Berlin’s Office Impart opens “Sandbox Mode,” a group exhibition that draws parallels between free-form gameplay and digital art. Impart teamed up with JPG’s María Paula Fernández and curator Stina Gustafsson to bring together new and recent code-based works by Mitchell F. Chan, Stine Deja, Andreas Gysin, Sara Ludy, and others that emerged from radical experimentation. Ludy’s new AI video series Metamimics (2023), for example, conjures crazed carnival scenes from deep within the machine.

In the wake of its new After AI issue, the Australian art magazine Artlink revisits its special issues on digital media art practice, beginning with Art & Technology (image), published in 1987 in collaboration with the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) and Apple. Writer Julianne Pierce attributes this “prescient commitment” to founding editor Stephanie Britton’s exposure to holographics, digital animation, and computer-generated video in Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation (EAF).

Indian artist Rohini Devasher publishes a reflection on her recent CERN residency, outlining efforts to move beyond the standard model of fundamental forces in particle physics—and in her practice. Devasher draws a connection between the “multiplication, magnification, distortion” that black holes rip in space-time with video feedback and shares drawings that map the implications of the “new modes and methodologies of research and practice” she was exposed to in Geneva (image: Beyond the Standard Model, 2023).

“Working With Waste,” a show presenting the outputs of an eponymous working group led by British artist Lucy Beech, opens at Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art in Oldenburg (DE). Presented is Beech’s recent video art exploring waste and transformation (image: Warm Decembers, 2022) alongside contributions from Riar Rizaldi, James Richards, and Steve Reinke. The works consider notions of flow and blockage relative to “not only individual guts and urban drainage networks, but also to understandings of creativity.”

Trevor Paglen’s solo exhibition “Hide the Real, Show the False” opens at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), presenting new works on mind control, disinformation, and psychological operations (PSYOPS). Case in point: Doty (2023, image), a video installation and the show’s centrepiece, features testimony by former US Air Force counterintelligence officer Richard Doty, who recounts his efforts targeting UFO researchers in disinformation campaigns while actual UFO programs ran in secret.

“Back to Earth: Contested Histories of Outer Space Travel” opens at New York’s Canal Projects. Nuotama Bodomo, Zahy Tentehar, and Alice dos Reis contribute to a film program that counters colonial space narratives (conquest, mining, tourism, etc.) with intersectional perspectives. Subash Thebe Limbu’s film Ningwasum (2021, image), for example, is a sci-fi film about a trio of Indigenous time travellers, from a future where Yakthung “knowledge, culture, ethics, and storytelling are still intact.”

Foregrounding human-machine tensions, Sophia Oppel’s solo show “On either side of a surface” opens at Arsenale Contemporary Art Toronto. Featured are silicone gel works and laser-cut wall-hangings by the Canadian artist, as well as the central video piece I’m sorry, I’m having trouble with the connection, please try again in a moment (2023, image), in which an introspective AI assistant named Claudia reflects on her subjugated status as “a machine, a servant, and a product.”

“New Visions,” the 2nd Edition of the Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media opens in Oslo (NO). A total of 22 artists including Anna Ehrenstein, Anna Engelhardt, Kristina Õllek, Monira Al Qadiri, Emilija Škarnulytė (image: RAKHNE, 2023), and Istvan Virag contribute media and installations, drawing on traditional mediums and new modes of automated image-making to underscore the ubiquity of “resource extraction, energy distribution, and data harvesting.”

Curated by Kyle Duffield and Terry Anastasiadis, “IA 360° Showcase” opens, debuting the new surround projection system installed in the gallery of Toronto’s InterAccess. Éric Filion & Michael Trommer, Tori Foster, Adrienne Matheuszik, Silvia Ruzanka, and 16 other local and international artists contribute to a program of immersive CGI and video (and accompanying spatial audio) that brings “real and synthesized realms, cosmic awe, the microscopic made monolithic” into focus.

Celebrating her pioneering “seer-like spaces and live surveillance situations,” the retrospective “Julia Scher: Maximum Security Society” opens at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach (DE). The “essayistic survey” scans the American artist’s entire oeuvre of power and gaze-focused works, from Predictive Engineering, her live camera installations iterated at SFMOMA over the years (1993-2016), through Delta (Radio) and Planet Greyhound, both produced for her recent Kunsthalle Gießen exhibition (2022).

The final instalment in a trilogy of exhibitions fixating on highrises, Jesse Colin Jackson’s “Mackenzie Place” opens at Toronto’s Pari Nadimi Gallery. Venturing to Hay River in the Northwest Territories, the Canadian artist shot a year of time-lapse photography atop Mackenzie Place—the near arctic town’s lone skyscraper. The resulting panoramic video tracks daily and seasonal flux and is bolstered by audio of oral histories about the mining town collected by anthropologist Lindsay Bell.

A survey of artworks acquired by the Nam June Paik Art Center during its COVID-19 pandemic closure opens in Seoul. “On Collecting Time” presents Kim Heecheon, Sunmin Park, Jinah Roh, Sungsil Ryu, and 6 other artists whose collected works are thematically bound in their exploration of “human and machine time in various forms.” Unmake Lab’s Utopian Extraction (2020, image), for example, pairs video demonstrating janky real-time object detection and documentation of slowly evolving landscapes.

“Terms of Use,” a show exploring “(re)framing of individual and collective selves, as we grapple with living simultaneously online and AFK,” opens at PHI Foundation in Montreal. Curated by Daniel Fiset and Cheryl Sim, the exhibition draws inspiration from feminists Ursula Franklin and Legacy Russell, and invites artists including Skawennati, Shanie Tomassini, Wu Tsang, Nico Williams, and Chun Hua Catherine Dong (image left: Meet Me Half Way, 2021) to examine tensions between identity and virtuality.

Serendipitously coinciding with an economy on the brink, Isaac Julien’s multiscreen installation Playtime (2014, image) opens at Berlin’s PalaisPopulaire. Set during the 2008-09 financial crisis that catalyzed the Great Recession, the filmmaker experiments in visualizing the flow of capital from the perspective of seven interlinked characters (a pair of hedge fund managers, a journalist, an artist, an art dealer, an auctioneer, and a maid) whose lives and ventures span Dubai, London, and Reykjavík.

“Signals: How Video Transformed the World” opens at New York’s MoMA, showcasing over 70 media works from the past six decades that capture how “artists have posed video as an agent of global change—from televised revolution to electronic democracy.” Highlights include Nam June Paik’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984), Ant Farm’s Media Burn (1973), Martine Syms’ Lessons I–CLXXX (2014–18), and Dara Birnbaum’s Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission (1990, image).

In memory of its longtime director and all-around media art titan Peter Weibel, who passed on March 1, ZKM Karlsruhe installs his 1970 piece Media May Rewind Reality in the entrance hall. In the work, a television set plays a video of a lighted candle in reverse, gradually growing as time passes, while a physical candle placed on its top slowly dwindles. “The work, which also won Weibel the BEEP Collection prize at ARCO Madrid just weeks ago, is a poignant farewell to a polymath who many thought to be immortal,” writes Frieze.

“Refigured,” a group exhibition that collapses “today’s material and virtual realms,” opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Curator Christiane Paul brings together Morehshin Allahyari, American Artist, Zach Blas & Jemima Wyman, Auriea Harvey (image: SITE1, 2023), and Rachel Rossin—artists engaged in “refiguring” material forms and bodies—to showcase sculptures that are “simultaneously physical and virtual,” and videos and animations that “extend beyond the screen and into the gallery.”