“In a world of computer simulations and deepfakes, a dead man’s voice speaking his own words of despair is hardly the most dystopian application of the technology. But the seamlessness of the effect is eerie. ”
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“I’ve resigned myself to being a non-stop curmudgeon about this, but an aspect of Dall-E’s closed invite beta I haven’t seen touched on is how it’s enlisted artists to act as unpaid influencers for a company whose backers include Peter Thiel and Elon Musk”
“The Byzantine Generals Problem,” a group show seeking consensus on crypto, opens at distant.gallery. Curated by Domenico Quaranta, the online exhibition features Sterling Crispin, Sarah Friend, Ben Grosser, Anna Ridler, and 10 others. Interrogative in tone, included works span Rhea Myers’ blockchain visualizations (2014-5), Kyle McDonald’s Ethereum carbon footprint calculations (2021), through a Web3 Dot Com Séance (2022, image) by Simon Denny and collaborators.
“The AI discovered a mechanism that redressed initial wealth imbalance, sanctioned free riders, and successfully won the majority vote.”
Metaverse Petshop, artist duo Exonemo’s CGI puppy mill, opens at NowHere in NYC. Building on a May beta test, this version adds NFT functionality and complicates transactions. Purchasers of virtual pups are faced with an ethical dilemma: keep their ‘metaverse pet’ in its entirety or strip off its 3D texture map and sell it on OpenSea. “It is like catching an actual animal and processing its skin to make it live much longer than the original,” the duo (ominously) note.
“Compared with energy use, data center water consumption is much more behind-the-scenes, is much more controversial, and in some cases is considered a trade secret.”
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What Just Happened:
Mindy Seu Forges Deep Links Between Cyberfeminism, Net Art, and Web3
The American designer and researcher in conversation about “WETWARE,” her Cyberfeminism all star NFT collection that’s currently on Feral File
June 2022
“We really have a very fixed idea of what kind of art we’re interested in. It requires a new model of running a gallery—especially one that shows challenging and forward thinking art.”
Berlin’s Panke Gallery and Zentrum für Netzkunst celebrate the 10th anniversary of iPhone live, the one-year art performance by Johannes P Osterhoff. From June 29, 2012, the German media artist broadcast screenshots from his jailbroken iPhone to a public website whenever he pressed the home button, aggregating 13,567 snapshots (about 40 per day) of his digital life. In commemoration, Osterhoff and invited experts reflect on the iconic project at /rosa, Berlin.
“There’s a prevailing narrative in society that it’s all or nothing—you’re a winner or a loser. It’s Trumpian and driven by the greed of glassy-eyed decentralized gamblers who are afraid if a project doesn’t sell out, their pathetic investment is in peril.”
OUT NOW:
Michael Century
Northern Sparks
A history of how hosting Expo 67 and innovative cultural policies kicked off a golden age in Canadian art and technology
“He was homeless for quite a long time during his life, and he really struggled with alcoholism. He had no interest in art at all, and then one day he went into an exhibition to get out of the rain.”
An intimate view into his ongoing efforts to automate his practice, Jonas Lund’s “Walk with Me” opens on the distant.gallery social platform. The online exhibition collages early and recent experiments of “wrapping his distributed identity, personality traits, and musical interludes” layered with instructions to make his artworks into a single glorious browser canvas, that Lund compares to “being inside the artist’s brain itself.”
“Digital sculptures live in the now, in a future that never ages. The physical object is the archive. That object was digital, but now it is real, pinned to a certain moment, and it can travel through different times and contexts as long as it exists.”
“Temporary Atlas” a show about ‘mapping’ personal experiences and perspectives opens at London’s MOSTYN; Manon Awst, Ibrahim Mahama, Kiki Smith, and 14 others contribute works. Of note: Oliver Laric’s erudite video essay Versions (2010, image) “that muses on the manipulation and re-appropriation of images throughout history” is featured, as is Jeremy Deller’s The History of the World (1997-2004), which diagrams improbable connections between the social forces that begat acid house and brass band music.
Joanie Lemercier’s latest solo exhibition opens at Le Tetris in Le Havre, Normandy, France. The show gathers recent works (Slow Violence, Brume, Edges) and new creations, capturing the French artist’s sustained interest in light and activism. In Prairie, a new collaboration with curator Juliette Bibasse, the two change focus from big to small: tracing mundane roadside grasses with small lasers, they shed light on beauty that is often overlooked.
“The worst-case scenarios are coming home to roost. We simply cannot afford to sustain separate, siloed movements; they are coming for every hard-fought civil right won in the last 50 years. WE have to fight back like our lives depend on it. Because they do.”
A grim sign of the times, surveillance capitalism and “more frequent, larger, and financially ruinous” forest fires converge in a Portland General Electric pilot project. In the initiative, a network of 5 (soon to be 22) cameras are deployed across rural Oregon, collecting footage that is monitored 24/7 by proprietary wildfire detection AI, which can distinguish “benign clouds from troubling smoke” with 90% accuracy; remote workers on standby protect against false positives.
