Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary
A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
“They have a different understanding of time and a different understanding of cinema because they look at images on small screens; they don’t have much of that cinematic, collective experience of watching a film together as a group.”
nGbK Berlin’s “EastUnBloc” examines the permeability of the “Iron Curtain” through the lens of experimental media art by more than two dozen artists and collectives from socialist and transition-era Central and Eastern Europe. From Slovak homebrew computer games, to Igor Štromajer’s hardware hacks, to the set of Hungary’s guerilla Vákuum TV: the included pieces counter clichés of socialist conformity and reveal the many inventive strategies—“scripts”—of making do.
Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) probes the complex relationship between technology and power in a major survey: “Data Dreams: Art and AI” brings together ten international trailblazers, including Fabien Giraud, Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Anicka Yi, to explore how algorithms and the data economy reshape world views, social systems, and the living planet. Giraud’s AI co-authored film, The Feral (2025–3025)—a world premiere—projects one possible outcome, hallucinating humanity’s future 32 generations ahead.
Sprüth Magers Berlin revisits Gretchen Bender’s Top Ten Grossing Films of 1988 (1989) in “Political Entertainment,” showing for the first time since their debut. Ten backlit sculptures rendered in crumpled black vinyl and neon bear the titles of that year’s highest-grossing films—Coming to America, Crocodile Dundee II, Die Hard, etc. Compiled through the late American artist’s monitoring of trade publications, the forms probe the Hollywood blockbuster as what Bender called “a fascism of and through entertainment.”
CLON’s PROTOCOL 909 (2025) wins best sci-fi short film at the London Independent Film Festival. Written, directed, and produced by CLON founder Estela Oliva, the film follows the emotional journey of a robot maker played by Anastasiya Ador whose beloved synthetic beings have vanished from the lab. Grappling with feelings of grief and betrayal, she must decide whether to erase their memories and shut down the code that keeps them alive.
Samson Young’s “Pavilion” transforms Taiwan’s New Taipei City Art Museum (NTCAM) into a cavernous media environment. His titular installation (2025) draws on IBM’s 1964 World’s Fair film THINK by the Eames Office, wunderkammers, and Lev Manovich’s notion of database cinema to examine how information architectures shape perception. Suspended multi-screen projections feature AI-generated images and a requiem-inspired score that “intertwine like data fragments” as visitors take it all in below.
“It’s ironic thinking what the road movie would look like for a self-driving car, because the road to the car represents their job and a certain sense of what they might want to escape from.”
“The Geopolitics of Infrastructure” probes the aesthetics and power relations of transnational systems at Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA). Curated by Nav Haq, it features Tekla Aslanishvili, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Jonas Staal, Zheng Mahler and 10 others exploring infrastructure “as both facilitator and destroyer.” Assem Hendawi’s film Everything Under Heaven (2021), for example, traces Egypt’s post-1952 infrastructural ambitions as national cosmology and contested sovereignty.
“I’m sick of the staleness of the traditional photographic image. I like to work with split screens, multiple screens at once, and text onscreen because I believe we can arrive at newer forms of mise-en-scène.”
“Filmmaking has always been driven by technology. After the Lumiere Brothers and Edison’s ground-breaking invention, filmmakers unleashed the hidden storytelling power of cameras. Later breakthroughs—sound, colour, VFX—allowed us to tell stories in ways that couldn’t be told before. Today is no different.”
Fragmentin’s “Efficient Ways” inaugurates V V, Visarte Vaud’s new contemporary art space in Lausanne (CH). The Swiss trio examines digital infrastructure’s territorial impact through generative film, photography, and sound art. Featured is Fragment of Parables ULX-56834 (2021, image), a sound sculpture—and now tribute—that plays audio of Nicolas Nova and other commentators discussing nearby Loèche’s parabolic antennas. “Gone too soon,” the trio writes of the late researcher.
“The profusion of digital images and simulations of environmental transformation make it seem possible—easy even—to play the climate models in reverse, suck the carbon out of the atmosphere and sculpt the biosphere at will.”
Troika’s new film, Drill Baby Drill (2025), premieres during Vienna Digital Cultures’ AI Cinema Night, sending viewers on what the artists describe as “a hallucinatory ride through techno-optimism, ecological collapse, and the aesthetics of power.” As synthetic landscapes blur into sublime visions of destruction, the video piece reworks Suicide’s 1979 cult track “Dream Baby Dream” into a pop-anarchist chant echoing Trump’s fossil-fuel populism.
In the second, MOCA Detroit edition of “Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art,” organizer Legacy Russell shifts her focus from the history of “Black data” and African American Cybercultures (see debut) to the present day, celebrating what contemporary Black makers, including American Artist, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, A.M. Darke, Stephanie Dinkins, and Martine Syms, contribute to new media art and digital practice.
In Untitled (archive) (2024), British artist Douglas Dixon-Barker abstracts a videogame’s interior space using 16mm film. Presented online by Milan Machinima Festival, this conceptual work honours idiosyncratic media: the source game is no longer available and it was captured within the 30-second shot technical limitations of a Bolex camera. Dixon-Barker coyly keeps the game’s identity secret, while interlocutor Matteo Bittanti aptly describes the silent film as a “degraded register” of virtual space.
“It’s an innate part of science that you try stuff. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not a conspiracy.”
EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival and OGR Torino team up for “Almost Real. From Trace to Simulation,” an exhibition exploring representation in the age of AI-generated imagery. Curators Samuele Piazza and Salvatore Vitale present recent works by Nora Al-Badri, Alan Butler, and Lawrence Lek that “problematize” artifice and AI imagery. For example, Lek’s film Empty Rider (2024, image) depicts a narrative about electronic personhood and speculates “how intergenerational memories might emerge from machine learning.”
Drawing on its Tate premiere programming last year, Preemptive Listening is the subject the latest issue of Disclaimer. In the film, sound artist Aura Satz and experts including Steve Goodman and Christina Kubish reflect on the siren as a symbol of “dread and anticipation of imminent threats.” In the special issue, interviewees including Raven Chacon, Margarida Mendes, and Camille Norment ruminate about sonic violence, industrial noise, and the materiality of sound.
“He saw the camera as a machine, saw that it does not care about you, saw that pictures signify little. Andy Warhol, that soup-inhaling enthusiast of Marilyn and Mao, reveals those rules.”
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