Named after a line of predictive text poetry, Travess Smalley’s solo exhibition “Number colors burn randomly” opens at Foxy Production, New York. Comprising new textile works (literal pixel rugs), plotter drawings, silk screen prints, and videos, the show expands upon the American artist’s use of code and scripts to plant “seeds of chance” for visual production. “It might not be the mark of my hand that is interesting,” notes Smalley, “but the exact inverse, the absence, the ghost, the memory.”

An eponymous retrospective of Swedish artist Charlotte Johannesson opens at Nottingham Contemporary in the UK. Presenting textiles, plotter prints, and installations from her five decade career, the show underscores her importance bridging weaving to early digital aesthetics in the 1980s (image: Digital Human, 1981-86). A tableau of “1960s counterculture, feminism, punk,” as described by curator Nicole Yip, Johannesson was recently recognized at the Venice Biennale (2022) and the Reina Sofia (2021).

Hugs on Tape (Gene/Susan), the most recent iteration of an ongoing series by video aficionados LoVid, opens at Ryan Lee in New York. Displayed in the gallery’s window, duo Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus’ animation loops two figures mid-embrace, “a spontaneous and genuine interaction between the subjects” richly abstracted with video feedback. Parallel to the series, they share new tapestries, exploring the same visual language—but mediated by the constraints of hand-stitching.

“Timefall,” a solo exhibition by Spanish artist Karlos Gil, opens at The Hague’s 1646. Designed to evoke the archetypal image of the cave, the exhibition centres Hollow Ghost (2022, image), video depicting the vernacular of contemporary caves—data farms, seed vaults, doomsday bunkers—in all their liminal (and terminal) glory. More mythos: also featured is a Jacquard loom-woven tapestry series, each depicting the sonic frequencies of a “fantastic” animal (cyclops, mermaid, etc.).

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.”

Laura Splan’s Rhapsody for an Expanded Biotechnological Apparatus takes over an elevator of the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY, as part of the museum’s Elevator Music Series. The tactile sound installation “reenvisions the elevator as a biological cell and its visitors as proteins.” Sitting on a rug made from the fiber of laboratory llamas (used to produce antibodies for human drugs) they are invited to “consider the invisible” while listening to a sonic tour of a biotech laboratory.