Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s installation, The Ephemeral Lake (2024), premieres at Hamburger Kunsthalle, reinterpreting the landscapes of 18th century Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich as immersive, computer-simulated ecologies. The piece explores themes of water, deep time, and crystallization, Steensen says, and “goes beyond contrasting the human figure in the environment.” Instead, it invites a worldview “where our bodies and minds merge with environmental energies and other species.”

Foregrounding food production and consumption, Deirdre O’Mahony’s “The Quickening” opens at Trinity College Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery. In its eponymous film (2024, image), the Irish artist documents years of consultation with farmers and policymakers, conveying the “reality of farming and the centrality of soil to human, animal, and insect life.” Kicking off a tour, O’Mahony will subsequently screen the film in Carlow, Waterford, Kilkenny and other towns across Southern Ireland.

Consumer advocates Public Citizen release “Mushrooming Risk,” a report on the danger of AI tools to foragers. Spurned by recent hospitalizations, researcher Rick Claypool outlines the folly of using apps to identify species and gauge edibility. “Mushroomers must take the time to develop their skills at their own pace,” he writes, championing local knowledge over app reliance. Experimenting with DALL-E compounded his fear; when he prompted it to label basic mushroom anatomy, it hallucinated utter nonsense (image).

Tomás Saraceno’s solo exhibition “Live(s) on Air” opens at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles, showcasing, among other works, new cloud and foam sculptures that manifest as clusters of iridescent geometries suspended in mid-air. Juxtapozed with a series of infrared photography that suggests a new era of climate-neutral aerosolar flight, the Argentinian artist’s floating colour fractals “make visible the spectral hues and synaesthetic vectors that shape the cosmic web,” inviting meditation on “forms of life and eco-social interdependence.”

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.”

Rosa Menkman’s mixed-media installation, A Spectrum of Lost and Unnamed Colours (2024), opens at EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne (CH), concluding the “speculative dialogues” with computer and environmental scientists that informed the work and guided her EPFL residency. In a series of translucent, lens-like sigils, the Dutch artist and researcher tells the story of a future media archaeologist who, in mapping colour loss, uncovers how air pollution and AI deluge ‘dimmed’ the atmospheric rainbow—“nature’s original ‘glitch’.”

“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.

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.

The NGV Triennial opens at Melbourne’s NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) International, showcasing 100 works from 120 artists and designers that epitomize contemporary practice. In addition to timeless pieces by Hito Steyerl, John Gerrard, SMACK, and Julian Charrière, NGV premieres several new commissions: Dunne & Raby’s Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival (2023) imagines future multi-species gatherings through speculative artifacts, while Agnieszka Pilat’s Heterobota (2023, image) enjoy playtime.