“If we had the Web3 dream world, it would be William Gibson with a concussion. It would be a really stupid cyberpunk hellscape—far dumber than the world we’re actually in.”
“Chronicles from a near Future,” a show featuring two installations addressing biodiversity, opens at iMAL, Brussels. Golnaz Behrouznia and Dominique Peysson’s Phylogenèse Inverse (2022, image) draws inspiration from Turritopsis dohrnii (the immortal jellyfish), presenting vitrines of de-evolved “lifeforms with strange anatomies and enigmatic functions,” while Stéfane Perraud’s Sylvia (2022) offers an at times “absurd or conspiratorial” audio narrative about a forest in peril.
Taking a wide angle view of the (recent) history of urbanism, artist and researcher Chris Salter publishes an essay arguing “the smart city is a perpetually unrealized utopia” on Technology Review. Starting with architect Constant Nieuwenhuys’ vision for New Babylon (1959-74)—a speculative city and engine of serendipity that helped residents transcend bourgeoisie life—Salter lingers on the potential of that dream, relative to corporate forces that followed (i.e. IBM). Situating the discussion in the moment, he further connects the extractive tendencies of the smart city with the role data is playing with the war in the Ukraine, glibly noting that both the contemporary urban warzone and our idealized sensor-laden city of tomorrow chronically “seem to lack a central ingredient: human bodies.”
“He was the first man to fill a movie screen with pixels. Now, every movie you see was created on a digital machine.”
After its inaugural showing at Switzerland’s Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2021, an adaption of “How to Win at Photography” opens at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. The group exhibition gathers 30 international artists whose works explore “image-making as play,” from early photography to nascent videogames. Case in point: Roc Herms’ Study of Perspective (2015) series appropriates Ai Weiwei’s eponymous photo provocations in Grand Theft Auto V.
“Black art is held, then, to show white viewers what they refuse to see while critically refusing to provide a prosthetic for white vision.”
“Outside In,” a web-based, site-specific AR exhibition by Manuel Rossner and Damjanski opens near /rosa, Panke Gallery and Zentrum für Netzkunst’s Berlin project space. Realized on Panke’s OpenAR.art platform, the two sculptures—Rossner’s Spatial Painting (image) and Damjanski’s Inside: Spatial Painting—stand in dialogue, where the latter takes visitors into the former—“a perspective that wouldn’t have been possible with AR technology.”
“SPACE PROGRAM: Indoctrination,” a solo show by American sculptor Tom Sachs opens at Art Sonje Center in Seoul. The fifth in a series of exhibitions where the artist playfully reconstitutes the aesthetics of his nation’s rich aereospace history (image: Launch, 2010), the show evolves the format through indoctrination. After participating in “missions and tests of knowledge” visitors can join Sachs’ DIY space program—and those lacking ‘the right stuff’ can attend a reeducation centre.
“Plants are already extremely efficient carbon fixing machines, resulting from millions of years of evolution, so I still remain to be convinced that CRISPR can do much to improve carbon sequestration at the scale we need.”
Part of Serpentine’s long-term climate crisis program, “Back to Earth” opens in London with arresting propositions. Works by Agnes Denes, Brian Eno, Carolina Caycedo, Formafantasma, Sissel Tolaas, and others present research, experiences, and interventions: A new edition of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Pollinator Pathmaker (2021), for example, algorithmically arranged 62 plant species in nearby Kensington Gardens to “serve the greatest diversity of pollinators.”
“The wreck is not just important to art historians or to the reconstruction of ancient trade routes, but also to our understanding of the travelers, merchants, and sailors of the ancient Mediterranean.”
“Pardon Our Dust,” a solo show by avatar artist LaTurbo Avedon, opens at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Vienna. The show’s titular work (image, 2022) riffs on a slogan used to describe 1990s websites as ‘under construction,’ revising that narrative of progress for nascent Web3. Serving as tour guide and critic, Avedon parses emerging decentralization and ever-present commercialization, in a narrative rendering virtuality torn between “construction and deconstruction.”
Sarah Friend drops the final chapter of her NFT “social sculpture” Off (2021) at Public Works, New York. “Off: Endgame,” a solo show commissioned by Rhizome, Fingerprints, and Refraction, also introduces Wildcards (image), a new work and key to Off’s secrets: The Canadian software artist offers customised card decks containing mint instructions for one of 52 NFTs; Wildcard tokens, however, will not become tradeable unless Off’s hidden message is revealed through cooperation.
“Scraping can sound like intrusive hacking—because it is. It disregards contextual integrity and asserts a right to inhale entire data sets and process them.”
