“Our stuff can be broken down into ingredients, of which concrete and aggregates take a gargantuan share…. Then come bricks, asphalt and metals. On this scale, plastics are a minor ingredient—yet their mass is still greater, now, than that of all animals on Earth.”
“It really started as a joke… I didn’t understand the game mechanics and how realistic the in-game lava and fire were, so my house burned down.”
Light artist Christopher Bauder teases the construction of DARK MATTER, a permanent home for seven of his iconic kinetic light sculptures, including Polygon Playground (2008), Grid (2013), and Inverse, a new site-specific piece. Built across from Bauder’s studio in East Berlin, the 1,000 square-meter “world of light, space, and sound” is set to open in 2021 and will be equal parts admission-funded exhibition space and research laboratory.
“The networks that determine artistic success are largely invisible to practitioners—even insiders see only specific segments of it. We relied on big data to map these networks out and remarkably, we find artistic success highly predictable.”
While many express outrage over the environmental impact of Non-Fungible Token (NFT) -based art, Memo Akten shows you the receipts. Building on an impassioned Twitter thread and Medium post, Akten has created a web app that calculates the ecological cost of tracking sales and bids on the blockchain for individual pieces of art distributed through SuperRare. Fire up the site, a random artwork is selected, and you’ll see its environmental impact as measured in number of flights or weeks of an average EU resident’s electricity consumption.
“TRANSFER is operating on a different timescale than most galleries trying to turn a profit to keep their doors open. The gallery exists to help bring artworks into the world, but our motivation is never around selling work in the short-term.”
Curated by Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Maya Allison “to be viewed in the palm of your hand,” N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi Art Gallery’s first virtual exhibition “not in, of, along, or relating to a line” opens on your phone. Organised like a “decentralized network diagram,” the show charts forking paths through 16 born-digital artworks by, among others, Cao Fei, Eva and Franco Mattes, Lee Blalock, Maryam Al Hamra, and Sophia Al-Maria. Among the highlights: a new entry to Addie Wagenknecht’s Opsec and Beauty YouTube series (image) that was specially commissioned for this show.
“UNINVITED brings to life a new being, born of the combination of surveillance data with the hallucinatory state experienced by many device systems when infected with a virus.”
The Society For Non-Trivial Pursuits (S4NTP, affiliated with UdK Berlin’s Generative Art class) launches “Future Voices,” a one-year-long radio broadcast generated from people’s “hopes, fears, and dreams,” uploaded as audio recordings from around the world. Commissioned for Berlin’s CTM Festival, the project hopes to amplify “voices that would otherwise remain unheard within an attention economy that favours loudness, provocation, and conspiracy theories.”
“Twitter and Facebook and other platforms are now trying to put the genie back in the bottle. They could have done something long before, but they chickened out. And they created a monster.”
Tony Longson
(1948–2021)
Golan Levin & Tega Brain
Code as Creative Medium
“What distinguishes workmanship, craft, and making from industry is uncertainty. There’s a ‘risk’ in the process that resolves between the maker’s discernment and dexterity.”
“What if satellites were art?” Régine Debatty recounts her visit to “Unseen Stars,” Trevor Paglen’s (temporarily closed) solo exhibition at OGR Torino in Turin, Italy. Revisiting his spacefaring sculpture Orbital Reflector (2018), the show comprises a series of non-functional satellites Paglen designed together with aerospace engineers. Their featureless mirror-surfaces demonstrate what space exploration could look like if, as Debatty puts it, “it were not guided by nationalism, global surveillance, and industrial logics.”
