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German experimental filmmaker and light artist Robert Seidel premieres several new works alongside painter Anna Niedhart in an unlikely XPINKY Berlin duo exhibition. The video piece Tremors (2024, image), for example, adds to Seidel’s AI pastiches where his signature CGI animations are fed into an image generator. Also new: Crispr #2 (2024), a print of painterly floral fragments and Suturae #2 (2024), a laser installation that renders cloudy geometries onto fabric.
Bundling a sci-fi opera and music project into a solo show, Lila-Zoé Krauß ’s “[After her Destruction]” opens at Kunsthaus Hamburg. The narrative of the Australian artist’s titular transmedia project centres on a protagonist, Girl, whose dialogue with a computer program blurs digital and dream worlds, questioning “notions of otherness, femininity and subjectivity.” On-site, the project manifests through video installations, and an accompanying album is available online on SoundCloud .
“I OWNED, A TONGUE,” a show in which Xuan Ye playfully “hacks the alphabetic writing apparatus,” opens at Ed Video in Guelph (CA). The Toronto-based artist presents six digital poetry works, produced independently and in collaboration with experimental writer and researcher Mujie Li and composer Jason Doell . Ye also shares EveryLetterCyborg Bite (2024), an edition of 100 “toothy fortune cookies” that commemorate @qletrcyborg , their defunct Donna Harraway-inspired Twitter bot.
“Because I really do see it as a kind of aggregate human intelligence. It’s trained on all of us. Specifically, when you look at music, it’s trained on human bodies performing very special tasks. And I think it does us a great disservice to try to remove that from the equation.”
– Musician
Holly Herndon , on why she prefers the phrase ‘collective intelligence’ over AI [quote edited]
Foregrounding how sick bodies are controlled and fetishized, Panteha Abareshi ’s “Impaired Erotics” opens at O—Overgaden in Copenhagen. Through a series of provocative sculptures made using braces, straps, and tubing—medical equipment—the Los Angeles-based artist underscores the violence and indifference implicit in treatment. In MAKING USEFUL (OF DECAY) (2024, image), for example, a pair of thermoplastic legs are rigidly restrained—illustrating how society “surveils, cages, or disciplines the sick or disabled body.”
The culmination of two years of cross-disciplinary research and co-creation within Resonance IV , a EU flagship initiative fostering collaborations between artists, scientists, and policymakers, “NaturArchy” opens at iMAL in Brussels. Over 20 artists including Kristin Bergaust , Coline Ramonet-Bonis , Yiannis Kranidiotis , Margherita Pevere (image: Lament , 2022-24), JD Whitman , and Jemma Woolmore probe issues of deep ecology, sustainability, and the decolonization of nature in pursuit of systemic change.
“The era of ‘move fast and break things’ is coming to a close, with entities such as the Federal Trade Commission and various state Attorneys General emphasizing the necessity and impending reality of comprehensive AI regulation.”
– Tech policy researcher
Tatiana Rice , heralding the
Colorado AI Act . The bill provides guidelines for mitigating algorithmic discrimination and is the first comprehensive AI law passed globally. Enthusiastic about the precedent, Rice asks, “Can this framework foster alignment across diverse jurisdictions?”
Celebrating key 1980s works by pioneering video artist Gretchen Bender , “The Perversion of the Visual” opens at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles. Taking centre stage is Dumping Core (1984, image), the late American artist’s 13-monitor megamix of CGI, corporate logo animations, and Salvadoran Civil War photos. Untitled (Daydream Nation) (1989), a series of computer-generated fractal prints, and Ghostbusters (1984), an experiment in CGI portraiture, are also displayed.
“Companies like Instagram and Activision do more than just allow gun companies to reach consumers—they underwrite and mainstream violence to struggling adolescents.”
– Uvalde Families lawyer Josh Koskoff, taking aim at Big Tech’s role in the
Uvalde school shooting (2022). Their lawsuit alleges the realistic guns and gunplay in Activision’s
Call of Duty videogame franchise and targeted Instagram ads from assault rifle manufacturer
Daniel Defense “groomed” the 18-year-old perpetrator to be a mass shooter.
