Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary
A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
“I’m interested in artists’ ability to shift language and discourse, though that’s not necessarily quantifiable. Being an artist is akin to asking questions that nobody really has answers to, prototyping from that, and—hopefully—stimulating new thoughts, new ideas, or new ways forward.”
“One could perhaps even define esolangs as languages hard to define to a computer, but easy to define to a human. And I think maybe this is why esolanging is an art.”
“Uttered like an incantation, there is no term (other than porn, perhaps) more slippery in its definition yet identifiable in its ubiquity. Slop is everywhere; everything is very sloppy now.”
Benjaminsen & Casey
Collapsed Mythologies: A Geofinancial Atlas
“The combination of hype and superstition is a useful way to think about how certain ideas or narratives can gain traction and influence reality. It suggests that when a concept is widely circulated and believed, it can create a feedback loop that reinforces its own existence and impact.”
In her final 2025 Artlab Editorial Fellowship essay, writer Elvia Wilk explores Jenna Sutela’s “many-headedness”—channeling of bacteria, slime molds, and machine learning to confound notions of singular authorship. In a close reading of nimiia cétiï (2018), Wilk connects the Finnish artist’s practice to 19th-century spiritualist Hélène Smith, whose ‘Martian language’ structured the video’s uncanny vocalizations. Wilk concludes that Sutela is herself a medium—listening first, then attuning us to new frequencies.
“Sculpting sound, Coco Klockner hammers the metallic shells of language into hollow drums. She flattens the syllables, melting them into a resonant bass.”
“They have grandmothers, family bonds and conversations. They mourn their dead. When you listen long enough, you realize their inner worlds might be as complex as ours.”
Daniel Temkin
Forty-Four Esolangs
“In this era of AI Realism, machine-born images are layered with collective meanings and realities, transforming ‘looking’ into an act of language-like exploration.”
“Accurate Misreadings” examines how interpretation shapes meaning at NOME as part of Berlin Art Week. Artists including James Bridle, Paolo Cirio, Goldin+Senneby, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed explore bureaucratic violence and power structures through annotated prints, defaced archival documents, and appropriated patents. Dread Scott’s #whileblack (2018), for example, catalogues racial profiling incidents through stark screen-printed text documenting Black experience in America.
“Wildly impressive if true. We are rapidly moving towards a world where any prior assumptions about privacy are going to be challenged in abstract new ways.”
“Every day, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez’s Petita Tatata would generate and recite beautiful abstract poetry and post to SoundCloud, and my bot, Petita DumDum Techa, would download, improvise music over it, and reupload.”
“The basic idea is that you write in pseudo-natural language, asking various Greek gods to construct code the way that you want it to be. Of course, to end a block of code, you have to call on Hades to collect the souls of all the unused variables.”
“Today in ‘you can’t make this stuff up,’ Meta has suspended my Facebook account because they suspect me of impersonating someone noteworthy.”
The Washington Post profiles artist Jim Sanborn in anticipation of a fall auction for the solution to his sculpture Kryptos (1990). The piece—a wave-shaped copper screen, engraved with 1,735 encrypted characters—installed outside CIA headquarters has obsessed code breakers for 35 years. While most of it has been cracked, the final 97-character sequence remains unsolved. “I could keel over at any minute,” the 80-year old artist says, explaining his urgency to transfer the solution to a new custodian.
“Some of the most important moments of people’s lives are in the deep, rich encounters with written work—they shape who we are and who we become. Why would we seek to rip this up into an abstracted mess of training data, a series of trivial and often incorrect Cliff Notes and factoids?”
“In a world where juridical systems, corporations, and nations are increasingly algorithmically governed, the link between writing and programming—between story structure and system architecture—becomes more than metaphor.”
“There could never be ‘Woke AI.’ ‘Woke’ refers to the confrontation of racism embedded into legacies that systems rely upon to operate. To be ‘woke’ implies awareness and effort to actively push back against that bias.”
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