Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary

A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
AI art and biohacks that ponder post-humanism, CGI fever dreams that (further) distort reality, software that speaks truth to power: HOLO explores critical creative practice where art, science, technology, and culture intersect. Support our work to get full online access and exclusive artist editions.
“I’d have more sympathy for NFT platforms shutting down if they hadn’t so openly embraced the capitalist extraction engine; the blinding antithesis of decentralization. These were businesses, and they made bad decisions. Own it.”
– Artist and designer Jana Stýblová, on the recent implosion of NFT marketplaces Nifty Gateway and Rodeo. Stýblová is particularly sour over founders shedding crocodile tears: “You don’t get to take artists’ and collectors’ money and then ask us to feel sorry for how hard you worked. You were salaried. You were paid to believe in the thing you were building.”

Curated by Jack Thomas Taylor and Amal Zeyad Ali, “What’s between, between?” takes over Doha’s Media Majlis Museum (QA). The show takes Gulf Futurism as its starting point—a term describing rapid transformation across the Arabian Peninsula, “where hyper-modernization and clashing visual cultures create a distinctive sense of living between multiple temporalities.” Featuring works by artists from across the Gulf region including Ahaad Alamoudi, Farah Al Qasimi, and Manal AlDowayan, the exhibition refuses a singular definition of the contested aesthetic.

Three decades into his practice, Jim Campbell continues probing the threshold between abstraction and recognition. “Encoding Light” at bitforms NYC situates historic pieces alongside new works, positioning the American artist’s low-resolution LED installations as investigations into how perception fills in visual gaps. Motion Color Study #6 (2026), for example, translates footage of Monet’s Giverny garden into blurred colour fields—a continuation of the Impressionist’s inquiry, not a reinterpretation.

Rice University‘s Moody Center for the Arts in Houston (US) presents “Imaging After Photography,” a group show probing algorithmic bias, synthetic image-making, and photographic truth in the era of generative AI. Coinciding with FotoFest’s 40th anniversary, the show features Refik Anadol, Sofia Crespo, Trevor Paglen, and others. Nouf Aljowaysir’s Ancestral Seeds (2025) subjects British archaeologist Gertrude Bell’s photographs of the Middle East to computer vision models, exposing biases embedded in AI.

The Infinite Node Foundation launches its permanent Palo Alto (US) hub with “10,000,” the first major exhibition devoted to CryptoPunks (2017), Larva Labs’ (Matt Hall and John Watkinson) canonical PFP (profile picture) NFT collection. Following last year’s acquisition of the collection’s IP from Yuga Labs, NODE positions the algorithmically-generated portraits as a process-based artwork where “the marketplace is a living exchange that hums with activity.”

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“In their hands, the mushroom becomes not an object but an inescapable feral imagination, with the exhibition a proposal to clean the plate and start over.”
– Writer and curator Lou Mo, reviewing anthropologist Anna Tsing and architect Feifei Zhou’s interdisciplinary show at Het Nieuwe Instituut (NL). Instead of romanticizing fungi as trendy biomaterial, Mou argues that “Fungi: Anarchist Designers” presents mushrooms as agents whose “boundless growth more closely resembles the expansionism of colonial and capitalist endeavours.”
“There’s always music in the garbage, an obsolete format, and the music industry has consistently been at the forefront of waste culture.”
– Media and sound artist Darsha Hewitt, on the cycle of technological obsolescence driving her High Fidelity Wasteland trilogy (2020-23). In conversation about her practice, the Canadian artist discusses media archaeology, domestic technologies, and the stories embedded in discarded electronics.
“You have to clock in for school, clock in for work, and now you have to clock in just to prove you aren’t dead. Chinese people—spending a lifetime ‘clocking in.’”
– Weibo commenter, on the viral success of Sileme (translation: ‘are you dead?’), a check-in app for solo dwellers that alerts an emergency contact if users don’t confirm they’re alive every 48 hours. The iOS app became China’s most downloaded paid app this month, its name a dark pun on popular food delivery service Ele.me (‘are you hungry?’). By 2030, China could have 200 million one-person households.

