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“A default move within contemporary art over the past two decades: defunctionalized objects pulled out of usual circulation or infrastructural location appear to offer a kind of freezing and deictic insight.”
e-flux Contributing Editor Evan Calder Williams, taking aim at white cube infrastructure porn. “As if a hunk of undersea internet cable on a gallery floor confronts us with the materiality of communication,” he writes in the second part of an essay on sweeping cultural paralysis. [quote edited]
“The internet is filling up with ‘zombie content’ designed to game algorithms and scam humans. It’s becoming a place where bots talk to bots, and search engines crawl a lonely expanse of pages written by artificial intelligence.”
– Technology reporter James Purtill, on the accelerating degradation of the Web. Bot-overrun platforms like X were “never designed for a world where machines can talk with people convincingly,” says digital media scholar Timothy Graham of the deluge of AI-generated content. ”The platforms have no infrastructure in place. The gates are open.”

KW Berlin opens “Poetics of Encryption,” an extensive group exhibition that builds on curator Nadim Samman’s eponymous book, illuminating “Black Sites, Black Boxes, and Black Holes”—terms that indicate how technical systems capture users, how they work in stealth, and how they distort cultural space-time. The show gathers both historic and newly commissioned works by over 40 artists including Nora Al-Badri, Clusterduck, Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, Simon Denny, Eva & Franco Mattes, Trevor Paglen, Rachel Rossin, and Troika.

Eva & Franco Mattes solo exhibition “508 Loop Detected” opens at Apalazzogallery (APG) in Brescia (IT), premiering a series of AI Circuit (2024) works that loop AI-processed photos of past shows and an updated version of Personal Photographs (2024, image). The latter conceals a data transfer of newly taken private photos inside a brightly coloured cable loop that spills beyond Apalazzo’s baroque walls. Meanwhile, Roomba Cat (2023) roams around indoors, manifesting meme culture with motorized taxidermy.

“It is really disheartening to watch artists I respect run to do ordinals. Can’t help but remember the rough convos we had around energy use and carbon load of ETH.”
– Digital artist and prolific collector Chris Coleman, on fellow creators “loading art onto the most wasteful crypto in existence,” Bitcoin, in the wake of Sotheby’s “Natively Digital: An Ordinals Curated Sale.” Rather than following the money, Coleman reaffirms his commitment to ‘green NFTs’ (on energy-efficient proof-of-stake chains) and takes a stand: “I don’t want to judge, but no way will I buy or sell on that chain.”

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.

B
OUT NOW:
Branch #7
Gentle Dismantlings
Branch and DING editors Kit Braybrooke, Julia Kloiber, and Michelle Thorne teamed up for inviting Gayatri Ganesh, Padmini Ray Murray, Georgina Voss, Eva Verhoeven, Iryna Zamuruieva and others to report on kinship, worlding, and more-than-human feminisms around the globe
OUT NOW:
Kris De Decker
How To Build A Low-Tech Internet?
Compiled from the Low-Tech Magazine archives, De Decker questions our obsession with bandwidth, proposes low-tech and solar-powered alternative infrastructures, and pushes back against planned obsolescence.

Billed as their largest solo show to date, Eva & Franco Mattes’ “Fake Views” opens at Frankfurter Kunstverein (DE), illuminating platform culture, internet infrastructures, and online communities. For their new installation P2P (2022-23, image), for example, the Italian net art duo invited peers Nora Al-Badri, Simon Denny, Do Not Research, Olia Lialina, Jill Magid, and Jon Rafman to create new works to be hosted on a peer-to-peer server enclosed in a wire cage—an ‘exhibition within the exhibition.’

Fragmentin’s solo exhibition “Subsoil Speculations” opens at the Swiss Alpine Museum in Bern (CH), presenting new works from the Swiss collective and 2023 SAC (Swiss Alpine Club) Art Prize winner’s post-digital archaeology series. Global Wiring (2023, image), for example, imagines a tech-contaminated core sample of Alpine strata in LED-illuminated glass—a gallery version of the 2022 outdoor original. By extension, the generative video Data Core (2023, image) traces CGI drill hole depths.

