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Generative art NFT platform fxhash announces a new feature that “enables collectors to collaborate in the creative process.” Entitled fx(params), the functionality allows artists to designate certain parameters (e.g. colour, geometry, velocity) within their code as adjustable for primary market buyers. Instead of leaving an NFT’s appearance entirely to chance, the collector can tweak the artist’s system to their liking before minting their copy (image: fx(params) interface for 1mpo$ter’s Smash , 2023).
“Thin Air,” the inaugural exhibition at The Beams London opens, featuring installations by artists 404.zero , James Clar , Robert Henke , Kimchi and Chips with Rosa Menkman , Matthew Schreiber , and S E T U P . Taking full advantage of the venue’s cavernous 5,100 square metres of high-ceilinged post-industrial space, the show presents large-scale immersive spectacle “at the boundaries of light, sound, and space” for visitors to soak up, explore, and lose themselves in (image: 404.zero 324 , 2023).
“Without novel human artworks to populate new datasets, AI systems will, over time, lose touch with a kind of ground truth. Might the next version of DALL-E be forced to cannibalize its predecessor?”
– Artist and writer
K Allado-McDowell , exploring possible side effects of the AI revolution. “To adapt, artists must imagine new approaches that subvert, advance or corrupt these new systems,” writes Allado-McDowell. “In the 21st century, art will not be the exclusive domain of humans or machines but a practice of weaving together different forms of intelligence.”
Nile Koetting ’s solo exhibition “Unattended Access” opens at Parliament Gallery in Paris, inviting viewers to consider the material internet and spectatorship inside his playground of 3D-printed miniatures of monitors, display machines, and theatres. Cherry script (2023, image), for example, imagines banal exhibition and office chatter as text chat animations on a pair of e ink displays. “Koetting presents to us the ultimate spectacle,” the gallery states. “There is no avoiding the infinite mirror here.”
“The breakneck deployment of half-baked AI, and its unthinking adoption by a load of credulous writers, means that Google—where, admittedly, I’ve found the quality of search results to be steadily deteriorating for years—is no longer a reliable starting point for research.”
Honouring his Mexican heritage and the Latinx community in San Francisco, “TECH-MECHS,” a survey of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ’s interactive installations opens at Gray Area. Featured are lyrical works like Pulse Topology (2021, image), in which 3000 dangling LEDs blink the varying rhythms of visitors’ recorded heartbeats, as well as bleaker perspectives on mortality and self-sovereignty, such as Sway (2016), an upside-down noose that moves from side to side “every time ICE arrests a person, like a metronome.”
“MySpace had neither the edge of a New York City digital media startup. Nor the loose libertarian spirit of Silicon Valley.”
– American writer
Joanne McNeil , recalling a more innocent era of social media. In the first episode of
Main Accounts , her new podcast on the rise and fall of
MySpace in the 2000s, McNeil engages journalists
Julie Angwin and
Taylor Lorenz about the social network’s spyware-adjacent origins and its infamous 2005 sale to News Corp.
Brazilian researchers report the finding of “plastic rocks” on the remote island of Trindade , part of a volcanic archipelago about 1,100 kilometres off mainland Brazil. Chemical tests revealed the main pollutant forming these plastiglomerates to be synthetic fishing nets that wash ashore and ‘melt’ into the sediment when temperatures rise. “This is new and terrifying at the same time, because pollution has reached geology,” says Fernanda Avelar Santos, a geologist at the Federal University of Parana.
“It’s a question of permanence. What will last the longest? What will give me the strongest sense of comfort that a work will exist well beyond my lifetime?”
Internet artist, former Rhizome co-editor, and are.na co-founder John Michael Boling resurrects his 2007 net art piece 20 Years Ago Today along with other parts of 53 os , a collaborative mid-2000s catalogue of GIFs, videos, and quirky web experiments. Cleverly, 20 Years Ago Today moves a playing YouTube panorama sequence across the browser canvas at matching speed, resulting in what net art pioneer Olia Lialina , then, praised as “a shining example of distributed work and tactful appropriation.”
OUT NOW :
Meredith Broussard
More than a Glitch
Interpreting glitches as a “signal that we need to redesign our systems,” data journalist
Broussard highlights algorithmic biases against race, gender, and ability across the tech sector—and suggests a path forward to a more equitable future.
“The very existence, even the idea of artificial intelligence, is a doorway to acknowledging multiple forms of intelligence and infinite kinds of intelligence, and therefore a radical decentering of the human, which has always accompanied our ideas about AI — but mostly incredibly fearfully.”
Lorna Mills ’ solo exhibition “The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common Part 1” opens online at distant.gallery, populating your browser canvas with dozens of Mill’s eccentric GIFs. Hosted in collaboration with TRANSFER gallery, LA-based curator Kelani Nichole ’s digital art imprint and long-time Mills representative, the show also serves as an in-browser gathering for net art enthusiasts: “COME TO THE OPENING,” the Canadian media artist tweeted to her followers. “BE A GIF. BE A FUCKING GIF.”
“Immured like rarefied noctiluca or sliced geodes, these TVs are glitzy shells dramatizing media’s narcotic visualizations with Bender’s surgical editing amplifying the violence of homogenizing logics.”
– Critic Alex Bennett, on
Gretchen Bender ’s “fierce use of film and television as source material” that’s currently
on view at Sprüth Magers , London. The “Image World” solo exhibition presents the American artist’s
TV Text & Image series and other single- and multi-channel video works from the 1980s and ’90s on CRT monitors and television sets.
“If your world view is ‘somebody’s out to get me and I need to protect myself from them.’ Well, then you view everything through that lens.”
– Baylands CEO
Greg Vilkin , dismissing recent American paranoia that
15-minute city -style urban planning infringes on civil liberties. The developer observes decreasing our reliance on cars makes a statement: “I buy society’s rules as part of something I have to do to be part of an active community.”
“Congratulations to everyone who wanted to be bankless, you got what you wanted.”
– American artist
Addie Wagenknecht , subtweeting crypto enthusiasts as the collapse of
Silicon Valley Bank wreaks havoc across the financial
and the DeFi sector. On March 10, the California tech lender was shut down by regulators “after a stunning 48 hours in which a bank run and a capital crisis led to the second-largest failure of a financial institution in US history,” as
CNN reports .
London-based light and media art collective United Visual Artists (UVA) celebrates the 20th anniversary of their studio genesis: Tasked with the (now iconic) stage design of Massive Attack’s 100th Window world tour (2003-4), UVA founders Chris Bird, Matt Clark, and Ash Nehru developed LED typographic displays for politically charged, location-specific real-time data feeds. “At the time, our way of working together was unique,” they write on Instagram. “It went on to inform our practice and studio culture.”
“Neurography [is] the process of framing and capturing images in latent spaces. The Neurographer controls locations, subjects and parameters.”
– German AI artist
Mario Klingemann , citing a tweet from January 2017 in which he first introduced the now more common descriptor. “I coined the term when it became obvious that latent spaces will become a new medium,” Klingemann writes, after fellow digital artist
Matt DesLauriers and others pondered its origin.
Berlin-based media artist Aram Bartholl plants a towering heart emoji, or Triangle of Sadness (2023), outside of Stadtgalerie Kiel, Germany, as part of the gallery’s “Tourismus. Let’s do it all” group exhibition. The latest in Bartholl’s series of supersized Internet iconography (Map , 2006-19, This is Fine , 2022) deals with the performative aspects of travel in age of platform capitalism and calls attention to the social cost of algorithmically driven content production and consumption cycles.
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