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Faith Holland ’s solo exhibition “Death Drive” opens at Microscope, New York, featuring new sculptures, videos, and digital prints that examine technological decay. In the series Death Doula (2023, image), for example, broken laptops, tablets, and smartphones become mycelium habitats that the New York-based artist, in the feminist tradition of the studio kitchen, cultivated in her home refrigerator. Over time, the molds will grow, shape colour, and, Holland muses, may help deteriorate hardware that takes eons to decompose.
“ChatGPT is an advertisement for Microsoft. It’s an advertisement for studio heads, the military, and others who might want to actually license this technology via Microsoft’s cloud services.”
– Signal Foundation president and AI Now Institute co-founder
Meredith Whittaker , on the strategy behind releasing generative AI to the public. “It costs billions of dollars to create and maintain these systems head-to-tail,” Whittaker says. “There isn’t a business model in simply making ChatGPT available for everyone equally. The technology is going to follow the current matrix of inequality.”
“It underscores the idea of the private space sector as a plaything for the ultra-rich.”
–
Art in America Associate Editor
Emily Watlington , critiquing Jeff Koons’
Moon Phases (2023, image), which will send 125 sculptures by the American artist to the Moon on a SpaceX rocket
“This is our generation’s moon landing, a mobilization of workers and resources on a planetary scale that would only be possible through international cooperation to an extent never achieved.”
– Australian architect and filmmaker
Liam Young , on humanity meeting the ultimate challenge of atmospheric carbon sequestration in his and consulting scientist
Holly Jean Buck ’s forthcoming docu-fiction
The Great Endeavor (2023)
Amsterdam’s Nxt Museum launches “Realtime,” a rotating showcase of digital artworks in its biggest space, Nxt Stage, that is updated every season. In the first iteration, “Lilypads: Mediating Exponential Systems,” curator Charlotte Kent considers hybrid ecologies with works by Amelia Winger Bearskin , Libby Heaney , and Entangled Others Studio . In her piece Q is for Climate (?) (2023, image), for example, Heaney draws on interviews with scientists and quantum computing to render radical, climate-positive futures.
”Does money corrupt art?”—“No, lack of money does.”
– Swiss curator and critic
Hans Ulrich Obrist , asking American multimedia artist and filmmaker
Lynn Hershman Leeson the perennial question. In the latest entry to Obrist’s ongoing interview series for
Gagosian Quarterly , Leeson delivers a number of zingers as well as insight into her past and current practice. “I’m working on the final part of
The Cyborgian Rhapsody , a project I began in 1996 about the evolution of AI and how it affects identity and culture,” she reveals. “Part 4 was written and performed by a GPT-3 chatbot that thinks it looks and sounds like me thirty years ago.”
With an impressive 259 pieces on display, the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum survey “Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements (1960-2022)” in Düren (DE) celebrates the corruption of the printed page. Curator Moritz Küng assembles “hermetic, dysfunctional, and mysterious” exploits by Irma Blank , Olafur Eliasson , Dora Garcia , Olaf Nicolai , Ilan Manouach , David C. Stairs (image: Boundless , 1983), and many others that refuse legibility and create meaning with the absence of content instead.
“Metaverse Landscapes ” and “Uncomputables ,” a pair of solo shows by New Zealander Simon Denny and Polish artist Agnieszka Kurant , open at Kunstverein Hannover (DE). The former features Denny drawing on landscape and abstract painting tropes to map the immaterial territory of crypto platforms in oil paintings (image: Metaverse Landscape 7: Somnium Space Small #138 , 2023), while the latter showcases Kurant’s “quasi-alchemical transmutations” in sculpture (image: Post-Fordite 2021-22) and code.
“A lot of people have just been kind of really mad at the existence of this. They think that it’s the end of humanity.”
– Influencer
Caryn Marjorie , on the backlash to
CarynAI , a GPT-4 chatbot trained on her YouTube footage. “I wanted to cure loneliness in my fan base,” Marjorie says of her motivations. While thousands have signed up for the $1 per minute ‘virtual girlfriend’ Telegram bot through
Forever Voices , threats forced her to hire security and go into hiding.
