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Freshly acquired by the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), American artist Jordon Wolfson ’s Body Sculpture (2023) debuts in its permanent Canberra home. An unsettling performance in which an industrial robotic arm wields a chain tethered to a metallic box with animatronic arms, the robot pair executes a choreography of power and control. In the foreground, the torso-box affectively gestures with humanlike precision; in the background, the industrial arm plays puppeteer and pulls the strings.
Total Refusal ’s solo exhibition “Every Strike Hits Dead Center” opens at Taipei’s Digital Art Center (DAC), presenting new and recent videogame appropriations that explore the representation of labour and leisure. Whereas Club Stahlbad (2022, image), for example, tunes into the frenetic escapism of NPC clubbers in Cyberpunk 2077 , the Austrian machinima collective’s new piece, Loop Labor (2023), highlights—and liberates—Latin American field workers in Grand Theft Auto V .
“Our technological culture keeps casting these artificial intelligences either as mothers, catering and caring, or as female demons that consume men, succubus-like, luring them to half-deaths, to a constant state of orgasm—a hijacked limbic system suspended in pleasure.”
– American author, filmmaker, and sex worker
Liara Roux , on the “sublimated patriarchal anxieties and revenge fantasies” AI femmes like Siri reveal about their creators: “Dark Enlightenment, PayPal Mafia, CEO types.”
“For me, drawing is a way of being in the world. When I draw and create with my machines, this creative process allows me to engage with the technology alongside my physical instincts to form a kind of gestural relation.”
– Chinese-Canadian artist
Sougwen Chung , on her robot collaborations. “I’ve come to think of my approach of learning through systems—deemed intelligent or otherwise—as a creative catalyst,” Chung writes. “There is meaning in the data, but it’s not the meaning we are given; it’s the meaning we make.”
OUT NOW :
Branch #7
Gentle Dismantlings
Branch and
DING editors
Kit Braybrooke ,
Julia Kloiber , and
Michelle Thorne teamed up for inviting Gayatri Ganesh, Padmini Ray Murray, Georgina Voss, Eva Verhoeven, Iryna Zamuruieva and others to report on kinship, worlding, and more-than-human feminisms around the globe
“We do not live in a simulation—a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews—but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic.”
The third act in curators Dominique Moulon , Alain Thibault , and Cathernine Bédard’s exhibition series, “Endless Variation,” opens at the Canadian Cultural Centre , Paris, as part of the 2023 Némo Biennial. Works by ten artists including Nicolas Baier , Salomé Chatriot (image: Idol (Hydra 4) , 2023), Nicolas Sassoon , Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, and Timothy Thomasson explore nascent generative processes and the transition from artist studio to computer interface.
“For every charge that immersive events are diluting our experience of artistry, there’s a counterpoint to be made that it’s opening that experience out to people who might not normally gravitate towards it.”
– Writer
Róisín Lanigan , weighing in on the post-pandemic rise of immersive media spaces like
Frameless ,
Outernet (both London), and
Sphere (Las Vegas). They empower creators, offer communal experiences, and yes, “they’re geared towards the gram—the number of views can attest to that,” Lanigan notes.
“The interdisciplinary art practice is your biggest project. Finding your people to nurture and grow together this idea of the practice being the project is what I’m thinking about right now.”
– Australian sci-fi artist and body architect
Lucy McRae , reminding
SCI-Arc students to prioritize hybridity and collaboration as they develop their art-research practices
“Cytographia is an elegy for species we will never know, or will never know again, expressed through generative illustrations from an imaginary book about imaginary organisms.”
– American media artist and lecturer
Golan Levin , on his forthcoming
Art Blocks release of algorithmic, cursor-interactive cells. Every aspect of the “xenocytology” is computationally generated, reveals Levin, “including the simulated behaviour of the depicted creature, the poiesis of its anatomy, the calligraphic quality of its lines, the asemic letterforms of its labels, and the (ahem) virtual ‘paper’ on which it is rendered.”
The NGV Triennial opens at Melbourne’s NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) International, showcasing 100 works from 120 artists and designers that epitomize contemporary practice. In addition to timeless pieces by Hito Steyerl , John Gerrard , SMACK , and Julian Charrière , NGV premieres several new commissions: Dunne & Raby ’s Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival (2023) imagines future multi-species gatherings through speculative artifacts, while Agnieszka Pilat ’s Heterobota (2023, image) enjoy playtime.
“We appear more like clouds, or atmospheres, or energy fields, and our meatiness fades into insignificance. Our breath forms chemical swirls drifting through multiple umwelten. Strands of you stretch for miles, caressing the nervous systems of innumerable lifeforms.”
– Designers
Dunne & Raby , on their NGV Triennial commission
Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival (2023), a set of speculative totems and mementos which illustrate how human-produced sound, fragrance and matter is experienced by other species
OUT NOW :
Kunze & Bauer (eds)
Glitch. The Art of Interference.
Accompanying their major glitch art
survey at Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, curators
Kunze and
Bauer compile key works by participating artists and essays by writers including
Nick Briz and
Ute Holl .
“I have a lot of lab experience, so it’s always funny to me how excited people get when they are exploring things through the microscope. They’re overwhelmed looking at the materials—stones, flowers—they collected.”
“Instead of being in charge, these executives and lobbyists should be behind bars. At the very least, the UN should ban them from climate summits.”
– American climate scientist and author
Peter Kalmus , on the annual United Nations climate summit,
COP28 , being overrun by fossil fuel industry figureheads. Worse yet, COP president and oil executive Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber is
reported to actively use the event for striking dirty energy deals. “It’s hard to imagine anything more cynical or more evil,” writes Kalmus.
Daniel Langlois 1957 – 2023
Canadian animator and
Softimage founder Daniel Langlois dies at 66. A
National Film Board of Canada filmmaker, Langlois created
Softimage 3D , VFX software used on blockbusters including
Jurassic Park and
Terminator 2 . Shifting to philanthropy in middle age, he launched the
Daniel Langlois Foundation , a major Montréal art-technology institution, in 1997.
Dredging up grotesque imaginaries, Tishan Hsu ’s “recent works 2023” opens at Secession in Vienna. Taking centre stage at the artist-run space, the American artist presents tablet-skin-screen (2023, image), an undulating moiré pattern-adorned sculpture that evokes both flesh and (video) feedback. Complementing the unnatural geometry, surrounding morphing videos and prints depict “the interpenetration of physical bodies with virtual digital forms.”
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