Mika Ben Amar’s Ad Space drops on Verse, presenting 111 compositions generated by a custom Chrome extension that strips websites down to nothing but ads. The Berlin-based artist’s resulting spartan canvases foreground the surveillance apparatus—targeting algorithms, behavioural profiles, the data-brokerage economy—that underwrite ‘free’ content. “I trained Google to only show me weird ads for this,” Ben Amar notes on social media.

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk (DK) stages the first full-scale presentation of Jon Rafman’s breakthrough Nine Eyes project (2008-) with “Report a concern—The Nine Eyes Archives.” Mining images from Google Street View, the Canadian artist foregrounds the accidental surveillance regime of Google’s ubiquitous roaming cameras. The show features scores of large prints, an archive culled from Street View subculture blogs, and new AI-animated works.

“In making no decisions, Google Maps as a private corporation makes political decisions for us,” writes Nidhi Singh Rathore. Noting how the platform shows Kashmir differently to Indian versus Pakistani users and Crimea as part of Russia to Russians, the design researcher argues Google’s ‘neutrality’ creates nationalist echo chambers. Instead, Rathore advocates for democratizing the mapping process through participatory practices that replace corporate decision-making with community input.

Tech reporter Sheera Frenkel chronicles how Google, OpenAI, Meta, and venture capitalists (VCs) have abandoned their anti-war pledges to embrace the military industrial complex. The transformation includes executives being sworn in as Army lieutenant colonels, companies scrubbing AI weapons bans, and VCs investing $31 billion in defense startups last year. Frenkel notes that a decade ago Big Tech companies “brandished mottos such as ‘connecting the world’ and ‘do no evil.’”

Artist, writer, and Scripps College lecturer Zsofi Valyi-Nagy visualizes the internet fatigue we all feel: Brain Fog (2025) is a plotter drawing of an overflowing, out-of-focus Gmail inbox, complete with browser window and taunting open tabs. It’s based on an earlier, unblurred drawing that recently became plotter fodder in her “Old New Media” class, Valyi-Nagy writes via DM. “I then bought my own plotter, and dialled up the stress level by doubling the SVG.”

Google announces progress on DolphinGemma, a foundational model that interprets the clicks, whistles, and burst pulses of dolphin vocalization. Analyzing a database of wild Atlantic spotted dolphin utterances collected over decades by the Wild Dolphin Project the model seeks patterns that may indicate language. Tests are underway to generate synthetic whistles to see if the aquatic mammals respond. The ultimate goal: “establish a shared vocabulary for interactive communication.”