“Game Society,” an exhibition that explores “how the grammar and aesthetics of video games have influenced contemporary art and visual culture,” opens at Seoul’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). Artists including Cory Arcangel & Paper Rad , Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley , Harun Farocki , and Lawrence Lek contribute 30 game-based works. Notably, LuYang presents 10 works, in a dedicated room full of arcade cabinets, adorned with murals featuring her signature demented characters (image).
An exhibition for the post-truth era, Trevor Paglen ’s “You’ve Just Been Fucked by PSYOPS” opens at Pace New York. In it, the American artist charts the “enduring effects of military and CIA influence operations on American culture” through several new works. These include an unknown orbital object photo series, and Because Physical Wounds Heal… (2022, image right), a mixed media—steel, bullets, resin—sculpture that mythologizes the iconography, sloganeering, and abject horror of U.S. psychological warfare .
“Fire isn’t going away. We’re going to be burning for this entire century. We’re going through a global regime change and a whole bunch of things are going to catch on fire, and catch on fire again.”
–
John Vaillant , American-Canadian writer and author of
Fire Weather (2023), discussing the wildfires currently raging in Alberta, Canada, as a sign of things to come. “This is a global shift,” he notes. “It’s an epochal shift, and we happen to be alive for it.”
Copenhagen Contemporary opens “Yet, It Moves!,” a city-wide exhibition of art-science encounters that explore the universe’s only constant: movement. Eleven artists including Cecilia Bengolea , Ryoji Ikeda , Black Quantum Futurism , Jakob Kudsk Steensen (image: Tongues of Verglas , 2023), and Jenna Sutela worked with leading researchers through Arts at CERN , ModLab , DARK , and the IMC to express phenomena like black holes, star formation, and gravitational waves as 3D animations, VR, AR, sound, and immersive installations.
“I’ve come to see these technologies as intrinsically antihuman. How far back do we have to go to find technology that’s not about controlling nature? You have to go back to fucking Indigenous people and permaculture. That’s the future.”
– American media theorist
Douglas Rushkoff , on his Silicon Valley disillusionment. “It’s not just
Look what they did to my song ,” the former techno-optimist tells journalist
Malcom Harris . “It’s that the song itself is corrupt.”
OUT NOW :
Christiane Paul
Digital Art (World of Art)
The forth edition of the
digital art curator ’s acclaimed 2003 survey includes recent developments like AI, augmented and mixed realities, and NFTs (and features pioneer
Caudia Hart on the cover).
“If, like Palantir, your hands appear dirty or at least your image seems tarnished, one redeeming way to attract public attention would be to sponsor an art exhibition. The principle, epitomized by the gas company Gazprom or the pharmaceutical company Sackler, is also known as ‘Art Washing.’”
– Five artists (and 600 additional signatories), in an open letter chastising the Leipzig exhibition “
Dimensions: Digital art since 1859 ” for accepting sponsorship from unscrupulous American surveillance software contractor
Palantir
Old Tree , a sculptural intervention into New York City’s urban fabric by Pamela Rosenkranz , takes root on the High Line. By constructing the primordial symbol of life and knowledge out of man-made materials (the 7.5 m sculpture is a steel armature layered with foam and resin), and coating in a hot pink and red paint job that starkly contrasts the surrounding monochromatic skyscrapers, the Swiss artist acknowledges both a romanticized ecology and a world “in which the synthetic has become nature.”
Jan Robert Leegte ’s solo exhibition ”No Content: Contemplations on Software” opens at Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam, examining digital media through “the carrier and reality that holds it.” JPEG (2023), for example, is a series of algorithmic images that fully express the signature compression; Broken Images (2023) foregrounds the volatility of digital assets by minting broken links as NFTs, and Scrollbars (image)—a Leegte classic—presents obsolete interface elements as sculptural and cultural debris.
“The sculptural interventions are like looking glasses. You bring to it what you see. There isn’t an image. It’s not an object. It basically is a relational perceptual device. As you move around, it collapses the environment.”
– Artist, architect, and
Minimaforms co-founder Theodore Spyropoulos, on the spherical configurations at the centre of the studio’s “
The Order of Time ” exhibition that’s currently on view at the Architectural Association School of Architecture Gallery, London
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