“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.

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.

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.

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.

“Arguably, The Terminator’s greatest legacy has been to distort how we collectively think and speak about AI,” writes Tom F.A Watts. Appraising James Cameron’s sci-fi classic (1984) on its 40th anniversary, the remote warfare researcher analyzes how Skynet, the film’s antagonistic AI network, still shapes discussions (and anxieties) about autonomous weapons. “It’s crucially important that human operators continue to exercise agency and meaningful control over machine systems,” he says of the film’s enduring takeaway.

A tour “leading us through the geological ages of the Earth all the way to space,” Pauline Julier’s “A Single Universe” opens at Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau (CH). The Swiss artist and filmmaker presents works linking the deep time of terrestrial biomes to a Martian mountain range. Multimedia installations including Follow the Water (2023, image), which explores water rights and landscapes, and Naturalis Historia (2017-19), an interrrogation of our “thinking and representation of nature,” are featured.

Tribeca Film Festival’s Immersive program takes over the media spaces of Mercer Labs, New York, with eight newly created, site-specific sensations. Highlights include 5-channel adaptations of Liam Young’s CGI eco-fictions Planet City (2020) and The Great Endeavour (2023), and the world premiere of Embodied Simulation (2024, image), a multi-screen collaboration between Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter that combines generative AI with dance and latest insights from neuroscience.

Exploring “adaptation, survival, and myth,” Emilija Škarnulytė’s “The Goddess Helix” opens at Kunsthall Trondheim (NO). Spanning film, sculpture, and holographic imagery, the Lithuanian artist presents three cinematic installations that draw on anthropologist Marija Gimbutas’ research into goddess and serpent motifs in Neolithic art. Æqualia (2023, image), for example, depicts a chimeric mermaid swimming alongside dolphins through the confluence of the Rio Solimões, Rio Negro, and the Amazon River.

Bringing meticulously constructed film sets into the white cube, Bob Demper’s “In Tall Buildings” opens at 1646 in The Hague. The Dutch artist presents several scenes—a bland boardroom, a marble-adorned lobby—and excerpts from 5000 Miles, his ongoing feature film project about an asset manager that (algorithmically) controls 10% of the world’s wealth. Inviting visitors to contemplate the seat(s) of power, Demper illustrates “how the risk taken by the corporate world is almost always a public risk.”