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“Glitch. The Art of Interference” opens at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne, offering a comprehensive institutional survey of “one of the youngest and most unpredictable forms of art.” Curators Franziska Kunze and Katrin Bauer present works by 50 international artists that trace the interrogation of media and its malfunction from the digital era (Rosa Menkman, !Mediengruppe Bitnik & Sven König, JODI) back to glitch art’s analog roots (Nam June Paik, Peter Weibel, Pipilotti Rist, Sondra Perry).

Dredging up grotesque imaginaries, Tishan Hsu’s “recent works 2023” opens at Secession in Vienna. Taking centre stage at the artist-run space, the American artist presents tablet-skin-screen (2023, image), an undulating moiré pattern-adorned sculpture that evokes both flesh and (video) feedback. Complementing the unnatural geometry, surrounding morphing videos and prints depict “the interpenetration of physical bodies with virtual digital forms.”

Peter Burr’s Sunshine Monument (2023) launches on the Whitney website as part of the museum’s Sunrise/Sunset series of timed micro interventions. Visible for up to 30 seconds twice a day, the “fleeting shimmer” translates the site’s layout into seven abstract architectures—one for each day—bustling with activity. Burr’s harsh signature style channels “the atmosphere of the late Web 2.0 landscape, characterized by an increasingly indexed, optimized, and gamified environment,” writes curator Christiane Paul.

“In the Screen I am Everything,” a solo show by transmedia artist Ellie Pritts opens at Bitforms New York. Foregrounding an aesthetic of video feedback, digital glitch, and fervent AI hallucination, the American artist presents works across video, giclée prints, and wallpaper. In the show’s titular video (2023, image), Pritts finds new avenues in self-portraiture by feeding an AI image generator text prompts from her journal—turning green screen footage of herself into a morphing dreamscape.

German media artist and Post-Internet purveyor Aram Bartholl unveals Delusion And Survival (2023), a collection of custom-made steel paper clips in @ sign form. Created in collaboration with The Internet Shop for an upcoming group show at Berlin’s A:D: Curatorial, the whimsical artifact fuses two concepts whose overlapping histories permeate contemporary digital culture—the paper clip that lives on in our interfaces and as a metaphor for AI dystopia, and the now ubiquitous @ sign, first introduced in 1971.

Jan Robert Leegte’s solo exhibition ”No Content: Contemplations on Software” opens at Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam, examining digital media through “the carrier and reality that holds it.” JPEG (2023), for example, is a series of algorithmic images that fully express the signature compression; Broken Images (2023) foregrounds the volatility of digital assets by minting broken links as NFTs, and Scrollbars (image)—a Leegte classic—presents obsolete interface elements as sculptural and cultural debris.

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Navigating the gap between veteran digital artists and next generation upstarts, “Machine Violence” opens at Postmasters Gallery in New York City. Twelve artists including Damjanski, Huntrezz Janos, Eva & Franco Mattes, and Jennifer & Kevin McCoy present works spanning machinima to painting. Of note: the show includes Biennale.py (2001, image), the Mattes’ 49th Venice Biennale contribution, in which a connected virus-laden and ‘clean’ computer “infect and disinfect each other in an endless cycle.“

Named after a line of predictive text poetry, Travess Smalley’s solo exhibition “Number colors burn randomly” opens at Foxy Production, New York. Comprising new textile works (literal pixel rugs), plotter drawings, silk screen prints, and videos, the show expands upon the American artist’s use of code and scripts to plant “seeds of chance” for visual production. “It might not be the mark of my hand that is interesting,” notes Smalley, “but the exact inverse, the absence, the ghost, the memory.”

“Evolving Kinetics,” a show demonstrating just how much digital aesthetics can “float freely in space, create an immersive environment, and break the rigid structures” of Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen (DE) opens. Curated by Peggy Schoenegge of Peer to Space, artists including Kim Asendorf, Rosa Menkman, Nicolas Sassoon, and Robert Seidel contribute a range of eclectic moirés, textures, and primitives that splash across the venue via display, projection, and (imaginatively) as wallpaper.