“There is something legitimately demonic in networked culture’s pervasive reduction of everything to data—words like ‘connection’ robbed of meaning; conviviality flattened into frictionless exchange.”
Spike editor and columnist Adina Glickstein, contemplating the “cosmic exoskeleton of communications technology” in the wake of two recent Paris exhibitions. Both Nile Koetting’s “Unattended Access” at Parliament Gallery and the group show “Au delà” at Lafayette Anticipations conjure “data’s limitations in the face of the divine,” she writes.

Nile Koetting’s solo exhibition “Unattended Access” opens at Parliament Gallery in Paris, inviting viewers to consider the material internet and spectatorship inside his playground of 3D-printed miniatures of monitors, display machines, and theatres. Cherry script (2023, image), for example, imagines banal exhibition and office chatter as text chat animations on a pair of e ink displays. “Koetting presents to us the ultimate spectacle,” the gallery states. “There is no avoiding the infinite mirror here.”

“The Technate,” an exhibition by Peter Behrbohm and Markus Bühler that “follows the wires” of North American internet infrastructure, opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. The show centres their eponymous research project (2023, image), a reenactment of a 1947 road trip (from California to British Columbia) promoting the technocracy movement. In it, the duo cosplay as technicians (with a robot dog), and visit technoculture hotspots including Internet Archive and Noisebridge.

Marco Barotti‘s solo exhibition “Rituals of Wasted Technology” opens at silent green, Berlin, presenting two mythical techno-species in defiance of obsolescence: As tower-mounted APES (recycled Wi-Fi sector antennas) perform ”quasi-rituals” from data input—Facebook likes, Google searches, tinder swipes—SWANS (used satellite dishes) float about, propelled by sound. Barotti’s show is part of “Speaking to Ancestors,” a two-year series on ritual curated by Pauline Doutreluingne and Keumhwa Kim.

“Handles like ‘Gorgon Horror,’ ‘The Wizard,’ and ‘Einstein’ were common. My brother’s name was ‘Blue Dragon,’ and his favourite colour was blue. My favourite colour was red, so I picked ‘Red Wolf.’ I liked wolves.”
– Journalist and tech historian Benji Edwards, on the 1992 kickoff of his “secret life as an 11-year-old BBS sysop,” in a memoir about his (pre-World Wide Web) introduction to online culture
“You don’t visit websites. Websites visit you: all the contents is downloaded to your computer.”
– Spanish artist and researcher Joana Moll, discussing the interface as a “well-engineered capitalist machine” (see Moll’s Carbolytics) at Berlin’s panke.gallery
“It wasn’t that long ago that we were designing cooling systems for a peak outdoor temperature of 32 degrees. They’re now over 8 degrees higher than they were ever designed for.”
– Jon Healy, of the UK data center consultancy Keysource, on how data centers are ill-prepared for the climate crisis. Healy argues that it’ll require substantial retrofitting—bigger chiller machines, bigger condensers, implementing evaporative cooling—to keep the planet’s collective knowledge online.

Mario Santamaría’s solo exhibition “Remote Hands” opens at àngels barcelona as part of the 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA). In addition to showing his Cloudplexity (2019) series of data cloud depictions sourced from US Patents, the Spanish artists debuts Underdesk (2022): an invitation to ‘lounge in the cloud’ and explore the gallery’s material internet infrastructure from a hammock underneath a fireproof computer desk.

“Is it like a postcoital-snail telegraph? Or like a Renaissance-era wheel device that allowed readers to browse multiple books at once? Or perhaps like a loom that weaves together souls?”
– Writer Kyle Chayka, on scholar Justin E. H. Smith hunting for “the most effective metaphor for the internet” in his new book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is
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