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“I recently mounted a section of tracking to the ceiling of my home studio so I could be hoisted out of my wheelchair to reach heights and canvas sizes I otherwise wouldn’t be able to access.”
– Painter
Robin Hodgson , on his DIY ceiling lift. A quadriplegic since his teens, creating adaptive tools (including a spray paint gun using a bicycle brake) is part of his practice. “My aim is to develop a unique painting style through new and experimental methods,” Hodgson writes, in a summary of his process.
Exploring how medicine and shamanism can begin to blur into one another, “Post-Human Narratives—In the Name of Scientific Witchery” opens in Hong Kong. Featured artists include Betty Apple , Mayumi Hosokura , and Yu Shuk Pui Bobby , with contributed works ranging from Liv Tsim ’s biomatter fabrications (2022, image) to Florence Lam ’s Zirca , an extremely witchy performance about channeling energy—applying so much of it to materials that they produce light.
“At some point, we’re amassing all this computing power at the consumer level for the sake of amassing this power because we can. Then we just go and use it to stream Netflix.”
– Tech journalist
John Loeffler , commenting on rumoured 200% performance increases in upcoming Nvidia and Intel chips. Concerned about financial accessibility and egregious power consumption he concludes “it’s okay to say, ‘you know, 60 to 70 fps at 1440p is good enough,’ because honestly, it is.”
“Large language models make me think of the profound experience of seeing the earth from space. Maybe AI is the overview effect for humanity. Maybe writing without a computer’s-eye view in this networked world is blinkered or even selfish.”
– Poet, artist, and AI researcher
Sasha Stiles , on her experiments with
GPT-2 and
GPT-3 . “We know that human bias frequently clouds our vision,“ notes the self-proclaimed transhuman translator. “Maybe posthumanism is a way of getting out of our own way.”
Art director Adam Pickard tweets an AI reimagination of Charles and Ray Eames’ iconic short Powers of Ten (1977). The film depicts the relative scale of the universe by order of magnitude based on a factor of 10, first zooming out from Earth, then in to a sub-atomic level. Whereas the filmmakers (masterfully) mixed footage and illustration, Pickard had OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 meditate on 57 text prompts—which are included—and apply the new inpainting feature to fill the gaps.
“The robot broke the child’s finger. This is of course bad.”
– Sergey Lazarev, president of the
Moscow Chess Federation , on a recent
Moscow Open altercation between a chess-playing robot and its seven-year-old opponent. “The child made a move, and after that we need to give time for the robot to answer, but the boy hurried, the robot grabbed him,” Lazarev told TASS news agency, after video of the incident was published on Telegram.
Perhaps the first bike-friendly indoor exhibition (cyclists can enter via a ramp), “bike in head” opens at Städtische Galerie Bremen, Germany. Rather than focus on the aesthetic object, included works by Wolfgang Zach , Anne Krönker , Kosuke Masuda , Aram Bartholl and others shift attention to the bicycle’s entanglement with society and self. Bartholl’s Unlock Life (2020, image), for example, stages tossed rental bikes recovered from the bottom of the Spree river.
“Journalists were actually actively looking for the contrarians. It was really feeding an appetite that was already there.”
– Don Rheem, former environmental journalist turned lobbyist, on his work for the
Global Climate Coalition (GCC). Throughout the ’90s, the fossil fuel interest group challenged the science of global warming by funding climate sceptics. “My role was to identify the voices that were not in the mainstream and to give those voices a stage,” Rheem says.
“It offers access to every file I have, making it an endless rabbit hole,” writes Matylda Krzykowski of Desktop Exhibition: A Curatorial Format (2018, image), in the latest issue of Techniques Journal . For the issue about ‘bordering,’ the Berlin-based deep thinker about space (both online and IRL) ruminates on the intimacy of digital collections, drawing on eclectic references ranging from Elizabethan home layout to Marcel Duchamp’s mini-monograph Boîte-en-valise (1935-41).
Irish CGI artist and filmmaker David OReilly calls OpenAI’s newly announced DALL-E credit system a scam. In an Instagram post (that also circulated widely on Twitter), OReilly argues that paying for an AI image generator trained on uncredited, unpaid creative labour by artists “who never asked to be included in a proprietary learning model” is a “bullshit deal.” “It rips off the past generation for the current one and charges them money for it.”
“Artists represented less than ten percent of the speakers in this week’s Art + Tech summit, meant to kick off Christie’s NFT venture fund. It really should have been called ‘Marketers + CEOs.’”
– Digital art preservationist
Jon Ippolito , sharing his quote (and scorn) that
didn’t get included in an
Observer article where he commented on Christie’s new NFT venture capital fund
What Just Happened :
Yuri Suzuki Broadcasts the “Sound of the Earth” at Triennale Milano and Online
The UK-based artist and designer discusses his geodesic megaspeaker and how sound creates bonds across borders
DOSSIER :
“Close friend François Morellet would refer to Vera and husband François Molnar as un peintre à deux têtes, a two-headed painter.”
– Art historian
Zsofi Valyi-Nagy , sharing an anecdote about the inseparability and linked practices of ‘partners in crime’ Vera Molnar and her late husband François in the 1950-60s
Combining robotic painting methods with Arabic artisanal practices, Liat Grayver and Nora Al-Badri ’s 4-day exhibition “Continuum” opens at Berlin’s transmediale Studio. Together with graffiti artist and computer scientist Daniel Berio , the two Berlin-based media artists explore, reconnect with, and reappropriate the aesthetic(al) heritage of their families’ Baghdad origins through the computational reproduction of calligraphy and ornamentation.
“I would really suggest experimenting with IBM’s public quantum computers using their Qiskit textbook, extracting data from various algorithms and then using that to generate forms using Processing or Unity or another digital software package.”
– Artist
and quantum physicist
Libby Heany , providing a
workflow that anyone (code savvy) could use to start experimenting with quantum computing
Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China, opens with its inaugural exhibition “In the Line of Flight, for Possible Worlds.” Presenting installations, video, and interactive works by key artists including Pierre Huyghe , Tomás Saraceno , and “father of Chinese video art” Zhang Peili , curator Zhang Ga creates a “post-pandemic microcosm” for reflection. Peili’s XL Chamber (2017, image), for example, is an algorithmic ‘trap’ whose shutter doors open and close randomly.
“NFTs create digital ownership based on scarcity and exclusion, which does not align with Minecraft values of creative inclusion and playing together. They create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots.”
–
Minecraft developer
Mojang Studios , announcing their NFT policy for the massively popular online videogame. They argue that “the speculative pricing and investment mentality around NFTs takes the focus away from playing the game and encourages profiteering, which we think is inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players.”
“These withering years are killing trees,” writes climate and ecosystem researcher Daniel Griffin in the New York Times opinion pages. Not your usual op-ed, Griffin’s analysis is bolstered by graphics from Nathaniel Lash , that pan horizontally across the rings of a 500-year-old Mount Pinos Douglas fir, charting its 1538 saplinghood through stifling droughts over the centuries to, troublingly, its missing rings and slivers of growth in several post-2010 years.
“Something that struck me about Dr. Manhattan, is that he’s a melancholic figure. To me this didn’t align with his origins as a white physicist. I began to entertain the idea that Dr. Manhattan had been Black in his past life as a human.”
–
American Artist , on the origins of the metaphysical avatar featuring in his 2019 video
Blue Life Seminar and installation
I’m Blue (If I Was █████ I Would Die) that is modelled after the blue
Watchmen super-being and former LAPD officer
Christopher Dorner
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