Combining video, dance, and a flute quartet, Marianna Simmett‘s opera GORGON opens at Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) in Berlin. Director Simmett’s narrative weighs “distresses and transformations” brought on by AI (tech writ large) by teaming up its namesake wailing mythic creature with a bored doughnut store employee. Technologist Moisés Horta Valenzuela puts the live flautists in conversation with AI-generated sound, and Holly Herndon‘s voice model Holly+ also makes a cameo.

Aram Bartholl bids farewell to his 2010 Google Streetview performance 15 Seconds of Fame, after the company updated its severly outdated Berlin image set. In October 2009, the German artist interrupted his coffee break on Borsigstraße to run after a passing Google Streetview car, creating the whimsical chase sequence that’s been online since the service launched in Germany in 2010. “15 Seconds of Fame turned into almost 15 years,” Bartholl jokes on Instagram. “The work is finally complete.”

“Moving as half-human half-machine, we enter the stage like Terminator robots hyping the crowd with claims of world domination,” Mary Maggic recalls opening “Climate Fitness” at Intermediae Matadero Madrid. Faster Higher Stronger (2022), a cross-species performance and installation, had Maggic and collaborators ride bicycle-powered bioreactors. “In the background, SCOBY flesh spins with us, synchronized to the tune of optimized aesthetics,” she writes. “The crowd films through their phones, peering like voyeurs into a mirror of their own reality.”

Against the backdrop of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) retrospective “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982,” four artists gather to ‘fill’ Casey Reas’ software installation An Empty Room (2023) with intimate, evocative gestures. More happening than performance night, the program fittingly called “A Full Room” brings together Edgar Fabián Frías, Lauren Lee McCarthy (image), Romi Ron Morrison, and Reas himself who, through song, poetry, and prayer, ask a vexing question: “What is social software?”

www.grindruberairbnb.exposed, Canadian artist Jonathan Chomko’s performance exploring how apps choreograph bodies, premieres at Tangente Montreal. Responding to the ways popular digital services guide movement, a troupe of participants walk, gesture, and synchronize themselves in response to web app prompts. Staged in private during the pandemic (image, 2020), the performance marks the first time Chomko’s glued-to-their-phone “atomized actors acting as one” pace and pivot in front of an audience.

“This Current Between Us,” an installation and performance program, opens at the Neo Faliro Steam Power Plant in Piraeus, Greece. Artists including Nikos Alexiou, Hypercomf, and Miriam Simun contribute works exploring energy and production in response to the decommissioned site. The latter’s performance Do Not Break Out of Prior Range (image), for example, draws on a blender, lightbulb, and power cord—and Simun announcing “this isn’t just a milkshake, it’s a crucial north-south energy bridge” into a microphone.

Jan Robert Leegte’s solo exhibition “Document Performance | Permanence” opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. Juxtapozing the Dutch artist’s Repositions (2018) series and Window #219 from the eponymous NFT collection (2022), the show explores software as performance and, conversely, sculpture. Both series are web-based constructs made in HTML DOM. The former renders dynamic documents in your browser, the latter lives on-chain and “behaves and feels like hardware.”

In the works since 2019 and then postponed during the pandemic, Kurt Hentschläger’s audiovisual performance EKO premieres at the Theatre Royal Plymouth, UK. Part of an ongoing series set in complete darkness, the Austrian artist’s composition interrupts the absence of light with intense millisecond-long bursts of “micro-animated geometric forms” emanating from an LED wall. As a maelstrom of ambient sound envelopes the viewers, “retinal afterimages unravel within their eyes.”

“Ghost 2565: Live Without Dead Time,” a survey of moving images and performance that resonates with its host environs’ “phantasmagorial city” status, opens in Bangkok. A follow-up to 2018’s Ghost:2561, the Christina Li-curated program features artists including Meriem Bennani, Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, Özgür Kar (image: DEATH, 2021), and Diane Severin Nguyen, sharing works that playfully probe and blur “subjectivities, untold stories, and shared visions.”

“Xenogenesis,” a retrospective of the London-based Otolith Group, opens at Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Collecting works produced between 2011-18 by Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun, and collaborators, that cultivate “a science fiction of the present” through media, installation, and performance, the show includes Sovereign Sisters (2014), a CGI short about the Universal Postal Union’s “imperial ambition,” and a special public program curated by the collective.

Berlin’s panke.gallery and Zentrum für Netzkunst celebrate the 10th anniversary of iPhone live, the one-year art performance by Johannes P Osterhoff. From June 29, 2012, the German media artist broadcast screenshots from his jailbroken iPhone to a public website whenever he pressed the home button, aggregating 13,567 snapshots (about 40 per day) of his digital life. In commemoration, Osterhoff and invited experts reflect on the iconic project at /rosa, Berlin.

In the first of six performances, Kerry Guinan’s The Red Thread links six industrial sewing machines at Dublin’s The Complex with six counterparts at a garment factory in Bangalore, India. “The kinetic installation appears to be self-operating, but there are puppeteers in hiding,” the Irish artist notes about the workers over 8,000 kilometers away. By eliminating that distance, she hopes to “make visceral the extraordinary scale, and underlying humanity, of the globalised economy.”

As part of her eponymous solo exhibition, American software artist Lauren Lee McCarthy performs a new iteration of her 2020 COVID response piece I Heard Talking Is Dangerous at EIGEN+ART Lab, Berlin. Whereas the original performance had McCarthy trigger text-to-speech monologues from her phone, Proceed At Your Own Risk invited the gallery audience to use the same technology (via a custom web app) to talk back.

A survey of seven performance and software works that explore human connection during COVID, Lauren Lee McCarthy’s solo exhibition “I Heard Talking Is Dangerous” opens at EIGEN+ART Lab, Berlin. In the 2020 piece the show is named after, for example, a masked McCarthy delivers text-to-speech monologues about safety and distancing to friends—on their doorstep. Captured in documentation and artifacts, the works reveal moments of augmented, but real, intimacy.

“Yesterday I spent 10 hours appreciating 100 people,” Lauren Lee McCarthy recaps her Zoom performance Appreciate You on Twitter. On Dec 21, the American media artist offered 100 five-minute appreciation sessions—“friends, acquaintances, and strangers all invited”—taking place over Dec 31 and bookable via (inexpensive) NFTs. “I could never have imagined 100 zooms flying by but they did,” writes McCarthy, Zoom screenshot attached. “My heart is full.”

Commissioned by Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) for its current Tomas Schmit retrospective, Swiss net art collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik launch an Internet take on the Fluxus artist’s 1962 theatre piece A bus carries the audience 100 km away. There the audience is deposited. Bitnik’s Non Guided Tour drops visitors on a virtual map, at a random point exactly 100 km from n.b.k. “The challenge is to navigate back, one click at a time.”

Lauren Lee McCarthy’s latest interactive performance Womb Walk premieres as part of her Surrogate installation at IDFA DocLab, the Amsterdam documentary film festival’s new media program. As the American artist strolls the city wearing a prosthetic belly (image), participants ‘become’ McCarthy’s baby. “You control my movements by triggering small internal kicks to the sides of my belly directing me when to turn,” she writes on Instagram. “Together, we navigate the city, with imagined baby as interface.”

A durational performance with the sea, AnneMarie Maes’ Theatrum Algaerium rises from the waves. Metal frames holding fluttering weeds and algae-carrying jars filling up with tidal water create “narratives woven from the threads of past, present, and future,” while a team of performers prepares and offers ocean delicacies. “The waves threaten to swallow up the lab,” the Belgian bio artist notes about the Oostende seaside ritual, “but in a repetitive action, structures, algae and jars are carried past the flood line.”