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“How do we hold digital space? We hold space as usernames, user profiles, icons, and avatars. The ability to hold a unique space is fundamental to taking part in society.”
– Researcher
Theresa Reimann-Dubbers , on the types of ‘placeholders’ we use to represent ourselves online. Just one of the analytical questions raised in her video essay
We Need to Talk about Avatars , Reimann-Dubbers probes how “our digital self is a carefully angled window to our physical self.”
Never shy to insert his eccentric alter ego into art history as a form of playful provocation, Canadian artist Jeremy Bailey tasked the generative AI system Midjourney to put his ‘Famous New Media Artist’ persona into a David Hockney pool painting (“it keeps twisting my legs up !”) and to combine it with one of Jeff Koons’ balloon dogs (image). Credit where credit is due: Balloon Bailey is the blue, bespectacled kitsch we didn’t know we needed.
“Like powering an engine with the methane that comes from decomposing corpses in a graveyard.”
– Computational Poet
Allison Parrish , using a visceral analogy to characterize how large language models (LLMs) compose new text from old text. In conversation with
Joanne McNeil about generative AI, Parrish describes LLMs as “inherently conservative. They encode the past, literally.”
MouthPad^, a smart oral splint that enables hands-free human-computer interaction using tongue, jaw, head, and breathing gestures, wins the grand prize in Innovation: Early Stage Technology at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Developed by MIT Media Lab spinoff Augmental , the forthcoming machine learning-powered ‘tongue trackpad’ gives users (not just those lacking mobility) full reign over their gadgets—to send emails, edit photos, or play videogames—while being invisible to others.
“I am not aware of a moment in history wherein the act of discovery by artists is more necessary. We need them to bring the innate mental, spiritual, and physical aspects of humanness into play and inquiry with technology in order to affirm our role as creators, not spectators, of our collective techno-future.”
– Eyebeam Executive Director
Roddy Schrock , reaffirming the New York City art and technology center’s mandate as it celebrates a new online home.
“WE DID THIS TO OURSELVES,” a survey of Ron Terada ’s news and typography-focused works, opens at The Power Plant in Toronto. Grimly articulating the surrealism and noise of the post-truth information landscape, the Canadian artist’s monumental painting series TL;DR (2017-22) takes centre stage, immersing gallery visitors in the “overwhelming experience” of perusing a wall of weird tech headlines (collected from The Verge ) rendered in the familiar and authoritative New York Times typeface.
“The majority of people aren’t users but subjects of AI. It’s not a matter of individual choice. Most AI determinations that shape our access to resources are behind the scenes in ways we probably don’t even know.”
– Signal Foundation president and AI Now Institute co-founder
Meredith Whittaker , discussing AI ethics with Credo AI’s
Navrina Singh , and Distributed AI Research Institute’s
Alex Hanna at the Bloomberg Technology Summit. “AI is a surveillance technology,” Whittaker insists. “The Venn diagram of AI concerns and privacy concerns is a circle.”
OUT NOW :
Logic(s) 19
Supa Dupa Skies
Contributors including
Meredith Whittaker ,
Şerife Wong , and
Edward Ongweso Jr. relaunch
Logic with a fresh mandate to transcend “the bleak uniformity of tech journalism” with Queer, Black, and Asian perspectives.
“As the white-collar workforce gets more and more automated, there’s gonna be a shift back to the office where people can prove to their co-workers that they’re in fact a human, not three ChatGPTs in a trenchcoat.”
–
New York Times tech columnist
Kevin Roose , theorizing that “AI is going to kill remote work” in conversation with reporter
Emma Goldberg . “People are getting anxious about their own replaceability,” says Roose. “So many of these uniquely human skills are things that are much easier to in person: collaboration, creativity, leadership.”
“Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop,” a send-up of disgraced crypto CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) Future Fund by Michael Stevenson , opens at Michael Lett in Auckland (NZ). The show takes aim at SBF’s defunct effective altruism charity by reproducing the text from the fund’s website on beanbag chairs—just like those beloved by the former billionaire. The New Zealand artist describes each chair (filled with shredded paper) as “a placeholder” for “good intentions and a compromised crypto ecosystem.”
DOSSIER :
“Be candid about current challenges—and dream big!”
How do we upgrade our cultural infrastructure? The Future Festivals think tank lays out a roadmap of seven major issues—from operations (funding, staff capacity) to ethics (inclusivity, sustainability).
“If we lift these disciplinary silos, then what we are left with are daring imaginations and skills, coupled with the profound knowledge that we are mired in layers of false assumptions.”
– Korean-American artist
Anicka Yi , taking on the “the impossible task of debunking the favourite Western notion: the autonomous self” with her newly-hatched nomadic research initiative
Metaspore . Speaking at NEW INC
DEMO2023 , Yi reveals the project as a “deeply personal transformation” in search of more sustainable meaning that seeks to “generate interdisciplinary spores of social trust and action.”
New York City’s (now nomadic) Postmasters Gallery premieres Damjanski ’s Napster (2023) at the artisanal bed and mattress showroom Charles P. Rogers. The venue is appropriate: The iPhone app scans the environment for comfy nap locations by placing a 3D model of Damjanski sleeping. Seeding AR snoozes is on brand for the Yugoslavian prankster and self-described ‘artist living in a browser:’ His 2019 app Bye Bye Camera erased people from photos, heralding the post-human era of AI.
“I gave credit to Mondrian, who inspired my investigation of the potential for digital art—this was not ‘copycat stuff.’ To some extent, the Mondrian experiment was a crude Turing test of machine intelligence.”
– Computer art pioneer
A. Michael Noll , rebuffing critic Jed Perl’s
dismissal of his 1964 experiment to algorithmically generate Mondrian-style compositions
“Plastic World,” a show exploring the politics and aesthetics of the ubiquitous polymer-based material, opens at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Its 50 contributors include contemporary artists focused on ecological critique (Monira Al Qadiri , Pınar Yoldaş ) as well as 20th century conceptualists (Christo & Jeanne Claude , Hans Hollein ); from the latter camp, kinetic sculptor Otto Piene ’s Anemones: An Air Aquarium (1976, image), has been reproduced, in all its inflatable glory.
Hayward Gallery within London’s Southbank Centre opens “Dear Earth,” a group show featuring 15 international artists including Agnes Denes , John Gerrard , and Hito Steyerl that explore “themes of care, hope, and connection” in times of planetary crisis. Denes, for example, recreated her iconic land artwork The Living Pyramid (2015, image) as a five-meter tall indoor architecture planted with wildflowers and grasses, invoking both “the past and the possible future we will invent.”
“I’m honestly at a loss to even characterize the current large-scale planetary wave pattern. Frankly, it looks like a Van Gogh.”
– American climatologist and author
Michael E. Mann , agast at the current
jet stream chaos . Normally, the narrow, fast-moving
band of polar winds help stabilize global weather patterns. As the temperature difference between the poles and tropics shrinks due to accellerated arctic warming, the jet streams weaken and swerve, creating unprecedented heat domes like the one currently
sizzling Texas .
Considering compassion and competence, “AI: Who’s Looking After Me?” opens at Science Gallery London. Co-presented with FutureEverything , invited artists including James Bridle , Wesley Goatley , Seo Hye Lee , and Mimi Ọnụọha interrogate “what it means to entrust our care to autonomous machines. ” Blast Theory’s Cat Royale (2023, image), for example, puts Ghostbuster, Pumpkin, and Clover in the custody of a computer vision system and robot arm, which monitor, tend to, and play with the three felines.
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