“Reverb,” a show celebrating two decades of releases by The Vinyl Factory, London’s preeminent pressing plant and record label, opens at 180 Studios . Theaster Gates , Es Devlin , and Julianknxx present new site-specific audiovisual installations amongst a stacked roster of 100 artists and musicians that also features Caterina Barbieri and Carsten Nicolai . Other highlights include an ultra hi-fi listening room by audio engineer Devon Turnbull (image) and a library of releases by the Vinyl Factory imprint.
Addressing nationalism and Arctic sovereignty, Toril Johannessen ’s “Deterrence and Reassurance” opens at Bergen Kunsthall (NO). In the show’s titular work, the Norweigian artist contrasts comfy Scandinavian lifestyle with Norway’s arctic policy (read: securing oil and gas deposits) via 18 rugs woven from military textiles (2024, image). Through the rugs and accompanying maps, Johannessen “visualizes the presence of the military in the landscape and the social imaginary.”
“It’s like nuclear fission, it’s ferocious and terrifying, and it’s also incredibly useful. So, what do we do? I don’t know. I have no idea.”
– Director
David Cronenberg , making an explosive analogy to describe the promise and peril of generative AI in filmmaking. “You can imagine a screenwriter sitting there, writing the movie; if they can write it in enough detail, the movie will appear. The whole idea of actors and production will be gone,” the Canadian
body horror legend notes, imagining movies made without humans, cameras, or sets.
OUT NOW :
Zachary Small
Token Supremacy
New York Times reporter
Small delves into the “murky, pixelated waters” of the NFT market and speculative crypto economy—and the stodgy commercial art and major museum milieu they have so decisively disrupted.
“As if painting in space, on air, its rhythmic cycle suggesting the steady inhalation and exhalation of breath, making us more aware of our own breathing.”
– Critic and curator Lilly Wei, lyrically describing Korean artist
Kimsooja ’s Tanya Bonakdar Gallery exhibition “
Meta-Painting ”
“Any art practice based on exposing systemic failure will ultimately be co-opted. Your clever face tracking critique will be turned into a cute photo filter. Your subversive design work will be appropriated to improve optics and grant an air of credibility.”
– American media artist
Kyle McDonald , parsing fellow artist and scholar
Roopa Vasudevan ’s “banger” zine
Transparency, Hypervisibility, Revelation: On Modalities of Creative Resistance (2024), the first release of Vasudevan’s new Strategic Transparency imprint
In honour of the 75th anniversary of Germany’s constitution, the weekend edition of one of the country’s major newspapers, Süddeutsche Zeitung , comes infused with its DNA—literally. Researchers from Munich and Zurich’s technical universities synthesized genetic code containing millions of copies of the legal text and mixed it into the printer ink. DNA is the data storage medium of the future, the researchers say. Whether the ink’s contents can be decoded , however, is subject to further experimentation.
Showcasing outputs of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics INHABIT residency program, “CONTACT ZONES” opens at Frankfurt’s Museum Angewandte Kunst. Pamela Breda , Victoria Keddie , and Sajan Mani present works informed by four months of dialogue with institute researchers. Keddie’s Pshal P’shaw (2024, image), for example, deconstructs eight American English diphthongs via multi-channel audio, exposing the “primal essence of phonetic expression and its impact on the oral landscape.”
“We need acts of translation, and I think artists are supplying images and metaphors that we can use as a common currency. These metaphors are alternatives to those offered by corporations.”
– KW Berlin curator
Nadim Samman , on the “profound alienation” at the heart of the current “
Poetics of Encryption ” exhibition. Channelling a cultural mood in conflict with obscured algorithmic regimes, the included works “express the anxiety, paranoia, and political rage we have around opaque tech.”
“MoMA struggled through COVID-19 like most cultural institutions, arduously attempting to recover its pre-pandemic attendance records and financial support. The same conditions that fomented the digital art renaissance were killing art nonprofits.”
– Art journalist
Zachary Small , on the tense 2021-22 moment when the NFT boom coincided with museum layoffs. In a
Token Supremacy (2024) excerpt, Small reveals the inner workings of MoMA’s
collaboration with
Refik Anadol . [quote edited]
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