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“The current AI craze is a result of a toxic surveillance business model. It is not the result of novel scientific approaches that, like the printing press, fundamentally shifted a paradigm.”
– Signal Foundation president
Meredith Whittaker , describing AI products as an
intensification of surveillance capitalism. Accepting the
2024 Helmut Schmidt Future Prize in Hamburg, Whittaker warns that generative AI “must be understood, primarily, as a way of marketing the derivatives of mass surveillance.”
“You got literal plastic milk crates, put a PC motherboard in there, and then zip-tied the GPUs to the edges so that you had air circulating. There was this spectacular folk engineering-slash-vernacular techno aesthetic that I love that you just don’t get any more.”
– Blockchain artist
Rhea Myers , recalling the DIY Bitcoin and Dogecoin mining rigs she encountered in the 2013 Vancouver crypto scene. In dialogue with
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy , the artists share anecdotes from the early days of crypto art and NFTs.
Igor Štromajer aka intima commemorates the 13th anniversary of his ritualistic Expunction performance on social media. From May 11 to June 16, 2011, the Slovenian media artist perma-deleted 37 of his net art pieces produced between 1996 and 2007, including acquisitions by the Centre Pompidou, Ars Electronica, and the Computer Fine Arts Gallery. Purging one artwork per day, Štromajer erased his personal history, asking questions about temporality, access, and memory as deception.
Named after Hito Steyerl ’s iconic 2013 video essay , “How Not to Be Seen” opens at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon (CA). Artists including Nick Cave , Zach Blas , Sondra Perry , and Steyerl present works that question the ubiquitous surveillance that “monitors and evaluates our actions, needs, and desires.” Demonstrating the show’s titular prompt, Canadian artist Sandra Brewster ’s Blur Grid (2016-19, image) presents photos of Black individuals in motion, where each subject resists legibility.
“77% of respondents believe global temperatures will reach at least 2.5C above preindustrial levels, a devastating degree of heating; almost half—42%—think it will be more than 3C.”
–
Guardian environmental editor Damian Carrington, parsing a
major survey of 380 of the world’s leading climate scientists, harrowing expert testimonials included. “1.5C is a political game—we were never going to reach this target,” said one participant; “The world’s response to date is reprehensible—we live in an age of fools,” said another.
Presenting a panorama five years in the making, teamLab ’s “The World of Irreversible Change” opens at Pace New York. Its single titular work depicts “an anonymous city during an unspecified epoch” on a black-painted wall in a pitch black space. The projection features figures moving through an idyllic village scene that viewers can watch or disrupt. First shown at Japan’s Aomori Museum of Art in 2022, the New York iteration of the animation responds to local time and weather conditions.
Showcasing his research into fabrication and digital form, Connor MacKinnon ’s “CGish” opens at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art in Kelowna (CA). The Canadian artist presents three arrays of sculptures that play with “notions of variability and multiplicity within a defined system.” Included are Historical Fictions , a series of faux ancient vessels (2022, image foreground), and Algorithmic Tools , a set of generative power tools (2021, image background).
Dagmar Schürrer ’s solo exhibition “Symbiotic Synchrony” opens at SOMA, Berlin, inaugurating the gallery’s two-year ”Becoming Future” program with post-digital meditations on consciousness, ecology, and technology. Curated by Peer to Space ’s Peggy Schoenegge, the show comprises digital animations, large-scale projections, and mixed reality applications that explore the scientific concepts of symbiosis and neural synchrony by conjuring CGI metaorganisms and bespoke hybrid experiences.
“But to change the primary definition of nature from ‘as opposed to humans’ to ‘including humans’ will require more people to use the word in a way that reflects how humans are intertwined with the whole web of life.”
