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OUT NOW :
Joy Buolamwini
Unmasking AI
Emerging from her influential Masters and PhD research at the
MIT Media Lab , activist
Buolamwini challenges the ‘defaults’ in algorithmic culture and makes the case for ethics and equity in automated system design.
“What concerns me is we’re giving so many companies a free pass, or we’re applauding the innovation while turning our head.”
– AI researcher and activist
Joy Buolamwini , on how the public discussion around recent breakthroughs in machine learning is celebratory—not critical
Riffing on how film noir protagonists struggle to make sense of their broken and corrupt worlds, Lawrence Lek ’s “NOX” opens in Berlin. The speculative filmmaker’s largest show to date, Lek presents a facility where Farsight Corporation, a fictional AI conglomerate, train and service sentient self-driving cars. Exploring Kranzler Eck ’s multilevel layout, visitors consume film, sound, and videogame-based works to piece together an elaborate narrative about a rogue self-driving car and therapy bot.
“Our physical realities, the human body and the planet, are no less real just because technology is taking up more of our attention. We are still embodied, we still look with our eyeballs, we still type with our hands, and we are still sitting here getting bad posture.”
Organized by the NFT platform Verse, American generative artist John Provencher presents two playful net.art-inspired bodies of work at Cromwell Place in London. The first, over-time (2023), pays homage to the blocky visual language of Alexei Shulgin’s Form Art (1997) via dithered animations of twisting Lissajous curves , while the second, HAHA (2023, image), sardonically “visualizes and plays on the transactional nature of NFTs” by spewing an endless stream of “generative receipts” from a thermal printer.
“Silicon Valley runs on VC hype. VCs require hype to get a return on investment because they need an IPO or an acquisition. You don’t get rich by the technology working, you get rich by people believing it works long enough that one those two things gets you some money.”
– Signal Foundation president
Meredith Whittaker , demystifying the AI revolution at the
Washington Post Futurist Summit . “We need to be clear about what we are responding to: ChatGPT is an advertisement—a very expensive advertisement,” Whittaker insists.
OUT NOW :
Zara Rahman
Machine Readable Me
Technology and justice researcher
Rahman argues that the surveillent database, biometric, and social platform regime is ill-equipped to “fully capture our complex, fluid identities over decades of our lives.”
“The names of various cancer variants and hereditary syndromes flutter across the screen as if from an invisible source, but a few minutes later it doesn’t matter anymore because the universe will end one day.”
– Art writer
Helen Korpak , on the glib information deluge of
Ryoji Ikeda ’s
data-verse 1 . Lingering on the implications of the Japanese artist’s 2019 installation in a review of his Amos Rex
solo show (Helsinki, FL), Korpak underscores how “sequencing and shifts in scale give the work a heightened emotional charge.”
“The Spectre of the People,” the flagship exhibition of the 2023 Thessaloniki Photobiennale opens in its namesake port city in Greece. Curated by Julian Stallabrass , artists including Lauren Greenfield , Carey Young , and The Archive of Public Protests explore populism. DISNOVATION.ORG contributes ONLINE CULTURE WARS (2023, image), a map of the “over-politicization of seemingly mundane topics, practices, and cultural elements,” with Donald Trump at the centre of a disinformation vortex.
“3D analysis shows patterns of radial fragmentation on the southwest side of the impact crater, as well as a shallow channel leading into the crater from the northeast. Such patterns indicate a likely projectile trajectory with northeast origins.”
Presented across digital screens and prints spanning the façade of the South West Wing of Bush House, “The Quiet Enchanting” opens at King’s College London. In the outdoor show design studio Superflux provoke passersby with—tower blocks enveloped in foliage, wildlife and humans side-by-siide—speculative imagery of a rewilded Borough of Westminster. Informed by interviews with local residents, the renderings romanticize “pre-modern poetics, pagan folklore, and animist societies.”
OUT NOW :
Deb Chachra
How Infrastructure Works
Engineer and materials scientist
Chachra makes the case that the pipes, cables, and power lines that make civil society possible should not only be functional and well maintained, but more “equitable, resilient, and sustainable.”
“Interreality,” a group show involving many leading digital artists, opens at The Desmond Tower in Los Angeles. Produced by bitforms and PR For Artists , it presents works by participants including Refik Anadol , Claudia Hart , Auriea Harvey , Tyler Hobbs , Rafael Lozano-Hemmer , Maya Man , and Manfred Mohr . Focused on the gap between ‘digital’ and ‘physical,’ its artists demonstrate how realms “commonly perceived as separate, can be unified because the divisions between them are illusory,” writes curator Mieke Marple .
“In the end, we need to ask more of museums and we need to ask more of DAOs (and of emerging technologies more broadly). For either to earn our trust, they need to continually define their terms and defend their motives.”
– Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator
Tina Rivers Ryan , questioning the rhetoric of decentralization. “Trust is not simply the product of technological protocols (no matter how transparent),” she writes in her essay for HEK’s
Algorithmic Imaginary , “but also of a ‘social layer’ of legal and professional codes and specialized knowledge bases.”
Capping a two-year project by Art Hub Copenhagen , Tropical Papers , and others, “Attention After Technology” opens at Kunsthall Trondheim (NO). Artists including biarritzzz , Kyriaki Goni , and Femke Herregraven explore “how algorithms affect us and how we could imagine them otherwise.” Johannesburg-based CUSS Group ’s The Pursuit of a True and Only Heaven (Disintegration Cycle) (2023, image), for example, recast Instagram’s Explore page as a trauma-inducing “snapshot of South African society.”
“We are in a quandary that demands careful critique, not easy derision, nor pat rejection. In terms of AI—the panoply of algorithmic softwares, predictive and surveillance technologies that the term represents—this is our 1970.”
– American arts writer and visual culture scholar
Charlotte Kent , drawing parallels between the birth of the U.S. environmental movement (1970 produced the Clean Air Act, Earth Day, and the EPA) and the difficulties to meaningfully engage around and regulate the AI revolution
“Synchronicity,” the largest-ever survey of United Visual Artists (UVA) sophisticated immersive installations, opens at London’s 180 Studios. Curated by Julia Kaganskiy , the exhibition presents works including the cosmic geometries of Musica Universalis (2016, image) alongside a new collaboration with Massive Attack’s Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja , which renders a deluge of algorithmically-generated data and headlines to disrupt the “sense of time, coherence, narrative, and consensus reality” of viewers.
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