The third edition of Japan’s Osaka Kansai International Art Festival ponders urban futures with a group exhibition that asks “STREET 3.0: Where Is The Street?” Curators Miwa Kutsuna and Yutaro Midorikawa present works by international artists that hack the city with technology (Aram Bartholl, Simon Weckert, AQV-EIKKKM), calligraphy, or olfactory. Bartholl’s over 1,400 node-strong network of Dead Drops (2010-, image), for example, inserts USB flash drives into the urban landscape for offline data sharing.

Known for inventive hardware hacks, Swedish musician and self-professed ‘mad engineer’ Linus Åkesson debuts his Commodordion: an 8-bit accordion made from two Commodore 64s. Both run QWERTUOSO, Åkesson’s programmable SID chip synthesizer, played via computer keyboard. As with a real accordion, the sounds are triggered by the bellows (that Åkesson improvised from 5 ¼ floppy disks): a sensor measures air flow as the virtuoso plays.

In the Bloomberg webcomic The Perfect Art Heist: Hack the Money, Leave the Painting, illustrator Anna Haifisch and writer James Tarmy relate the ongoing dispute over who owns John Constable’s 1824 painting A View of Hampstead Heath. Art dealer Simon C. Dickinson had sold the prized landscape to the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, for $3.1 million in January, but a (still at large) hacker intercepted the money transfer by hijacking Dickinson’s email.