– Ecologist
Tom Oliver , describing the endgame for
We Are Nature , a campaign to shift the commonly understood definition of ‘nature’ to
include humans rather than be something
distinct from humankind
A current slice of born-digital, code-based art co-presented with objkt.one , “Web as a Medium” opens at NEORT++, Tokyo. Ten international artists including 0xhaiku , exonemo , Damjanski , Jan Robert Leegte , Joan Heemskerk , Leander Herzog , Violet Forest , and Yehwan Song contribute newly created works that speak to the Web’s nascent artistic capacity as well as its legacy. Case in point: Jan Robert Leegte’s 2024 JavaScript restoration of his obsolete Adobe Flash artwork Text Document out of Focus (2008, image).
A retrospective featuring experiential installations designed by the Icelandic–Danish artist over three decades, “Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey” opens at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM). Some included works invite play and movement, like the colourful body-tracker Multiple Shadow House (2010), while others provoke, like The glacier melt series 1999/2019 (2019), a time-lapse photo grid that starkly illustrates how global warming has ravaged the Icelandic landscape (image).
“I love my human friends because they are not programmed to care about me, and they do anyway. Take that away, and I might as well be chatting with my Roomba.”
– Tech columnist
Kevin Roose , on the current—lacking—generation of AI companions. “I worry that some of these apps are simply distracting users from their loneliness,” Roose writes after extensive experimentation. “But if they can be made responsibly, I could get behind the use of AI companions as social simulators—a safe, low-stakes way to practice conversational skills.” [quotes edited]
MacKenzie Art Gallery’s online exhibition “Wake Windows: The Witching Hour” goes live with interactive and time-based works that highlight “the missing datasets in our collective understanding of the labour that is mothering.” Led by a rebellious AI chatbot, the Rea McNamara -curated show traces how care work has shifted the outputs of eight artists that are parents, caregivers, and educators including Alejandra Higuera, Faith Holland & Ben Bogart , Wednesday Kim , Lauren Lee McCarthy , Rory Scott , and Skawennati .
“The silver CDs are commercial discs with music, movies, audiobooks, porn, Jesus, Celine Dion. Everything. The green are CDRs, so they’re recordable. They contain whatever people valued enough to put on them, whether it’s a Grateful Dead concert or a mix.”
– American artist
Tara Donovan , describing the 200,000+ CDs she used to build sculptures. Discussing her
New York show , she frames the media format as “the last quantifiable object of data that exists. We moved from filing cabinets to clouds.”
“The evidence does not support the claim of win-wins or triple wins for environment, economy and people often made for market mechanisms as a policy response to environmental problems.”
– University of Helsinki researcher
Maria Brockhaus , on a major global study that debunks market-based solutions to deforestation and poverty. Filed by the
International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO), the report urges a “radical rethink” of trade and finance-driven initiatives which it shows have failed to deliver for the environment and people.
Maria Roszkowska’s new installation Fire Season (2024) debuts within the eco-critical group exhibition “La Flamme” (The Flame) at Mains d’Œuvres arts center in Saint-Ouen (FR). In her illustrated (and live) display of plants that thrive in the Pyrocene , the Polish artist-researcher and DISNOVATION.ORG member explores how five pioneer species excel at climate resiliency. Fire lily , for example, only flowers after fire, Roszkowska notes, and within nine days produces scarlet blossoms that, poetically, resemble flames.
“While many of the former colonial powers are busily engaging in critical self-examination–or artwashing , depending on how you look at it–the newer pavilions tend to exude a certain national pride and optimism.”
–
Nordic Art Review Editor
Mariann Enge , on the Venice Biennale’s national pavilions. Weighing tensions including Indigenous representation, the shuttered
Israeli pavilion , and the Biennale debut of formerly-colonized countries, Enge asks if it’s productive to frame global art as emanating from nation-states in 2024.
Bringing meticulously constructed film sets into the white cube, Bob Demper ’s “In Tall Buildings” opens at 1646 in The Hague. The Dutch artist presents several scenes—a bland boardroom, a marble-adorned lobby—and excerpts from 5000 Miles , his ongoing feature film project about an asset manager that (algorithmically) controls 10% of the world’s wealth. Inviting visitors to contemplate the seat(s) of power, Demper illustrates “how the risk taken by the corporate world is almost always a public risk.”
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