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“We have all taken photos like these—bad lighting, out of focus, glaring flash, poor composition. You know, MySpace.”
–
Tobias Revell , pondering the unnerving mediocrity of CGI artist Blitter’s
Mundane Renders (2020)
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration releases the first image showing how light is polarized at the edge of a black hole. The swirling, striated articulations around Messier 87 ’s supermassive black hole map magnetic fields that extend more 100,000 light-years from the object. The imaging resolution required ”is equivalent to that needed to measure the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon,“ write the researchers.
“You cannot have a discussion about creating new online curatorial spaces on an app that is only accessible for people with an iPhone.”
OUT NOW :
Dora Vrhoci & Florian Weigl
Art and Care
A reflection on the curatorial research behind “To Mind Is To Care,” an exhibition and “interdisciplinary study of care,” shown at V2_, Rotterdam’s Lab for the Unstable Media, earlier in the year
“Like mushrooms themselves, the font changes unpredictably, illustrating how fungi can be both an aesthetic and a methodology for rethinking how images and objects can form and grow.”
Marking their 15th anniversary, Rhizomatiks ’ first major solo show opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT). “Rhizomatiks_multiplex” celebrates the collective’s fluency across mediums, presenting data visualization, stage design and choreography (image: Reframe 2019 , for the pop trio Perfume ), music videos, and installations. Picking up on their preoccupation with how “our bodies oscillate between the virtual and the real,” the exhibition is itself hybrid—an online component augments the MOT programming.
“We’re in the CompuServe age of this stuff. Like, we haven’t even gone to AOL or MySpace or, you know, even Facebook yet in terms of lineages, of how technologies develop.”
–
Gray Area Executive Director
Barry Threw , on the transformative potential of NFTs. “It’s an asset bubble, it’s a hype bubble, and it provides some opportunity for artists to have some traction,” Threw explains. “[But] it’s a market that’s just as interested in buying memes as it is in buying art.”
“One of the more exciting calls I get as an artist working in the field of new media is for editorial illustration work. It’s rare .” In a Medium post, software artist Zach Lieberman unpacks the cover and secondary artworks he created for this week’s New York Times Magazine . To accompany Kashmir Hill’s deep dive on Clearview AI and face recognition, Lieberman built on an earlier face fragmentation sketch , because “it feels like these companies are building portraits of us that are unsettlingly made from disparate pieces.”
“In South America—especially in the Andean region—the preferred way to store information was in textiles. Pre-Colombian people tied knots in string-based devices to keep records.”
NFT marketplace Feral File launches with “Social Codes,” a specially commissioned exhibition curated by American software artist and Feral co-founder Casey Reas . New generative works by ten digital artists including Andrew Benson , Anna Carreras (Arrels , image), and Raven Kwok explore software becoming social. Similarly, Bitmark -backed Feral File aims to “establish transparent protocols for exhibiting and collecting file-based art” with the media art community in mind.
“From the beginning, we were trying to make artworks without boundaries. In 2004, before we could realize truly immersive spaces, we displayed artwork using five screens in a row. People could walk around in front of it.”
–
TeamLab co-founder Toshiyuki Inoko, on the humble beginnings of the ultra-technologist art collective that has shaken up the world’s experience economy [quote edited]
At the recommendation of the UNESCO’s National Commission, Germany declares the Demoscene a cultural heritage. The decision acknowledges the country’s long tradition as one of the niche computer culture’s hotspots, where, for decades, international gatherings (so-called demoparties) have brought together programmers, artists, and musicians for eccentric creative coding competitions. “Most forms of digital culture are short-lived,” states Tobias Kopka of Digitale Kultur . “Active for over 30 years, the Demoscene is alive and well.”
“My money came from crypto, and it’s great that I’m able to do the same thing—change someone’s life—and touch millions of people. The idea’s in the mainstream now, it’s going to bring a lot of artists to NFTs, and they’re going to make their first $1,000, first $5,000—just like I did in 2013.”
The fourth edition of “ECOSS: Ecosystems of the Unexpected” opens at Santa Mònica Arts Center , Barcelona, pondering “how much of what we consider nature is in fact a simulation.” Featuring inter-species installations by Nathalie Gebert , Paula Bruna , Anna Rierola , María Castellanos & Uh513 Collective (image: Beyond Human Perception , 2020), the show takes visitors through seeded topographies, microscopy of cellular self-regulation mechanisms, and prosthetic objects that communicate with and care for plants.
“It’s a grimly funny gesture, a reminder that the tools used to measure the quickening pace of climate change are contributing to that acceleration just as much as the tools used to mine crypto.”
In the second of a three-post series revealing their spatial computing roadmap, Facebook Researchers reveal in-progress gestural and neural interfaces. One demo shows expressive wrist and finger control mediated by a watch-like wearable reminiscent of the Myo armband ; supporting concept videos telegraph aspirations for neural keyboards and that old AR chestnut: a user manipulating GUI elements in 3D space in front of them. However far off the tech is, it’s immediately satisfying to watch one of the researchers gush about the shiny future of neural interfaces where “you and the machine are in agreement about which neurons mean left and which ones mean right” without any mention of data harvesting or his employer’s long history of malfeasance.
Simon Denny ’s solo exhibition “Mine” opens at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York City, disentangling “data mining, mineral mining, and the mechanization of labor.” The show brings together recent works, like Denny’s massive cardboard mining machines clad in cartoony videogame textures, as well as newer ones: the artist’s 2021 sculpture of a patented Amazon delivery drone comes alive with an animated AR model of a mineral-rich Earth that is drawn from mineral mining propaganda.
“It was a remarkable turn of events. The relationships behind Clearview AI had germinated at an event celebrating Trump. Now, four years later, the app was being deployed in a domestic crackdown on lawbreaking Trump supporters.”
– Reporter
Kashmir Hill , uncovering the controversial facial recognition start-up’s secretive origins, the legal and ethical limits of its
AI-powered technology , and how its success in identifying U.S. Capitol rioters changed (some) opinions
A survey of painting and sculpture in the post-digital age, “The Artist Is Online” opens at König Galerie, Berlin. Showing 70 works by 50 ‘at home on social media’ artists such as Gretchen Andrew , Ben Elliot , Miao Ying , and Chloe Wise , curator Anika Meier demonstrates how the attention economy has redeemed the medium. “Painting has become a mashup where the Old Masters, Surrealism, Pop Art, and Post-Internet Art are sampled,” she writes. “The result is portraits of people, bodies, and animals that lose themselves in pathetic poses.”
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