“Tiffany Chung: indelible traces” at UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum (US) is the Vietnamese American artist’s first museum survey. Spanning 25 years and over 70 works—from embroidered maps to archival investigations of place—Chung excavates suppressed histories that official narratives overlook. A major thru-line: the climate-conflict nexus, “which views climate disasters and armed conflicts as dual systemic causes of forced migration.”

Taking Ludvig Holberg’s proto-sci-fi novel Underground Travels (1741) as its starting point, “Iter Subterraneum” at Bergen Kunsthall (NO) imagines nonhuman ways of sensing and reasoning. Artists including Cecilia Fiona, Wangechi Mutu, and Anicka Yi shift perspective toward plants, fungi, and insects—echoing Holberg’s sentient trees. Naomi Rincón-Gallardo’s Dung Kinship (2024), for example, fantastically chronicles ‘fly women’ and ‘dung folk’ transforming rot into regenerative force.

“Protecting artists doesn’t just mean excluding ‘AI content.’ It means crafting policies with enough nuance to distinguish between automation and critique, extraction and deep engagement. Otherwise, we risk eliding some of the most thoughtful and important work being made with and about these technologies.”
– Poet and language artist Sasha Stiles, on Bandcamp’s newly announced AI ban. “Many of my voiced performances are hybrid human + AI,” she explains on X. “Because of this, I’ve run into barriers releasing audiobooks and sound works on major platforms.”

MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge (US) presents “List Projects 34: Brittany Nelson,” featuring new photographs and a moving-image work filmed at West Virginia’s Green Bank Observatory—a hub for SETI researchers scanning the cosmos. Drawing on Daphne du Maurier‘s Rebecca (1938) and analog photographic techniques, the American artist frames the search for extraterrestrial contact as a mirror for human longing. Nelson has likened the telescope to “an ex-girlfriend,” and the piece unfolds as a “kind of breakup narrative.”

“I’m interested in artists’ ability to shift language and discourse, though that’s not necessarily quantifiable. Being an artist is akin to asking questions that nobody really has answers to, prototyping from that, and—hopefully—stimulating new thoughts, new ideas, or new ways forward.”
– Artist Xin Xin, on art as a form of inquiry. In a wide-ranging oral history of their practice, the Eyebeam Rapid Response Fellow discusses consentful tech, community-driven software, and liberatory approaches to digital archives.
OUT NOW:
Mousse 94
Mousse’s winter 2026 issue features Forensic Architecture on counter-forensics and their ongoing Gaza Atlas plus Shumon Basar offering an autobiographical reflection on two decades of curatorial work via “The Only Way Out Is Through” at The Third Line, Dubai.

In her solo exhibition, “Image Remains,” at Filodrammatica Gallery, Rijeka (HR), Dutch glitch art pioneer and resolution theorist Rosa Menkman explores the “unteathered” digital image—copied, processed, and endlessly circulated across platforms and algorithms. Drawing on Paul Klee’s iconic 1920 painting Angelus Novus, Menkman’s installation, videos, and diagrammatic analysis ask “what is left of the image when its resolution is made destitute, and its appearances are governed.”

“Bianca approaches femininity not as an essence but as a kind of cultural technology—a set of inherited techniques the body learns to perform. She treats it as an operating system rather than identity.”
– A masked Bianca Censori double, on the surreal portrayal of womanhood in the Australian architect and Yeezy designer’s recent performance art debut in Seoul. BIO POP (2025) featured furniture sculpted from contorted Censori clones—body doubles wearing wigs and latex suits. “Instead of portraying femininity, Bianca reveals its mechanics.”
“Bryan Johnson—the man who transfused his son’s blood, dumped his fiancé when she was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer, and takes 54 pills every morning—is poised to be a major literary inspiration of our contemporary age. The longevity bro is the Dracula we deserve.”
– Writer Greta Rainbow, on why tech entrepreneurs obsessed with living forever are the hot new literary archetype—Bryan ‘don’t die’ Johnson, chief among them. Rainbow traces the trend across new novels including Lost Lambs (2026) and Murder Bimbo (2026), where plasma-harvesting billionaires and crypto galas are ready-made for fiction—no invention required.
“The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centres that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear.”
– Silicon Valley software engineer Jatin K Malik, on the speculative economics of AI infrastructure. [quote edited]
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