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“Could this be your new signature scent? Sample it on your skin. My algorithm feels confident that it can deliver you the computer conjured scent of your dreams.”
“My version of feminist, queer, trans-affirmative politics is not about policing. I don’t think we should become the police. I’m afraid of the police.”
“Quantum Soup,” a solo show surveying Libby Heaney’s sustained exploration of quantum physics-informed aesthetics, opens at Basel’s House of Electronic Art (HEK). Curated by Sabine Himmelsbach, the show presents CGI works by the British artist including ENT– (2022) and slimeQrawl (2023), and her mournful VR experience Heartbreak and Magic (2024). Heaney “visually tests scientific concepts such as contextuality, entanglement, and superposition, making them accessible,” writes Himmelsbach.
Mohawk multimedia artist Skawennati’s new machinima, They Sustain Us (2024), premieres at Gray Area, San Francisco, expanding a music video built and filmed in Second Life into an IRL garment collection and runway performance. Two years in the making and Gray Area’s biggest commission to date, the piece reimagines Three Sisters, beloved personifications of Indigenous staple crops (corn, beans, squash) as futuristic superheroes that celebrate food sovereignty, sustainability, and femininity.
Threading connectivity in red, Chiharu Shiota’s “Everyone, a Universe” opens at Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. True to her signature delicate network aesthetic, the Japanese artist wires up 43 chairs purchased at a flea market and two thousand skeins of wool into the show’s titular work (2024, image). “Perhaps death is not a return to nothing but, rather, a matter of integrating ourselves,” says Shiota of her preoccupation with mortality and universal interconnection.
“Apple selectively restricts access to the points of connection between third-party apps and the iPhone’s operating system, degrading the functionality of non-Apple apps and accessories.”
Madhumita Murgia
Code Dependent
“This new report represents an immediate call for greater investment in infrastructure development, more promotion of repair and reuse, capacity building, and measures to stop illegal e-waste shipments.”
“Maybe creating practices and transmitting them through physical, social embodiment is actually a more resilient structure than any particular media might be.”
Consumer advocates Public Citizen release “Mushrooming Risk,” a report on the danger of AI tools to foragers. Spurned by recent hospitalizations, researcher Rick Claypool outlines the folly of using apps to identify species and gauge edibility. “Mushroomers must take the time to develop their skills at their own pace,” he writes, championing local knowledge over app reliance. Experimenting with DALL-E compounded his fear; when he prompted it to label basic mushroom anatomy, it hallucinated utter nonsense (image).
“Ten Thousand Suns,” the 24th edition of the Biennale of Sydney opens at venues across the New South Wales capital. Artists including Mona Al Qadiri, Dumb Type, Özgür Kar, and Lawrence Lek are featured at the White Bay Power Station flagship exhibition, which repurposes the former coal-fired facility as a cultural hub. Excitingly, Australian cyberfeminism originators VNS Matrix present a selection of their works from the last four decades on banners, displays, and zines throughout the venue (image).
“A default move within contemporary art over the past two decades: defunctionalized objects pulled out of usual circulation or infrastructural location appear to offer a kind of freezing and deictic insight.”
“Universal / Remote,” a show chronicling how “capital and data flow freely on a global scale,” opens at the National Art Center Tokyo (NACT). Artists including Xu Bing, Maiko Jinushi, Trevor Paglen, and Evan Roth contribute works addressing globalization and social atomization. Hito Steyerl, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, and Miloš Trakilović stage their video installation Mission Accomplished: Belanciege (2019, image), a sardonic reflection on post-Berlin Wall European culture—and the luxury brand Balenciaga.
“László Moholy-Nagy telephoned instructions to a factory in the 1920s to produce images without the need to be on-site to direct production.”
“The line, when regarded close up, does not have the sweeping fluency or charm of the human hand, of a Matisse, for instance, whom some of the linear portraits seem to be channelling.”
UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery opens “Bodily Autonomy,” Lauren Lee McCarthy’s largest solo show in the U.S. to date. Curator Ceci Moss brings together two major series of works—Surrogate (2022) and Saliva (2022)—in which the Chinese-American artist examines bio-surveillance through performances, videos, and installations. A newly commissioned Saliva Bar, for example, invites visitors to reflect on data privacy, race, gender, and class as they pertain to genetic material over traded spit samples.
“We’d have kept our fossil fuel funding sponsors AND curated poetry competitions on climate change if it wasn’t for those pesky school strike kids.”
“So literally, I was like, what the fuck? Get these down. What are you doing? It’s as if I was the head of Gucci, and there’s all these knockoffs.”
Underscoring the direness of the climate crisis, Oliver Ressler’s “Dog Days Bite Back” opens at Belvedere 21 in Vienna. Featured are works spanning photography, film, and installation by the Austrian artist that lament the state of stalled climate policy and fossil fuel crony capitalism run amok. His 2-channel video installation Climate Feedback Loops (2023, image), for example, starkly documents the ice melt around Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago that is rapidly disappearing into the Arctic Ocean.
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