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Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley ’s solo exhibition, “THE SOUL STATION,” opens at Halle am Berghain, Berlin, transforming the iconic club location into an arcade of “ethical, political and moral decision-making” within the “broader structures and histories of marginalization.” Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and curated by Mawena Yehouessi , it surveys Brathwaite-Shirley’s oeuvre of game-based works exploring the Black Trans experience and centres on a newly-created piece that has players contend with their biases through collaboration.
“Previously, you’d develop a software artwork in fits and starts—releasing occasional updates, patches, improvements, new versions, etc. But now, there’s no updates after the big drop.”
– Media artist
Golan Levin , expressing concern that the unforgiving
permanence of blockchain-based generative art is taxing and stressful for artists. “I worry for my brethren that the requirements of blockchain publication are making us artistically constipated,” quips Levin.
“Too Fragile to Hold,” the flagship exhibition of the 2024 Vector Festival, opens at Toronto’s InterAccess . Curated by Miriam Arbus , it features Faisal Karadsheh , Sabrina Ratté , Timur Si-Qin , Wes Viz , and Yoshi Sodeoka working across installation, video, and VR. Broadly, its artworks explore fertile tensions between nature and technology, as evidenced by Montréal duo Aenl ’s /lick (2023, image right), which invites viewers to communicate with digital organisms via a chat interface on computer workstations.
“Her tribute to photojournalists portrays death as an interruption to the continuity of life and a disruption to the mechanical routine of American society—to clock out work, return home, and sit on the sofa to watch that day’s evening show.”
– Critic Nahui Garcia, unpacking the significance of war photography in
Gretchen Bender ’s iconic video installation
Dumping Core (1984). Reviewing Bender’s
show at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles, Garcia hones in on the presence of the
Salvadoran Civil War in the late artist’s work.
“The lights are powered by a hydro-electricity project a thousand miles away, the gas comes from national pipelines, the water drains to one of the largest treatment plants in the country. Alone in my kitchen, I am a continent-spanning colossus.”
– Material scientist and
How Infrastructure Works (2023) author
Deb Chachra , making tangible the basic invisible networks—plumbing, electricity, etc.—that are vital to human agency. In her infrastructure crash course at
Bloomberg Green Festival , Chachra warns about and offers solutions for their long-term resilience and sustainability.
One of the sites where tech blogging started in the 2000s, The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), is back—kind of. Shuttered in 2015, Jay Peters and Sean Hollister report on how TUAW was acquired by Web Orange Limited this year. The hitch: the new owner did not acquire TUAW’s content and used generative AI to rewrite it all—badly—to attract search engine traffic. “Seeing my name on this slop is so fucked,” vents former TUAW blogger Christina Sharp, who discovered recent zombie content had been attributed to her.
“I could no longer enjoy the game. So I retired.”
– 18-time world Go champion
Lee Saedol , describing his emotional response to being defeated in the game he dedicated his life to by
AlphaGo in 2016. “I faced the issues of AI early, but it will happen for others, It may not be a happy ending.” Lee reportedly warned students of their employment prospects at a talk in Seoul.
Delving into the evergreen question of mind-body dualism, “Ghost Outside the Machine” opens at Seoul’s Incheon International Airport. Eight Korean artists including Chan Sook Choi , SANGHEE , Sojung Jun , and Minha Park present (primarily) CGI works exploring postdigital “identity, transience, and migration” across the transit hub. TZUSOO’s Dalle’s Aimy (2024, image), for example, presents vivid posthuman forms generated with DALL-E 2 in an array of lightboxes alongside scenography by OUR LABOUR .
“Ed Fornieles draws intriguing parallels between the ambitions of artists and venture capitalists in their shared pursuit of world-building.”
A survey of post-digital painting across multiple generations, “Between pixel and pigment” opens at Marta Herford in North Rhine-Westphalia (DE). Artists including Charlotte Johannesson , Rafaël Rozendaal , Vera Molnar , Andy Warhol , and Anicka Yi present works that show how digital culture has “influenced materialities and visual media structures.” Austrian artist Peter Kogler , for example, splashes his dense patterns across the gallery walls—blurring the line between his canvases and the venue (image).
Swiss artist collective Fragmentin ’s new installation, HIVE Index (2024), debuts within the “Abelhat [aβeˈʎat]” exhibition at Cairn Art Centre in Digne (FR). Part of a long-term research project led by Apian , Aladin Borioli’s Ministry of Bees, the work critiques how big agriculture exploits bees with the help of technology. A skeletal, hand-like sculpture, LED stock market signifiers at its tips, tightens its grip on a bee colony, while two short films show modern ways of beekeeping—ethical, unethical—and speculate on their stock market value.
“I think a world run by 200-year-old white men would be an appalling place.”
– Computer scientist
Geoffrey Hinton , expressing disgust at the most likely outcome of life extension. Commenting on how septuagenarian inventor and futurist
Ray Kurzweil hopes to live to 2030 and cheat death by ‘merging’ with AI, Hinton acknowledges Kurzweil’s predictions of a
technological singularity seem more plausible post-AI acceleration than they were at the turn of the century.
“All the histories seemed incomplete and some were clearly inaccurate,” writes engineer Steve Leibson of his efforts to find the ‘origin story’ of the printed circuit board (PCB). So for lack of a proper history, he wrote one himself. Leibson reveals the PCB can be traced to the proximity fuse , a post-WW2 device for making explosive munitions more accurate, and that in 1947, the U.S. Army Signal Corps developed an “auto-sembly” technique to mass produce electronic boards (image: tube-based circuit boards, 1949).
“We found that crypto ownership was associated with belief in conspiracy theories and the ‘Dark Tetrad’ of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism.”
– University of Toronto and University of Miami researchers, digging deep into the political, psychological, and social leanings of
HODLers and
degens which, they argue, “might speak to broader global trends in distrust, populism, and cynicism of established institutions, as well as their nonnormative behavioural and society-wide consequences”
OUT NOW :
Seb Franklin
Control
Media theorist
Franklin examines how digitality has reshaped labour, subjectivity, and collectivity in the information economy through analysis of cybernetics, economics, and popular media.
“But a Labour party looking for growth and state renewal over the next few years should recognize that if a government dataset is valuable enough to be worth charging for, it’s even more valuable if it can be built on, improved and reused.”
– TechScape columnist
Alex Hearn , arguing that if the Labour Party gains power in the imminent UK election, they should provide open access to national data. “Free our data, boost growth, and strip friction from our daily lives,” writes Hearn of his desire to see progressive tech policy accompany progressive politics.
“Multiple different materials—including aluminium, minerals and seaweed—seem to have negotiated an agreement to coexist, reacting to one another in an unfolding state of constant flux.”
– Artist and writer
Sean Burns , on the alchemy of
Yunchul Kim ’s “seemingly sentient sculptural installations” currently on view at
798CUBE , Bejing. Engineering marvels that “flirt with us to engage in their seductive displays and quiet drama,” the works “feel demonstrative, lightly asking us to consider new physical and metaphysical possibilities.”
Andrew Russeth reports on the efforts by Rhizome and Cory Arcangel to restore the PowerBook G3 laptop recovered from the 2002 plane crash that killed Luxembourgish artist Michel Majerus . “It’s a true virtual studio,” says Arcangel of the recovered material, including files for the artist’s final solo show and other unrealized exhibitions. Incredibly, Photoshop 6.0 files reveal exactly how Majerus planned paintings. To share his discoveries, Arcangel started a Let’s Play -style video series on YouTube.
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