“We could almost touch the data but we cannot see it. Like the billions of images made each day that no one will ever look at. Some of these unseen photographs are made by people, others by and for machines.”
– Critic Régine Debatty, on Eva & Franco Mattes’ Personal Photographs (2021-22) that are currently ‘on view’ at GAMeC, Bergamo (IT), as part of “A Leap into the Void.” Taken over the course of a month, the images—their data, rather—circulate via ethernet cables contained in colourful cable trays.
OUT NOW:
Alison Hearst (ed)
I’ll Be Your Mirror
The catalogue for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s survey of 50 years of screen-based art, works by Petra Cortright, Cao Fei, Nam June Paik, Lillian Schwartz, Hito Steyerl (and dozens more) are framed by Hearst and writers Omar Kholeif and Tina Rivers Ryan.

Journalist Steffan Powell reflects on Helsinki’s dominance in mobile gaming, citing the demoscene as a key catalyst. Before Angry Birds Nokia put the city on the map, Powell writes, tracing local tech aptitude to 1990s and ’00s—still burgeoning—demoparty culture that fuelled domestic creation (image: CNCD, Closer, 1995) and attracted programmers from afar. The demoscene nurtured a culture of doing more with less, or as quoted executive Sarita Runeberg puts it: “Finns have been tech geeks since forever!”

“I would say there is a circuit board aesthetic, a punch-card aesthetic, as well as an interest in pristine and gleaming metallic surfaces, reminiscent of the IBM mainframe.”
– LACMA curator Leslie Jones, describing the aesthetic of one of the six rooms in “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982.” In conversation with Bronaċ Ferran, she shares the landmark exhibition was inspired by a 2013 donation of computer drawings from the Frederick Hammersley Foundation which left her in awe: “[it] was unlike anything I had seen before.”

“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982,” a major survey of early computer art, opens at LACMA in Los Angeles. Curated by Leslie Jones, the show assembles works from Analívia Cordeiro, Hans Haacke, Frederick Hammersley, Vera Molnar, Stan VanDerBeek, and others, that reimagined methods and materials. Edward Kienhol’s The Friendly Grey Computer (image, 1965), for example, “anticipated the coming age of personal computing” with a big-eyed anthropomorphized bot, made of salvaged industrial parts.

An eponymous retrospective of Swedish artist Charlotte Johannesson opens at Nottingham Contemporary in the UK. Presenting textiles, plotter prints, and installations from her five decade career, the show underscores her importance bridging weaving to early digital aesthetics in the 1980s (image: Digital Human, 1981-86). A tableau of “1960s counterculture, feminism, punk,” as described by curator Nicole Yip, Johannesson was recently recognized at the Venice Biennale (2022) and the Reina Sofia (2021).

“Numbers count landscapes and what moves through them; they count routes and their optimal relations; they count possibilities and potentials, and numbers are the backbone of both images and industrialization.”
– Media theorist Jussi Parikka, on the overarching quantification, “large-scale systems, logistics, and abstractions” of industrialized vision. An excerpt from his forthcoming book Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual, Parikka ruminates on the distinct visual language and enduring legacy of late German filmmaker Harun Farocki.
OUT NOW:
Menkman & Gross (eds)
Im/possible Images Reader
Contributors including Memo Akten, Ingrid Burrington, Daniel Temkin, and Alan Warburton, share art and writing expanding on a 2021 exhibition at Lothringer 13 Halle (Munich, DE) parsing “im/possible images.”
OUT NOW:
Leslie Jones (ed)
Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982
Accompanying the imminent LACMA exhibition, Jones and contributing writers situate the work of early computer artists including Alison Knowles, Harold Cohen, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar, and A. Michael Noll.
“What Unsupervised insinuates, is that art history is just a bunch of random visual tics to be permuted, rather than an archive of symbol-making practices with social meanings.”
– Critic Ben Davis, demystifying Refik Anadol’s AI “alternative-art-history simulator” on view at MoMA. “The effect is pleasant—like an extremely intelligent lava lamp,” Davis writes. “What it is not is anything like what MoMA says it is: an experience that ‘reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been.’”
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