Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary

A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
● 25/09/2025
“My bet is that a child born today has a greater chance of dying from AI than of graduating high school.”
– Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) president and If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (2025) co-author Nate Soares, on the probability of near-term AI extinction. In their book, Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky issue a dire warning that the race towards superintelligent AI poses an existential risk. “Humanity usually learns from its mistakes,” Soares tells Breaking Points hosts Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim. “In this situation, there’s not gonna be any chance to learn.”
YouTube
● 24/09/2025

Troika inaugurates max goelitz’s new Munich location with “Deception Island,” a display of new and recent works that chart “a cartography of displacement and emergence, where extinct species, digital flora and machine-mediated visions converge.” In the speculative landscapes of Out of Place, Out of Time (2025), for example, an extinct cactus species takes root at the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, while the delicate metal forms of the Ultraflora (2025) sculpture series were grown from 3D scans of pioneer plants.

max goelitz
● 05/09/2025
“Every author dreams of their book being an enduring classic. Not so much these two. If they are right, there will be no one around to read their book in the future.”
– Wired’s editor-at-large Stephen Levy, on Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s forthcoming AI extinction bible If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (2025). Written to jar humanity out of its complacency, “the book is beyond dark, reading like notes scrawled in a dimly lit prison cell the night before a dawn execution,” Levy writes.
Wired
● 09/05/2025
“I wanted to just understand what extinction is at a very basic level. It’s about making deep time more accessible in the past and in the future, and putting ourselves into a longer continuum.”
– Artist, writer, and musician K Allado-McDowell, discussing “The Known Lost,” their solo show on view at New York’s Swiss Institute. The participatory exhibition-slash-opera decenters the human and hallucinates a monument that honours all species that have ever lived and died on Earth.
Dazed Digital
● 07/05/2025

K Allado-McDowell’s first solo show, “The Known Lost,” transforms the lower-level gallery of the Swiss Institute, New York, into a memorial site for “all species that have ever lived and gone extinct on Earth.” The scientific names of the 180,285 known extinct species the writer, artist, and musician compiled from paleobiology records serve as the libretto for a new opera, inscriptions in a proposed, AI-hallucinated monument, and a set of books for visitors to read—or sing—from.

Swiss Institute
● 14/04/2025
“It’s like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.”
– Evolutionary biologist Richard Grenyer, refuting Colossal Biosciences’ claims of successful de-extinction. The U.S. biotech company recently announced that it had resurrected the dire wolf, a long-gone Pleistocene predator. In reality, the two pups they engineered are modern interpretations. “They are grey wolves, with 14 genes modified to produce an animal that resembles what we think a dire wolf looked like,” Grenyer clarifies and warns: “We’ll all pay for the mistaken belief that extinction is a solved problem.”
The Conversation
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