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“Maybe creating practices and transmitting them through physical, social embodiment is actually a more resilient structure than any particular media might be.”
Rosa Menkman’s mixed-media installation, A Spectrum of Lost and Unnamed Colours (2024), opens at EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne (CH), concluding the “speculative dialogues” with computer and environmental scientists that informed the work and guided her EPFL residency. In a series of translucent, lens-like sigils, the Dutch artist and researcher tells the story of a future media archaeologist who, in mapping colour loss, uncovers how air pollution and AI deluge ‘dimmed’ the atmospheric rainbow—“nature’s original ‘glitch’.”
“If you’re confident in a contemporaneous movement or your own work, you don’t have to pretend it’s novel. Without acknowledging over half a century of media arts, you are asking to be forgotten.”
“Cohen developed AARON with intention. The machine and the painter grew together—inefficiently, by tech’s standards, but fruitfully, by art’s.”
Honouring the centenary of late digital art pioneer Vera Molnar (1924-2023) as part of this year’s Genuary, American media artist and lecturer Golan Levin shares a re-code of Molnar’s 1970 plotter work, À la Recherche de Paul Klee. Realized in p5.js and fully accessible via the p5.js online editor, Levin’s tribute and countless others were prompted by generative artists Melissa Wiederrecht and Piter Pasma, who set the Molnar theme for the online creative coding sprint on Genuary 5th.
Retro computing blogger Josh Renaud reports the recovery of long-lost algorithmic music software developed by American-Israeli inventor and cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen in 1986. Magic Harp was a set of six thematic music disks to be bundled with the Commodore Amiga, each dedicated to a different genre. Found was a beta version of “baroque,” where a Bach-like “artificial personality” conducts digital organs and spinets (image). After the deal with Commodore fell through, Kirschen’s innovations were largely lost to obscurity.
Niklaus Wirth
1934 – 2024
In a love letter to Deluxe Paint, the popular pixel editor Electronic Arts published from 1985 to ’95, Swedish programmer Carl Svensson dissects and celebrates the package’s powerful drawing, animation, morphing, and colour cycling features that defined the workflow of pixel artists and game developers well into the PlayStation era. “If you’re an old school DOS, Amiga or even console gamer, it will have helped create some of your fondest memories,” writes Svensson.
The auction for “Keith Haring: Pixel Pioneer” concludes, bringing in $1.6M in sales across five lots. Undeterred by faltering NFT sales, several astute collectors swooped in to acquire the late artist’s trove of Commodore Amiga drawings. Created in the winter and spring of 1987, they showcase Haring’s signature exhuberent figures and vivid colour palettes, as shaped by the limited graphic capabilities (320 x 200 resolution, 32 colours) of the Amiga (image: Untitled #2 (April 16, 1987)).
Celebrating the Toronto artist-run centre’s 40th anniversary, “Remember Tomorrow: A Telidon Story” opens at InterAccess. Curator Shauna Jean Doherty present vintage works created with Telidon, a short-lived Canadian teletext and videotext service (similar to Minitel) that saw a wave of early 1980s artistic exploration. Artists including Paul Petro, Geoffrey Shea, and Nell Tenhaaf share original Telidon works (restored by John Durno) and contemporary digital artist Jerome Saint-Clair joins in.
“The Haring NFTs demonstrate that the smart contract can be a flexible tool, using metadata and code to accommodate the various needs and contexts of digital art.”
“The Amiga drawings are significant because they were created at the dawn of the consumer computer age. Even then, Keith knew that computers were going to be important to people’s lives as their capabilities continued to advance.”
Deep demake or meta media archaeology? Thanks to programmer WebFritzi, retro gaming fans can now enjoy Windows 95 classics Solitaire, Freecell, and Minesweeper on a Commodore 64—iconic Windows 95 desktop interface and mouse support included. Recreating an authentic 1995 PC experience on an 8-bit platform from a decade prior required some assembly language wizardry. “How are the icons created? Can you make a user interface like this? I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” stunned Commodore fans wrote online.
“The result is a fantasy—or nightmare—of computers as both preternatural agents of their own histories and autocratic engines of meaning.”
British composer and vintage computer music connoisseur Paulee Alex Bow takes to his Magical Synth Adventure! YouTube channel to revisit obscure software instruments on the Commodore Amiga, a 16bit home computer platform launched in 1985. Introducing viewers to the unique capabilities of the system’s 4-channel sound chip, Paula, Bow demoes a variety of early real-time soft synths including Aegis SONIX (1986, image), Sonic Arranger (1992), and OctaMED (1989-97, “my happy place”) that enthusiasts experiment with to this day.
Andrés Burbano
Different Machines
“Immured like rarefied noctiluca or sliced geodes, these TVs are glitzy shells dramatizing media’s narcotic visualizations with Bender’s surgical editing amplifying the violence of homogenizing logics.”
Marcel Schwittlick’s solo exhibition “Composition #84: The Long Run” opens at SP2 gallery, Berlin, juxtapozing three eponymous plotter drawings with videos documenting their creation. The pieces, each measuring 36 x 115 cm and comprising 2.5 million dots plotted over 23 hours, record the emptying of a collection of vintage felt tip pens, marking the “end of an era.” Eight stripes per plot, drawn with pens of the same colour, yield subtle variations that tell the “unique history of each pen,” notes Schwittlick.
“Eisenhower spent the next eight years in office. But in terms of influence over culture, the computer was arguably the night’s biggest winner.”
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