HOLO / Stream

“Offshore finance pierces reality,” French artist collective RYBN reflects on their Offshore Tours (2018-20) in a Palm editorial. Over two years, the artists mapped 785,000 leaked addresses tied to offshore activity. “Behind each photographed facade hides a hot spot, a gap in the urban landscape connected to elsewhere, a true crossing point to offshore space,” they write. “These addresses are deserted at the very moment of their unveiling, the tracking of offshore finance thus turns into ghost hunting.”

Extending out of Oli Sorenson’s visual cataloguing of the technological artifacts and compromised landscapes of our current era, “Diamond edition: Panorama of the Anthropocene” opens at Montréal’s ELEKTRA Gallery. For the show, Sorenson adapts material from the his ongoing painting and inkjet series about the perennial clash between production and nature (image: Oil extraction detail, 2020) rendered in the style of “Minecraft’s landscapes and Peter Halley’s geometries,” and (re)presents it on angled digital displays.

The culmination of a three-year inquiry into “the extractive gaze of European institutions and policies” with a focus on “how resource management shapes and gives corporeality to geopolitics,” artist duo FRAUD (Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo) launches the EURO⁠—VISION platform. A growing resource and archive, the site reveals the links between international relations, trade, economic policy, and border security through the lens of Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) such as phosphate, fish(eries), sand, and carbon.

“a=tF²,” a solo show by Igor Štromajer, “the Pavarotti of HTML,” opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. Drawing on the artist’s favoured tropes and aesthetics, ranging from CGA graphics to toolbar mandalas, the show juxtaposes knowledge work’s ephemera with the austerity of the white cube. On Instagram, in advance of the opening, Štromajer has teased work-in-progress, his strategically cropped previews revealing “dirty, radical, minimal” assemblages of e-junk and toy robots (image), and an adorable pint-sized workstation.

With “Natural Sovereignty,” a solo show opening at Capri’s MiBACT Certosa museum, Italian artist and activist Paolo Cirio offers a “utopian vision of climate justice.” Building on his conceptual framework of a ‘climate crime tribunal’ that combines the legal concept of environmental personhood with the Right of Nature theory, Cirio presents evidence, plaintiffs, and sentence in the form of informational visuals featuring scientific and economic data, legal documents, and biological studies.

Currently setting up several major exhibitions all across Europe, Turkish-American media artist Refik Anadol shares a (stunning) glimpse of installing Alkazar Dream: AI Cinema at a yet undisclosed location in Istanbul. Los Angeles-based Anadol is renowned for his rich data-driven architectural projections, large-scale media facades, and immersive experiences. Alkazar Dream: AI Cinema will feature ‘machine hallucinations’ of an AI trained on 150 historic movies and is set to open on October 29th.

“Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age” opens at Mudam Luxembourg. Exploring the paradox that capitalism is ”both dependent upon and threatened by technological progress,” the show includes polemical works by Simon Denny, Oliver Laric, Martine Syms, and others. Strongly signalling the capital-collides-with-lifeworld aesthetic is Cao Fei’s Asia One (2018, image), a film about a burgeoning romance between two young workers in a gigantic logistics warehouse, set against a backdrop of automation.

EIGENHEIM gallery launches an edition box dedicated to digital art. Curated by medienkunstverein (mkv), “Digital Art Collection” features 30 international artists including LaTurbo Avedon, Jeremy Bailey, Lauren Lee McCarthy, and Zach Liebermann, who “deal with the effects of the (post)digital age on our everyday life, our culture and our society.” Each artwork is represented by an NFC-chipped wooden cuboid that activates the respective piece on an enclosed tablet. Box and works are now on view at EIGENHEIM Berlin.

“Work Upside Down,” a group exhibition exploring labour, opens at the Cluj Cultural Center in Cluj, Romania, as part of the Cluj Future of Work program. Curated by Time’s Up, Corina Bucea, and Rarița Zbranca, the show presents 13 newly commissioned works by, among others, Blajin, Mihaela Drăgan, Ioana Păun & Flavia Giurgiu, Polina Kanis, and Cristina Vasilescu & Bob Bicknell-Knight. The latter’s 24-minute CGI film Pickers (image) concerns Amazon Fulfilment Centres, abusive workspaces, and the 24/7 churn of 21-century capitalism.

Curated by British artist Bob Bicknell-Knight, “Algorithmic Bias” opens at [Senne], Brussels, featuring works by 13 international artists, including Zach Blas, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Ben Grosser, JODI, and Lynn Hershman Leeson, that critique computational systems of control. Among the new works included is one of Bicknell-Knight’s own: Second Variety imagines a Boston-Dynamics-inspired four-legged automaton unearthed in a distant future “by a society that has forgotten its original purpose.”

Miffed about the meager fee offered for the reproduction of two of his banknote works, Danish artist Jens Haaning pocketed the 534,000 kroner ($84,000) lent by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg (DK), and delivered two empty frames entitled Take the Money and Run. “The work is that I have taken their money,” Haaning said in an interview. “It’s not theft. It is a breach of contract, and breach of contract is part of the work.” The frames are now on view as part of “Work it Out,” the museum’s ongoing show about art and labour.

A spatial collage of film and fabric, Metahaven’s “Passphrases” opens at State of Concept Athens—the first solo show of the Dutch avantgarde film-and-design collective in Greece. Featured alongside a newly commissioned installation of their films Chaos Theory (2021) and Hometown (2018), both part of a trilogy that begun with Information Skies (2016), are textile works from the series Arrows (2020) and—a premiere—Blossoms and Secrets (2021), “embodying texture, dreams, and film stills.”

