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“Cytographia is an elegy for species we will never know, or will never know again, expressed through generative illustrations from an imaginary book about imaginary organisms.”
– American media artist and lecturer
Golan Levin , on his forthcoming
Art Blocks release of algorithmic, cursor-interactive cells. Every aspect of the “xenocytology” is computationally generated, reveals Levin, “including the simulated behaviour of the depicted creature, the poiesis of its anatomy, the calligraphic quality of its lines, the asemic letterforms of its labels, and the (ahem) virtual ‘paper’ on which it is rendered.”
The NGV Triennial opens at Melbourne’s NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) International, showcasing 100 works from 120 artists and designers that epitomize contemporary practice. In addition to timeless pieces by Hito Steyerl , John Gerrard , SMACK , and Julian Charrière , NGV premieres several new commissions: Dunne & Raby ’s Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival (2023) imagines future multi-species gatherings through speculative artifacts, while Agnieszka Pilat ’s Heterobota (2023, image) enjoy playtime.
“We appear more like clouds, or atmospheres, or energy fields, and our meatiness fades into insignificance. Our breath forms chemical swirls drifting through multiple umwelten. Strands of you stretch for miles, caressing the nervous systems of innumerable lifeforms.”
– Designers
Dunne & Raby , on their NGV Triennial commission
Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival (2023), a set of speculative totems and mementos which illustrate how human-produced sound, fragrance and matter is experienced by other species
OUT NOW :
Kunze & Bauer (eds)
Glitch. The Art of Interference.
Accompanying their major glitch art
survey at Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, curators
Kunze and
Bauer compile key works by participating artists and essays by writers including
Nick Briz and
Ute Holl .
“I have a lot of lab experience, so it’s always funny to me how excited people get when they are exploring things through the microscope. They’re overwhelmed looking at the materials—stones, flowers—they collected.”
“Instead of being in charge, these executives and lobbyists should be behind bars. At the very least, the UN should ban them from climate summits.”
– American climate scientist and author
Peter Kalmus , on the annual United Nations climate summit,
COP28 , being overrun by fossil fuel industry figureheads. Worse yet, COP president and oil executive Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber is
reported to actively use the event for striking dirty energy deals. “It’s hard to imagine anything more cynical or more evil,” writes Kalmus.
Daniel Langlois 1957 – 2023
Canadian animator and
Softimage founder Daniel Langlois dies at 66. A
National Film Board of Canada filmmaker, Langlois created
Softimage 3D , VFX software used on blockbusters including
Jurassic Park and
Terminator 2 . Shifting to philanthropy in middle age, he launched the
Daniel Langlois Foundation , a major Montréal art-technology institution, in 1997.
Dredging up grotesque imaginaries, Tishan Hsu ’s “recent works 2023” opens at Secession in Vienna. Taking centre stage at the artist-run space, the American artist presents tablet-skin-screen (2023, image), an undulating moiré pattern-adorned sculpture that evokes both flesh and (video) feedback. Complementing the unnatural geometry, surrounding morphing videos and prints depict “the interpenetration of physical bodies with virtual digital forms.”
Marshmallow Laser Feast premieres a new 3-channel video installation, Breathing with the Forest (2023, image), within Emergence Magazine ’s “Shifting Landscapes” exhibition at Bargehouse, London. The show presents works by nine artists and filmmakers including Adam Loften , Kalyanee Mam , and Katie Holten , that “open our imaginations to our entanglement with the biosphere.” Laser Feast’s contribution, for example, invites visitors to ‘take in’ volumetric and ambisonic field recordings of the Colombian Amazon.
“The internet was loaded with earnest content and search engines proved vital to indexing and recalling every last morsel of it. There was a sense of abundance: you could read about anything and research everything.”
– Writer
Michelle Santiago Cortés , reminiscing about when the internet was still legible. Recalling a simpler era of Tumblr and
Vice , Cortés laments how Google and other search engines are increasingly useless given “the thickening muck of junk websites vying for programmatic ad money.”
“The works certainly carry historical significance, but in their new ‘commonplace’ state, they become fossils through contemporary eyes.”
– Critic Matthew Sturt-Scobie, assessing some of the older works featured in “
REBOOT ,” a survey of four decades of Dutch media art at Rotterdam’s
Nieuwe Instituut . “It highlights what the dated works now lack in impact or affect,” he writes of his mild dissatisfaction that show organizers LI-MA don’t quite situate the aging work clearly enough.
“Real AI isn’t sci-fi but the precaritisation of jobs, the continued privatisation of everything and the erasure of actual social relations. AI is Thatcherism in computational form.”
– Scholar and
Resisting AI (2022) author Dan McQuillan, equating AI adoption with a now infamous period of
British austerity . “Case after case, from
Australia to the
Netherlands , has proven that unleashing machine learning in welfare systems amplifies injustice and the punishment of the poor,” argues McQuillan. “Like Thatcher herself, real world AI boosts bureaucratic cruelty towards the most vulnerable.”
“Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025,” a show by researchers Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler opens at Fondazione Prada Osservatorio in Milan. Picking up where their collaboration Anatomy of an AI System (2018) left off, the duo maps how “empires of past centuries are echoed in the technology companies of today.” Exhibited is a cabinet of curiosities, a map room, and ephemera related to data and control spanning six centuries.
“Not having one theme imposed by a curator but multiple curators contributing their unique concepts and artist selections to the same event was unheard of at the time and remains uncommon today, even after a decade.”
–
The Wrong Biennale founder
David Quiles Guilló , on the “radical inclusiveness” that is at the core of the thriving online (and increasingly hybrid) art show he launched in 2013. “It’s like a costume party, and you decide to let all costumes join in,” Guilló tells
Fakewhale . “It surely becomes a great party.”
“Screensavers are wild and showed all kinds of other possibilities with computation. Pipes? Flying toasters? Lissajous figures? As a kid the computer was most interesting when you didn’t touch it.”
– Software artist
Zach Lieberman , defending the humble screensaver. A decades-old clichéd criticism of digital art (“it’s just a screensaver”), the tired trope resurfaced recently when critic Jerry Saltz
sniped at Refik Anadol’s
Unsupervised (2022), describing it as “mediocre spectacle” and “a banal screensaver.”
Documenting a half-century of DIY publishing, “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines” opens at the Brooklyn Museum. A tremendous undertaking, more than one thousand artists’ zines and publications emerging from the unruly 1970-2020 North American punk and queer underground are featured. Artist-publishers including Tom Jennings and Mimi Thi Nguyen present their Xerox handiwork and an online archive of selected zines opens access to the rich collection.
Exploring sound across the ages (and over the Atlantic Ocean), “Resonaciones. An embrace to awake” opens at IFA Gallery Stuttgart. Inspired by the ancient Peruvian whistling vessels in the Linden Museum collection, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen presents art and environments by artists and culture workers Carolina Arévalo , Francisca Gili , Nicole L’Huillier , and Bettina Korintenberg that weigh the impact of colonialism and how soundscapes function as “a living and permanently changing archive.”
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