cotton lucidly outlines the ways in which women artists engaged with computers: as language and code games, as tools and an aesthetic, and finally, as intimate extensions of bodies, engendering dreams of post-gender otherness, but also technological nightmares.”
“An unrecognized pop art masterpiece, a proto-GIF, a sarcastic, feminist work, an affirmation of autonomy, and a slap in the face as much to the conservative, technophobic academy as to the technofetishist, male-dominated world of technology.”
After honouring her with the 5th DAM Digital Art Award (nomination via critic Domenico Quaranta), DAM Projects Berlin celebrates American artist Rebecca Allen with a solo show. An early innovator of CGI and computer animation—the 1974 punchcard-generated sequence Girl Lifts Skirt (image) is considered one of the first pieces of feminist computer art—Allen is renowned for foregrounding “the body within technology” and collaborating with fellow icons Twyla Tharp, David Byrne, Kraftwerk, and Nam June Paik.
“I can’t help you with your film because people just want a gay film or lesbian film, and this mixture of sexuality in your film is just not going anywhere.”
“Ten Thousand Suns,” the 24th edition of the Biennale of Sydney opens at venues across the New South Wales capital. Artists including Mona Al Qadiri, Dumb Type, Özgür Kar, and Lawrence Lek are featured at the White Bay Power Station flagship exhibition, which repurposes the former coal-fired facility as a cultural hub. Excitingly, Australian cyberfeminism originators VNS Matrix present a selection of their works from the last four decades on banners, displays, and zines throughout the venue (image).
Eleanor Drage & Kerry McInerney
The Good Robot
“Our technological culture keeps casting these artificial intelligences either as mothers, catering and caring, or as female demons that consume men, succubus-like, luring them to half-deaths, to a constant state of orgasm—a hijacked limbic system suspended in pleasure.”
The Hole’s yearly thematic group show, “Fembot,” opens at the New York gallery’s Bowery location, celebrating technology and the female form. “Representations of the female body are as vast as the internet, from futuristic robots to porous, sweaty flesh,” writes gallerist Kathy Grayson about the works of Salomé Chatrior, Auriea Harvey, Jordan Homstad, Faith Holland, Nicole Ruggiero, and others that range from “cyborg goddesses” to post-human grotesques. Case in point: CGI artist Emma Stern’s 3d-printed ‘amphemme’ Brooke (2023, image).
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