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Marking the emergence of three new avatars, or non-fungible people (NFPs), to inhabit LaTurbo Avedon ’s blockchain-integrated Materia (2022) collection, “Club Zero” launches as part of arebyte on Screen . Non-binary, unnamed, and unfinished, the avatars’ final form is determined by visitors in three public editing sessions. Avedon’s NFPs are brought to life slowly, arebyte writes, presenting an antidote to the hyper-capitalised avatar moment of the metaverse.
“Xenogenesis,” a retrospective of the London-based Otolith Group , opens at Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Collecting works produced between 2011-18 by Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun, and collaborators, that cultivate “a science fiction of the present” through media, installation, and performance, the show includes Sovereign Sisters (2014), a CGI short about the Universal Postal Union’s “imperial ambition,” and a special public program curated by the collective.
The Art Directors Club Germany (ADC) celebrates the legacy of the late Joachim Sauter with a lifetime achievement award at the annual Night of Honour. Sauter, who died unexpectedly in 2021 at the age of 62, pioneered media art and interactive architecture with his award-winning Berlin-based studio ART+COM for nearly three decades. “He was a rare hybrid creature, part artist, part scientist, part researcher, part generalist,” notes GRAFT co-founder Thomas Willemeit in his eulogy .
“Over the last 200 years, sudden outbreaks of this globe-trotting fluff have damaged economies, influenced wars and sparked social unrest.”
– Writer
Joe Zadeh , examining the history of
Phytophthora infestans , “the plant pathogen that has most greatly impacted humanity to date.” The parasitic microbe, a species of oomycete or water mold that, for example, caused the
Great Irish Famine , reminds us that “in an era of animal pandemics, it’s easy to overlook the fact that plants also experience them, and they can have an equal or more devastating impact on human society.”
OUT NOW :
Paris Marx
Road to Nowhere
Uber, Lyft, The Boring Company—a polemic arguing Silicon Valley’s urban interventions are profoundly misguided
“I’ve resigned myself to being a non-stop curmudgeon about this, but an aspect of Dall-E’s closed invite beta I haven’t seen touched on is how it’s enlisted artists to act as unpaid influencers for a company whose backers include Peter Thiel and Elon Musk”
– Comic artist
Michael DeForge , observing that the prominent digital artists flooding our timelines with AI-generated images are doing free PR for
OpenAI (and its odious investors)
“The Byzantine Generals Problem,” a group show seeking consensus on crypto, opens at distant.gallery. Curated by Domenico Quaranta , the online exhibition features Sterling Crispin , Sarah Friend , Ben Grosser , Anna Ridler , and 10 others. Interrogative in tone, included works span Rhea Myers’ blockchain visualizations (2014-5), Kyle McDonald’s Ethereum carbon footprint calculations (2021), through a Web3 Dot Com Séance (2022, image) by Simon Denny and collaborators.
“The AI discovered a mechanism that redressed initial wealth imbalance, sanctioned free riders, and successfully won the majority vote.”
–
DeepMind researchers, studying policy innovation through AI. In a new paper, published in
Nature Human Behaviour , the UK-based team reports on their “human-in-the-loop research pipeline called Democratic AI” that ran an online investment game with a thousand human players. “By optimizing for human preferences, Democratic AI offers a proof of concept for value-aligned policy innovation,” write the researchers.
Swiss artist collective Fragmentin unveils Global Wiring , a new permanent sculpture extracted from a hypothetical Alpine future. A stratified column of recycled glass, realized during a recent residency , resembles a glacial ice core sample contaminated with contemporary infrastructure: water piping, electricity cables, fiber optics. Part of the collective’s Obsology series, the work points a post-digital archaeology lens at modern hyper-connectivity.
Martine Syms’s solo exhibition “She Mad Season One” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), marking the U.S. premiere of the fifth and newest episode of the artist’s titular sitcom project. She Mad tells the story about a young woman trying to make it as an artist in Los Angeles, “dissecting the ways Black experiences are mediated on television, in film, and online.” Shown in its entirety for the first time, the museum situates each episode within an immersive sculptural installation.
Exonemo ’s CGI puppy mill Metaverse Petshop opens at NowHere in New York City. Building on a May beta test , this version adds NFT functionality and complicates transactions. Purchasers of virtual pups are faced with an ethical dilemma: keep their ‘metaverse pet’ in its entirety or strip off its 3D texture map and sell it on OpenSea . “It is like catching an actual animal and processing its skin to make it live much longer than the original,” the artist duo (ominously) note.
Art Safiental, a biennial outdoor exhibition of land and environmental art, returns to Grisons, Switzerland, to inspire “Learning from the Earth.” 15 artists including Ursula Biemann , Julius von Bismarck , !Mediengruppe Bitnik , and Dharmendra Prasad contribute works that are “both campaign, methodology, and intervention.” Bismarck’s Trees Without Borders (2022, image), for example, permanently transplants a native larch above the local tree line, anticipating the effects of a warming climate.
“Compared with energy use, data center water consumption is much more behind-the-scenes, is much more controversial, and in some cases is considered a trade secret.”
–
David Mytton , former researcher at the Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy, on why the droughts in the American West could bring about a reckoning for the tech industry’s “secret water hogs”
What Just Happened :
Mindy Seu Forges Deep Links Between Cyberfeminism, Net Art, and Web3
The American designer and researcher in conversation about “WETWARE,” her Cyberfeminism all star NFT collection that’s currently on Feral File
“To this childless writer, it was an eye-opening lesson—all the more acute in a post-Roe America—in just how much labor it takes to keep someone alive.”
– Critic
Jillian Steinhauer , on
Ani Liu ’s solo show “
Ecologies of Care ” in which the American artist turns her experience of new motherhood into thought-provoking works. For example: “
Untitled (Labor of Love) (2022) charts every feeding and diaper change during the first 30 days of Liu’s infant’s life through vials containing breast milk, formula and pieces of diapers.”
OUT NOW :
Garrett & Colakides
Frankenstein Reanimated
A collection of texts on art, culture, technology, and politics that retraces exhibitions at
Furtherfield (UK),
NeMe (Cyprus), and
LABoral (Spain)
“It is understandable that people with no technical training might rely on metaphors to understand complex technology. But we would hope that policy-makers might develop a slightly more sophisticated understanding of AI than the one we get from Robocop .”
– Legal scholar
Tomas Fitzgerald , in an article detailing how bad metaphors (e.g. comparing neural networks to brains) hamper our attempts to understand AI
“We really have a very fixed idea of what kind of art we’re interested in. It requires a new model of running a gallery—especially one that shows challenging and forward thinking art.”
–
Postmasters co-founder
Magda Sawon , on transitioning to a new nomadic model as the pioneering digital art gallery is being forced out of its Tribeca neighbourhood. Instead of showing in one fixed location, “Postmasters 5.0 locations will be tailored to the art we will present,” the gallery’s
announcement states, defiantly.
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