“What if an exhibition had an energy budget? How would it affect its design, organization, management, and activation?” With 16/2017, Spanish artist Joana Moll forces Barcelona’s Arts Santa Mònica Center to cut its energy usage by 50% during the “Exposar · No exposar-se · Exposar-se · No exposar” exhibition. Named after a failed policy to half the region’s CO2 emissions by 2030, 16/2017 prescribes weekly meetings to monitor the energy budget and negotiate corrective measures with management, artists, and the public.

The most extensive installation of Rafaël Rozendaal’s websites series and the Dutch-Brazillian artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK, “Permanent Distraction” opens at Site Gallery, Sheffield. Existing and newly produced websites are shown as twelve, floor to ceiling projections, filling the space with abstract colour, movement and gesture. The show “forces us to confront the slippage between our physical and digital realities,” writes the gallery, “bringing bodies physically into the space of the internet.”

Drawing on Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, writer Claire L. Evans makes a case for reimagining the web’s central metaphor as a forest. Teasing out the famed Canadian ecologist’s findings gleaned from a life in forestry, Evans uses the symbiotic tendencies of ‘Mother’ trees, mycorrhizal fungi, and birch trees, to map alternate readings of the web. Big Tech has “privileged high-value crops—viral content, controversy, and clickbait—over a healthier ecosystem of people, opinions, and perspectives,” she writes, likening platform capitalism to clear cutting—short term profit at the ecosystem’s expense. While the diagnosis is grim, Evans ends optimistically, calling for “Mother nodes,” resilient sites of nurturing and collective memory.

“I wanted to see what human-generated randomness looks like,” writes Jonathan Chomko of his NFT project Proof of Work. Extending out his previous prompt-driven choreography, the Montréal artist created software for collecting random values from “small-scale“ gestures: typing random characters on a keyboard. Experiments with scale and colour yielded a pixellated visual language and, post-NFT drop, he notes the labourious process “records a minimum viable artwork, the hand of the artist visible in the digital image.”

Agnes Scherer’s “The Notebook Simulations,” supersizes the laptop, rendering its mythos in paint (not pixels)

“Time Holds All the Answers,” a survey of Postcommodity’s work opens at Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Canada. Duo Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist have long “injected Indigenous knowledge systems into the museum,” challenging its hermeticism and, here, Let Us Pray For the Water Between Us (2020, image) transforms an 8,300 L hazmat storage container into a drum with a motorized mallet sounding interior rhythms, reverberating calls for “respect, accountability, and transparency” in water stewardship.

A survey of the Argentinian artist’s inquiries into breath, spirit, and regeneration, Tomás Saraceno’s solo exhibition “We Do Not All Breathe the Same Air” opens at Neugerriemschneider in Berlin. A highlight is Saraceno’s newest installation, Particular Matter(s), that illuminates microscopic air particles “like millions of suspended galaxies” with a beam of light. Noteworthy: the exhibition is powered by renewables and opening hours shift with daylight to conserve energy.

As part of the NEW NOW festival exhibition, Korean-British artist duo Kimchi and Chips launches Another Moon into the skies over Zeche Zollverein, a former coal mine turned World Heritage Site and cultural park in Essen, Germany. Through Oct 3, a ring of 40 solar-powered laser projectors captures sunlight during the day and casts it back into the sky at night. Where the beams meet, a ghostly sphere—another moon—appears. In development for over six years, the installation celebrates the end of coal.

Curated by Karie Liao, “Geofenced” opens at (and around) Toronto’s InterAccess. Presented on the artist-run centre’s steps, at a local parkette, microbrewery, and other sites, the show features AR works by Cat Bluemke & Jonathan Carroll, Scott Benesiinaabandan, Jenn E Norton, and Adrienne Matheuszik. The latter’s Proxima-B (2021, image) superimposes scenes from an “extraplanetary resort … free from the troubles of the earth” in the InterAccess gallery, at a nearby parking pad, and on a billboard.

Twitter user and Blockchain sleuth Zuwu shares an incriminating paper trail revealing a senior employee of the NFT platform OpenSea has been engaging in insider trading. In a Twitter thread they list a number of suspicious transactions from wallets connected to OpenSea Head of Product Nate Chastain—indicating purchases of NFT projects right before they were featured on the site’s homepage, and then corresponding sales when the price spiked. While unscrupulous NFT collectors engage in a range of dubious practices including scalping, bribing miners, and gas wars, this is the first instances of a major NFT platform employee being caught red-handed.

Huidi Xiang’s “How to Be an Artist in Minecraft” opens at Ender Gallery. A sculptor who became obsessed with the routine (and implicit labour) of Animal Crossing during the pandemic, Xiang’s Ender residency culminates with the presentation of a spreadsheet of every act she performed in Minecraft over a three-month period. Building construction, skin customization, tutorial creation, every minute of her residency—and for those that can’t visit in-game, note the complete log on the artist’s website.

Marjolijn Dijkman’s solo exhibition “Electrify Everything” opens at NOME Gallery, Berlin, bringing together three interrelated bodies of work that ruminate on the history of electricity and the environmental impact of modern energy storage. The photo series Earthing Discharge (2019-21, image), for example, is made with a high voltage electro-photography technique in which the Dutch artist uses a discharge plate made from a tin-coated sheet, the same material as used in touch screen devices.