The TRANSFER Data Trust reports the record-breaking acquisition of Carla Gannis’ digital triptych The Garden of Emoji Delights (2014)—a new high for womxn artists on the Tezos chain. Sold for 32,221 XTZ, or $45,000 USD, the NFT of the internet-age take on Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic 16th-century altarpiece comes with the original, 4 metre-wide print Gannis premiered at her 2014 TRANSFER gallery solo show (image). Instead of biblical immorality, the piece depicts the ‘sins’ of contemporary consumer culture.

Aram Bartholl debuts This Is Fine (2022) as part of the “On Equal Terms” group exhibition at Uferhallen, Berlin. In what is, perhaps, a timely follow-up to his Map public sculpture series (2006-19), the German post-internet artist erects a 3×4 meter fire emoji in the venue’s courtyard, capturing the deep anxiety many of us grapple with: as the climate crisis and geopolitical conflict continue to escalate, “it feels like the world is on fire.” 🔥

A reimagination of Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic triptych for the digital age, Carla Gannis’ The Garden of Emoji Delights opens at Stockholm’s Fotografiska. In her 2014 collage, the American artist explores how Bosch’s visual world from 500 years ago matches our emoji dictionary, circa now. “There is humour, darkness, and absurdity,” state the curators. “Earthly, cosmological, and technological conditions are combined,” revealing ideologies and social constructs that have remained unchanged for centuries.

Avatar artist LaTurbo Avedon announces that the mirror emoji submitted by her, Theo Schear, and ‘emoji activist’ Jennifer 8. Lee is now official Unicode (13.0) standard. Citing anthropologist Tom Boellstorff’s writings on mirrors in Second Life, their proposal from February 21, 2019, argues for the mirror as an important “non-literal” symbol users carry over from one world to another as “we integrate ourselves more closely with the virtual.”

Raphaël Bastide’s URL installation otherti.me (2019) shows at the transmediale Vorspiel opening at Acud Macht Neu, Berlin at the invitation of panke.gallery. The work, presented as a URL mural, invites viewers to explore a corpus of 30 online works Bastide made over 30 consecutive days, starting on November 16, 2019. Drawing inspiration from daily life, the French artist’s online experiments include emoji clocks, Wikipedia modifications, animated GIFs, and HTML hacks.