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“Until all energies used to extract and process these four indispensable materials come from renewable conversions, modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.”
– Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst
Vaclav Smil , on how cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia—the “four pillars of modern civilization”—are (largely) incompatible with a
net-zero emission future
“If a Token Could Speak,” a show of video works by Sophie Auger that “put the NFT and the traditional art world in perspective,” opens at Montreal’s ELEKTRA Gallery. In Catalog (2022), the Quebec artist gets meta, tokenizing 3D models of the exhibition press release, archive, and making-of documentation—and puts everything up for sale on the blockchain; while an eponymous work (2022, image) demonstrates how even a ‘poor ’ image can attain “the same value as a rare work of art.”
“The evidence now suggests a 3 to 4 degree warming by mid-century, not accounting for tipping points—which could easily be 5 or 6 degrees.”
–
Benjamin Sovacool , University of Sussex energy researcher and one of the lead authors of the recent IPCC
Working Group III report , on the damning implications of current climate legislation implementation gaps. “Even if we were to meet 100% of the 2015
Paris accord , we’d still be pretty far off from 2 degrees,” says Sovacool.
“Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul,” a whitepaper by researchers E. Glen Weyl and Puja Ohlhaver , and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is published. In it, the trio describe a web3 where tokens denoting “commitments, credentials, and affiliations” are “soulbound” to individuals, and these non-transferable identity markers are used to govern more efficiently (e.g. DAO vote-weighting based on expertise) and to generate more equitable datasets (opt-in with privacy controls). Moving beyond ‘trustless’ DeFI frameworks, they propose decentralized sociality (DeSoc) “which encodes trust networks that underpin the real economy today.” Drawing on the community and infosec foibles in crypto over the last decade, they extend the model to prevent concentrations of power, and propose checks and balances to protect its decentralization.
“It takes at least 10 hours to produce 1 kWh on a bike generator. The electricity price in France is roughly €0.20 per kWh, so that’s what you would earn that day!”
OUT NOW :
Manouach & Engelhardt
Chimeras
An “inventory of synthetic cognition” featuring 150 artists, writers, and researchers that disassemble—broaden—the definition of AI to include non-human perspectives and anticipate modes of symbiosis
With a market capitalization of $2.4 trillion, Saudi Aramco replaces Apple as the world’s most valuable company. Meta, Netflix, Robinhood—tech stocks are tanking right now and Apple is down 20% this year. There is more at play here than investors exhibiting a newfound skepticism towards Big Tech’s bottom line—or optimism that the oil sector will clean up its act. The Russian incursion into Ukraine has sent oil prices—commodities—soaring, further exasperating supply chain woes brought on by the pandemic. “There’s panic selling in a lot of tech and other high-multiple names, and the money coming out of there seems headed for energy in particular,” notes Tower Bridge Advisors ’ James Meyer on the cynical flow of capital back to fossil fuel.
“It stopped being something that resided only within the skull, only within the individual, and became something that mattered when it emerged between bodies, between species, between beings. Something that’s active in the world.”
– British artist and writer
James Bridle , discussing broader definitions of intelligence laid out in their newest book
Ways of Being with musician and
5×15 interlocutor
Brian Eno
“There’s no comfortable path to decolonizing our minds and institutions. We need to embrace discomfort in order to engage and make change.”
– Spanish curator
Maite Borjabad , on the importance of creating friction. “There is a level of self-consciousness that they need to address issues of equity, diversity and inclusion,” the
Guggenheim Bilbao Museum curator, who views herself as an institutional infiltrator, says of major art organisations. “But at the same time there is so much fear and hesitation.”
“The funniest, saddest aspect of this boom is that the digital and internet artists who had long awaited a salable moment performed a sort of due diligence, or conceptual laundering, for the nothings to come.”
– Artist and writer
Elisabeth Nicula , on watching digital artists ‘pivot to NFTs’ and lend credibility to the cryptoart scene. While critiques are plentiful, Nicula offers new insights, discussing NFTs alongside the extractive nature of land art and the idea of ‘the void.’
OUT NOW :
Anne-Katrin Weber
Television before TV
A transnational study of “new media and exhibition culture” in the late 1920s and 1930s, where television met its first audiences
“Deploying more capital—steady lads.”
– Terraform Labs CEO
Do Kwon , reassuring investors that the
stewards of the Terra cryptocurrency ecosystem are working to quell a major crash. Second only to Ethereum in
total value locked , Terra’s $40 Billion in assets are in freefall due to its central UST stablecoin ‘
depegging ’ from the U.S. Dollar.
“The Artwork as a Living System,” a retrospective of works by Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau , opens at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. Included are early A-Life works (image: Interactive Plant Growing , 1992) through the duo’s recent focus on augmented reality —14 interactive installations in total. “Few artists have shaped the transition from the moving image media phase to the living image media like Sommerer and Mignonneau,” note the curatorial team.
OUT NOW :
Hertrich & Miyazaki
Following the Elephant-Nosed Fish
A
research -driven reimagination of the human sensorium that is part theory-poetry and part theory-fiction
The culmination of the Studiotopia program, which embedded 13 artists in labs for 17 months, “Colliding Epistemes” opens at Bozar in Brussels. For their residencies, artists including Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand , Kuang-Yi Ku , and Sandra Lorenzi (image: How to read poetry to cancer cells? , 2022) were paired with quantum physicists, molecular biologists, and other niche researchers, yielding works about “the collision of disciplines, methodologies, and mindsets.”
“Crypto-toys collapse the distinction between a financial and an emotional investment—a necessary maneuver for a digital asset class ultimately backed by nothing more than flows of sentiment.”
– Writer and researcher Richard Woodall, on why some of the biggest NFT projects look like they were made for children. Juvenile aesthetics help “compensate for a lack of utility or fundamental value,” notes Woodall, “encouraging buyers to imbue them with sentimental worth.”
“Our leaders have offered few spaces for reflection, so artists have stepped in to fill the gap.” In her piece on COVID memorials, New York-based writer Jillian Steinhauer considers four exhibitions that “offer us a place to put our grief.” Featured works by Jill Magid , the Zip Code Memory Project , Rafael Lozano-Hemmer , and Coco Fusco in particular (Your Eyes Will Be An Empty Word , 2022, image) go beyond puncturing the anonymity of numbers; they “memorialize those whose stories we don’t know.”
The Processing Foundation , a champion of software literacy within the visual arts and developer of the eponymous creative coding toolkits, announces that it received a record-breaking $10 million in donations in 2021, a majority of which came from artists donating cryptocurrency. This generous support has “allowed the Foundation’s work to become sustainable for the first time,” writes Executive Director Dorothy R. Santos , citing particularly generous artists such as Joshua Davis , Monica Rizzolli , Jared Tarbell , and Lia . Santos further announces that the foundation’s board decided to suspend new Ethereum donations over environmental concerns. Support for Tezos, a more energy-efficient cryptocurrency, will continue.
Bringing together 18 immersive installations that ponder planetary co-existence, “Our Time on Earth” opens at the Barbican, London. To mitigate dread and paralysis felt in the face of compounding environmental crises, guest curators Caroline Till and Kate Franklin selected works that “carve out space to imagine a constructive way forward.” Case in point: Superflux ’ Refuge for Resurgence (2021), a interspecies dinner table “where all living beings are considered equal.”
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