OUT NOW:
David M. Peña-Guzmán
When Animals Dream
A synthesis of neuroscience and philosophy addressing nonhuman cognition, and argument that animals are conscious beings
“You can play recordings of a whale’s song, but that doesn’t show what it means for whales to hear each other across oceanic distances. You can depict the magnetic field that envelops the planet, but that can’t begin to capture the experience of a robin using that field to fly across a continent.”
As documented in his now viral Twitter thread, British CGI artist Alan Warburton recovers hundreds of op art drawings from his upstairs neighbour, George Westren. Westren, “a sweet guy” who battled addiction and anxiety but found solace in his art, died during Covid. As the clearance company got to work, Warburton rushed in to save Weston’s legacy from the bin. “It’s just such a privilege to see all this work that must have been carefully amassed over years,” he writes.
Ars Electronica announces this year’s Prix winners, awarding a prestigious Golden Nica to Jung Hsu and Natalia Rivera’s Bi0film.net. Selected from 2,338 submissions and inspired by bacterial resistance, the open platform aids the creation of decentralised, nomadic protest networks by turning umbrellas into parabolic Wifi antennas. Other awarded works include Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s Perfect Sleep, Cristhian Avila’s Eternal Return, and Kimchi and Chips’ Another Moon.
“I can barely type an email and they’re raising millions to help people and save the rainforest. They are heroes.”
Much to the delight of writers, concrete poets, and ASCII artists, creative coders Play and EREN launch Typed, a text-based NFT market place on the Tezos chain. Featuring a spartan interface reminiscent of the Hic et Nunc glory days, Typed allows minting of bare-bones text entries, inviting all kinds of character-based experimentation. Within hours of being announced on Twitter, the platform was bustling with activity (image: Leander Herzog’s adaption of his generative art hit Agglo).
“There’ll be all kinds of crazy subcultures of image generation. So if it produces these kind of hazy, slightly mangled images with people’s arms in the wrong places, that’s OK, we just get used to that aesthetic.”
“Biotopia,” an exhibition that “questions the central position of humans in the world,” opens at le pavillion in Namur, France. Curated by KIKK Festival’s Marie du Chastel, the show features Design I/O, Teresa van Dongen, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Zimoun, and others, contributing works. Thomas Thwaites’ GoatMan (2015, image), chronicles the artist’s experiment living amongst a herd of goats in the Swiss Alps, outfitted with prosthetic limbs and an artificial stomach.
“We chose to make a product—tire sandals—which are made across the developing world, where the tires are solely made of rubber. But in Europe, tires are reinforced with steel wire, which meant we couldn’t cut through them.”
What Would Ursula Franklin Say?, a collection of 17 essays emerging from a working group supported by the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, is published. From 2019-21, scholars including Sara Grimes, Katie Mackinnon, and Leslie Regan Shade, deployed the pioneering technology critic’s “unique materialist, practice-based” methods to engage contemporary discourses of innovation, algorithmic bias and inequity, and social resilience.
“Do not give the vampires who host these panels about their landlord metaverse country club they’re building a goddamn inch. Ask provoking questions, make them uncomfortable, be confrontational.”
DOSSIER:
Continuing her exploration of Vera Molnar’s legacy, art historian Zsofi Valyi-Nagy excavates the history of the drawing machines that defined early computer art. From the Zuse Graphomat that was adopted in laboratories in the 1960s (image) to the Benson drum plotters Molnar used a decade later, Valyi-Nagy considers “the complex, iterative, nonlinear, and very hands-on process that was early computing.”
“The self-reflexive NFT that employs the theater of absentness suggests that if art offers grace at all, it is volatile, conditional, and inseparable from the systems of capital under which it operates.”
“On Copper, Wax, Iron, Wisteria and Ice,” a show documenting a decade of “smellscapes, labs, and conversations” by Italian artist Elena Mazzi opens at Parco Arte Vivente (PAV) in Turin. Featured works include En route to the South (2015, image), a series of beeswax maps of EU cities undergoing rapid economic transformation due to an influx of migrant labour, and Smellscapes (2022), a “valorization of the olfactive dimension” of local Turinese culture.
Physicists Corentin Coulais, Vincenzo Vitelli, and collaborators solve a key robotics problem: emergent locomotion. Nicknamed the ‘odd wheel,’ their 12 motor-assembly adjusts its wiggling motion to move forward and navigate uphill, despite the fact it can’t perceive its terrain. “These are indeed behaviours you would not expect,” notes bioroboticist Auke Ijspeert. Future kinetic and structural applications include odd balls and odd walls.
OUT NOW:
Paolo Cirio
Monitoring Control
An incisive Big Tech critique and counter-control guide, that offers texts (by, among others, Bruce Sterling) and artistic research to highlight “the overt yet covert ways in which tools and platforms control our lives.”
“This is the first time I’ve been able to just log in, browse new work, and acquire it. It’s changed my view of how an economy of digital art could exist.”
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