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“While it has its own story, I put that video there to make a link between the creatures and their origin point. A diagram to the parallel history from where my pantheon hails.”
“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.”
“Institutions make these standard statements, but oftentimes they address Indigenous communities as if they are from the past—when they are still present here today.”
Continuing his mission to call attention to the climate crimes unfolding at the Hambach and Garzweiler mines in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, French visual artist and activist Joanie Lemercier unveils Faces of Coal (2023), a series of plotter portraits of those responsible drawn in lignite coal. The first culprit: Markus Krebber, CEO of energy giant RWE, the German multinational operating the mines that, famously, laid waste to an entire region and are now the biggest source of CO2 in all of Europe.
Ian Cheng ’s solo exhibition “THOUSAND LIVES” opens at Pilar Corrias, London, presenting the American CGI artist’s 2022 real-time anime Life After BOB: The Chalice Study and a new simulation. Thousand Lives (2023) focuses on Chalice’s pet turtle, Thousand, a key character in Life After BOB . Driven by an inferential AI model, Thousand must reconcile internal urges with the affordances (and threats) of Chalice’s apartment environment in “a new kind of ‘slow story’ achieved only via simulation.”
“I’m really interested in systems of power, and it often feels like there’s a secret inside these systems, because they function in ways that are almost invisible.”
– Conceptual artist
Jill Magid , on how the nuances of power dynamics are often hidden in plain sight. Art that exposes these secrets, she says, “offers a way to slow down these systems and look at them in a different way.”
Peter Weibel (1944-2023)
Austrian media artist, theorist, and curator
Peter Weibel dies in Karlsruhe, Germany. Making his mark with political, rebellious works in 1960s, Weibel’s curatorial legacy includes the Venice Biennale, Neue Galerie Graz, and Ars Electronica. In 1999, Weibel took on directorship of the ZKM Karlsruhe and helped make it the institutional force it is today.
“The subdued blackness of the Apple II computer terminal—which has slowly given way to white-dominated monitors—is juxtaposed with the seeping, gooey asphalt, which seems to suggest that Blackness will not so easily be contained.”
– Writer Veronica Esposito, on
American Artist ’s
Mother of All Demos III (2022), featured in the forthcoming group exhibition “
Refigured ” at the Whitney. The piece invokes Douglas Engelbard’s epochal
1968 presentation and has “the feel of an archetypical, Promethean moment when things changed forever.”
“It seems that forcing a neural network to ‘squeeze’ its thinking through a bottleneck of just a few neurons can improve the quality of the output. Why? We don’t really know. It just does.”
– TechScape columnist
Alex Hearn , describing an idiosyncrasy of neural network design. Part of a (largely) jargon free ‘glossary of AI acronyms,’ Hearn breaks down the meaning of ubiquitous AI terminology (GAN, LLM, compute, fine tuning, etc.).
“If we could endow nature with the legal power of personhood using emerging blockchain technologies, would it fight back?”
– Artist and curator
Simon Wu , on the vexing question at the heart of
terra0 ’s blockchain governance experiments. Granting property rights to trees and forests, makes the artist collective’s method “a sort of capitalist realism,” argues Wu. “Maybe, they seem to say, there are few other ways to produce substantive forms of legal autonomy—and thus protection—for natural environments under capitalism.”
Seoul-based light artist and Kimchi and Chips Co-Founder Elliot Woods teases a new image—or “worlding”—system that renders “an imagined future out of the present day reality” using machine learning, optics, and electromechanics. In a nutshell: A matrix of opto-mechanical cells that “independently pick out features, colours, textures, aesthetics” paired with prisms creates a remix of features in its background. The new system, Woods notes, will premiere in Seoul later this year.
“It’s impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble.”
– Entrepreneur and writer Anil Dash, on how many in Silicon Valley have embraced far right ideology. Deriding the trend as “VC QAnon,” he worries that future entrepreneurs will have to “rely on these newly-extremist figures for funding their companies or for business deals.”
Positioning the slaughterhouses as a space “where the boundary between human, animal, and machine is produced and reproduced,” Aria Dean ’s “Abattoir, U.S.A.!” opens at The Renaissance Society in Chicago. In her new film of the same name (image), the American artist takes viewers through an empty CGI slaughterhouse, probing “modernism’s intimacy with death.” Accompanying it in the gallery are abattoir architectural motifs to unsettle visitors: rubber flooring, side walls, an aluminum door.
“Value Flows,” a pop-up show curated by the decentralized JPG community opens as part of NFT Paris . Artists including 0xDEAFBEEF , Kim Asendorf , Dmitri Cherniak , Simon Denny & Guile Twardowski , and Sarah Friend contribute works revealing the “on-chain transactions and mechanisms, or off-chain interactions between humans, that live at the core of every blockchain system.” Rippling with DIY energy, it juxtaposes ad-hoc pyramids of analogue displays (image) with the backdrop of a bustling trade show.
Saša Spačal ’s solo exhibition “[UN]EARTHING” opens at Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken (DE), presenting works that trace the deep links between human biology and the soil. “Every time we breathe, we pull the world into our bodies,” the Slovenian artist and researcher writes about the planetary metabolic flows on view. The Meta_bolus bioreactor (2017, image), for example, invites visitors to sniff the seductive geosmin aroma emitted by Streptomyces bacteria which evokes “the memory of a forest after rain.”
“We could almost touch the data but we cannot see it. Like the billions of images made each day that no one will ever look at. Some of these unseen photographs are made by people, others by and for machines.”
– Critic Régine Debatty, on Eva & Franco Mattes’
Personal Photographs (2021-22) that are currently ‘on view’ at GAMeC, Bergamo (IT), as part of “
A Leap into the Void .” Taken over the course of a month, the images—their data, rather—circulate via ethernet cables contained in colourful cable trays.
“NOw/here,” an exhibition foregrounding two new large format material study series by Gian Maria Tosatti , opens at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. In the first, the Italian artist presents rust and gold encrusted iron panels, using oxidation to “restore a sense of the passing of time” while evoking the gold leaf of Byzantine mosaics (image left: Portraits , 2023); the second, is austere fields composed in graphite and charcoal, which “move from the real to the imaginative dimension” (right: NOw/here , 2023).
“The future’s gonna be weirder than anyone can imagine,” Turkish AI artist Memo Akten writes about the effect TikTok’s newly released Teenage Filter has on people. “It makes you look young,” he demonstrates in an uncanny reaction video, “and now TikTok is full of middle-aged folks trying come to terms with this, trying to understand where their life went.” Facing your younger self can be “quite emotional,” says Akten and provides dozens of examples in a (now viral) Twitter thread.
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