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“I’m concerned that all the backlash and negative energy around NFTs did a lot of damage to the work that curators and artists had been doing in good faith.”
– American software artist
Casey Reas , discussing the state of NFTs in a wide-ranging conversation about the origins and future of
Feral File , the (tightly) curated NFT market place he founded in 2020
“I want to fight for games, but I also want to have difficult conversations about the oppressive things that are happening inside of these spaces that artists are not seeing because they don’t genuinely participate.”
– American media artist
Angela Washko , airing her frustrations with “intellectually lazy” critiques of videogame culture. “I regularly saw artists going into a game community that they may not be familiar with, and extracting something really embarrassing and politically incorrect,” Washko tells MUBI columnist
Matt Turner . “They would identify the lowest hanging fruit, extract it, and take it into a gallery and do well doing that.”
“Scientists have discovered plastic-eating microbes at sites around the world, including a cemetery compost heap in Leipzig, Germany; a waste disposal site in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad; and debris washed up on two beaches in Chania, Greece.”
– Science journalist
Sandy Ong , on the search for bacteria and fungi capable of breaking down the millions of tonnes of plastic piled up at landfills worldwide
Ismael de Anda III and Eugene Ahn ’s collaborative exhibition “Revolution Generators” opens at panke.gallery, Berlin, investigating territorialization at the U.S. and Mexican border, where Anda was raised, and the once divided German capital. 25 digital collages, printed on aluminium, capture real and fictional landscapes and are paired with projections and AR sculptural forms . A recurring motif are (hostile) metal turnstiles lifted from U.S. border crossings and cast into the sky as colourful satellites.
“Today’s sentence should serve as a warning to other corporate insiders that insider trading—in any marketplace—will not be tolerated.”
– Southern District of New York Attorney Damian Williams, on former
OpenSea executive Nathanial Chastain’s sentencing of three years probation, the forfeiture of his ill-gotten gains, and a hefty fine as the
first person convicted for digital asset insider trading. During the 2021 crypto boom, Chastain bought NFTs scheduled to be featured on OpenSea—and sold them for 200-500% profit when they were.
“If we truly want to break from the future that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have planned for us, with our blood in their machines, it could take more than legislation to do so. It might require a few hammers.”
The Wignall Museum in Rancho Cucamonga (US) opens “Seeing the Unseen: Science + Art,” a group exhibition squarely focused on disciplinary entanglements and artists “engaged in new methods of scientific research” including David Bowen , Hannah Chalew , Maru Garcia , Lia Halloran , Elizabeth Hénaff , and Laura Splan . Splan’s Tangible Variations (2022, image), for example, weave molecular interaction maps simulated in collaboration with theoretical biophysicist Adam Lamson at the Flatiron Institute , New York.
The first major solo exhibition in the LA-based filmmaker and speculative architect’s home country of Australia, “Liam Young: Planetary Redesign” opens at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne. The show surveys Young ’s recent body of eco-critical works comprising CGI films, costumes, and photography that offer a “radically optimistic solution to the climate crisis.” In the film The Great Endeavor (2023), for example, Young depicts the successful mass mobilization for planet-scale decarbonization.
“‘Him’ didn’t live up to his promise. Four months after these virtual lovers were brought to life, they were put to death.”
– Tech reporter
Viola Zhou , on Chinese AI voice startup
Timedomain retiring “Him,” a customizable chatbot offering virtual companionship with daily voice messages that proofed particularly popular with young women. “Devastated users rushed to record as many calls as they could, cloned the voices, and even reached out to investors, hoping someone would fund the app’s future operations,” Zhou writes.
“Both The House of Dust and Cree# are microworlds, homes for forms of computing and expression that fall outside of the traditional purview of ‘information technology’ and industry-focused coding practices and tools.”
OUT NOW :
Tamara Kneese
Death Glitch
Tech ethnographer
Kneese draws on interviews with digital afterlife startups, chronic illness bloggers, and transhumanist tinkerers to explore how platform capitalism shapes our perception of mortality.
“Are You Working Now?” opens at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA) in Taichung City. Curated by Mike Stubbs and Ming Turner , the show presents work from an impressive roster of 13 artists including Simon Denny , Harun Farocki , John Gerrard , I-Ting Hou , Ryoichi Kurokawa , Molleindustria , and Hito Steyerl that question capitalist notions of productivity. Rosie Gibbens’ installation version of Planned Obsolescence , (2023, image), for example, whimsically reimagines bodies at work.
“The physical still has power. Let’s at least get the power of digital in our own hands, for us to be able to tell that story, rather than leave it up to museums to start representing things digitally, and then own that narrative.”
– Looty’s
Chidirim Nwaubani , calling for the digital repatriation of cultural plunder from major museums. Until institutions admit guilt and return the ill-gotten “spoils of war” that line Egyptian and African museum wings in the Global North, he and collaborator Ahmed Abokor are defiantly 3D scanning artifacts (and sharing them in AR) for their rightful inheritors.
For Ocula , Sam Gaskin profiles digital art megastudio teamLab , scrutinizing the (big) business of ticketed interactive experiences. Touring teamLab Planets TOKYO , a venue “wavering between an art museum and a theme park” that draws 150,000+ tourists monthly, Gaskin considers the “utopian bent” of their aesthetic, noting similarities to works by Yayoi Kusama and Pipilotti Rist . Reflecting on homogeneity versus auteurship , teamLab embodies a ”collective, design-brand-inflected approach,” he concludes.
“Someone once told me that, with blacksmithing, if you want to know the quality of someone’s work you look at their tools (because blacksmiths make their own tools). Generative programming is the same thing.”
– Generative artist
0xDEAFBEEF , suggesting an alternative way to evaluate code-based art. Drawing on his hands-on experience as a metalworker and jeweller, the Canadian artist further elaborates that it’s the artist’s
toolkit (personal software libraries, subroutines, workflow) “that allows you to have your own style and work efficiently.”
Total Refusal ’s newest videogame exploit Kinderfilm (2023) premieres at Locarno Film Festival (CH) in the prestigious international competition. Set and shot entirely in Rockstar’s action adventure Grand Theft Auto V (2013), the Austrian machinima collective tells the story of Edgar, an NPC, who grapples with existence when he learns of his suspended future. Undoing the safety measures that control his algorithmic reality, Edgar “discovers a beautiful yet nightmarish world” beyond the game.
“Scanning the irises of individuals in the Global South, who genuinely need the money and are unaware of potential risks, is a contemporary form of colonialism.”
– New York-based artist
Burak Arikan , on the recent launch of
Worldcoin . Sam Altman’s biometric cryptocurrency project that aspires to be “the world’s largest identity and financial public network” rolled out with an aggressive recruitment campaign including in the Global South. Luring people with a sign-up bonus of 25 WLD—about $50 USD—Worldcoin booths in Nairobi, Bengaluru, and Hong Kong, for example,
drew massive crowds .
Generative art NFT platform fxhash announces a $5 million seed raise with venture capital firms and angel investors including Tezos Foundation , PunkVenturesDAO , Casey Reas , and thefunnyguys (Le Random ). The funds will be used to hire more team members, support development of a 2.0 release (integrating Ethereum) and tools for art institutions, and bolster the platform’s mission of “empowering anyone, anywhere, to artistically express themselves with code,” they tweet (image: Zancan Garden, Monoliths , 2021).
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