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“Boston Dynamics, the best-known manufacturer of quadrupedal robots, has a strict policy agains weaponizing its machines. Other manufacturers, it seems, aren’t so picky.”
“Offshore finance pierces reality,” French artist collective RYBN reflects on their Offshore Tours (2018-20) in a Palm editorial. Over two years, the artists mapped 785,000 leaked addresses tied to offshore activity. “Behind each photographed facade hides a hot spot, a gap in the urban landscape connected to elsewhere, a true crossing point to offshore space,” they write. “These addresses are deserted at the very moment of their unveiling, the tracking of offshore finance thus turns into ghost hunting.”
DOSSIER :
“Making the ‘decision-making process’ of a predator drone more ‘legible’ to the general public seems a fatuous achievement. Even more so if it is an explanation in service of a capitalist state or state capital, and we know how that works.”
Extending out of Oli Sorenson’s visual cataloguing of the technological artifacts and compromised landscapes of our current era, “Diamond edition: Panorama of the Anthropocene” opens at Montréal’s ELEKTRA Gallery. For the show, Sorenson adapts material from the his ongoing painting and inkjet series about the perennial clash between production and nature (image: Oil extraction detail, 2020) rendered in the style of “Minecraft ’s landscapes and Peter Halley ’s geometries,” and (re)presents it on angled digital displays.
“The only thing we can make now is ourselves; day after day, again and again. To sculpt one’s own individuality has ballooned into an endless task. To post every day, to express yourself creatively, to have opinions on the churning discourse.”
–
Spike ’s New York Editor
Dean Kissick , on the cult of celebrity and the cult of self. In his latest “The Downward Spiral” column, he asks: “Are we human, or are we content?”
“The algorithm estimates Hito’s gender, it says she is 57% female and 42% male. Which begs the question: what would 100% female be? Whether that’s Barbie, Grace Jones, or Angela Merkel—who knows?”
– Trevor Paglen on
Machine-Readable Hito (2017), which tasked facial analysis algorithms with guessing Hito Steyerl’s age, gender, and emotional state across hundreds of photos. In dialogue for SJMA’s “
Artists in Conversation ” series, the duo discuss representation, truth, and power relations.
Anicka Yi ’s In Love With The World , the annual Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, opens, turning the iconic post-industrial space into a machine ecosystem. Eight helium-filled “aerobes” drift through the hall’s upper reaches, tentacles gently rising and falling as their artificial life software system guides them towards human heat. To enhance the scenery, the Korean-American artist added weekly ‘scentscapes,’ evoking the smell of prehistoric oceans or that of the industrial age.
“Hard to imagine how this could be faster or more cost-effective than humans. It just looks like a performance to scare increasingly organized gig workers.”
– Indie game developer
Paolo Pedercini aka
Molleindustria , on
Kiwibot ’s semi-autonomous delivery robots taking over his Pittsburgh neighbourhood. “It [the robot] performs well on the rough sidewalks but it randomly stationed on a curb cut for five minutes, blocking the ramp and confusing drivers—do they even have right of way?”
“Underwater cables emit an electromagnetic field. When it’s at a strength of 500 microteslas and above, which is about 5% of the strength of a fridge door magnet, the crabs seem to be attracted to it and just sit still.”
– Heriot-Watt University marine biologist
Alastair Lyndon , on the effects energy infrastructure has on ocean life. In a study, published in
Journal of Marine Science and Engineering , Lyndon and team warn that underwater power cabels could disrupt animal migration, metabolism, and reproduction.
The culmination of a three-year inquiry into “the extractive gaze of European institutions and policies” with a focus on “how resource management shapes and gives corporeality to geopolitics,” artist duo FRAUD (Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo) launches the EURO—VISION platform. A growing resource and archive, the site reveals the links between international relations, trade, economic policy, and border security through the lens of Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) such as phosphate, fish(eries), sand, and carbon.
“No one would have been able to feed multiple TV monitors in real time with visual data from an affordable computer system. We used VHS tapes and cheap Panasonic video mixers. Everything was pre-rendered at that time and it took ages to do.”
– Musician and artist
Robert Henke , critiquing a scene in the new Netflix miniseries
The Billion Dollar Code . “Clubs in Berlin did not look like this,” Henke squirms. “And whoever wrote the dialog has neither a clue of 1990s club culture nor any technological background. Cringe.”
“a=tF²,” a solo show by Igor Štromajer , “the Pavarotti of HTML,” opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. Drawing on the artist’s favoured tropes and aesthetics, ranging from CGA graphics to toolbar mandalas , the show juxtaposes knowledge work’s ephemera with the austerity of the white cube. On Instagram, in advance of the opening, Štromajer has teased work-in-progress, his strategically cropped previews revealing “dirty, radical, minimal” assemblages of e-junk and toy robots (image), and an adorable pint-sized workstation .
“Temperature check on late-stage capitalism: you can buy NFTs of AI-generated descriptions of imaginary girlfriends.”
With “Natural Sovereignty,” a solo show opening at Capri’s MiBACT Certosa museum, Italian artist and activist Paolo Cirio offers a “utopian vision of climate justice.” Building on his conceptual framework of a ‘climate crime tribunal’ that combines the legal concept of “environmental personhood” with the “right of nature” theory, Cirio presents evidence, plaintiffs, and sentence in the form of informational visuals featuring scientific and economic data, legal documents, and biological studies.
“The Hollywoodization of crypto is a moral disaster. And for celebrities’ fans, who likely have far less money to lose, it’s potentially a financial one, too.”
– Writers
Ben McKenzie and
Jacob Silverman , on film and sport stars shilling cryptocurrencies—for money. Parsing the Kardashian
Ethereum Max pump-and-dump scheme , the two issue a stern warning: “Crypto and blockchain technology may yet have important roles to play, but the industry executives, venture capitalists, and, yes, the rich and famous people pushing these products haven’t earned your trust—or your money.”
Curated by Colección SOLO , “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” a show named after the 15th century tryptych it pays tribute to, opens at Matadero Madrid. Featuring contemporary artists inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece, the show assembles strange scenes by Cassie McQuater , Mario Klingemann , SMACK , and others. American artist Dan Hernandez’ injket transfer and acrylic painting GOED (2020) riffs on The Legend of Zelda ’s map, questioning how “the starting and end points in open world games are predetermined”—and free will.
“We stamp a coin with the face of a dead president and it’s worth as much as we say it is because that’s what the law says. It’s something I can teach to a seven-year old and it has the benefit of being true.”
– Financial regulation scholar
Rohan Grey , noting that the only thing stopping America from minting a
$1 trillion coin to solve its imminent debt ceiling crisis is a lack of imagination. “It’s no more silly that judges wearing robes.”
“The NFT market is increasingly reframing ‘digital art’ to mean image making in popular usage. This is a cultural setback, of about 50 years.”
–
Julian Oliver , media artist and ‘critical engineer,’ on how the crypto boom flattens the perception of computational art practice. “‘Digital art’ began as an image making practice, then in ’80s, ’90s, and noughts came to encompass a far broader and exciting diversity of practices, methods, and materials,” Oliver writes on Twitter. “Now, with the NFT market, it’s come full circle to refer to image making again.”
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