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The final chapter of the museum’s “Trilogy of Matter” exhibition series, “A Leap into the Void” opens at GAMeC in Bergamo, Italy, to examine “Art beyond Matter.” Interested in artistic acts of “dematerialization” that explore the void as an “ideal or imaginative dimension,” curators Lorenzo Giusti and Domenico Quaranta gather works from nearly 50 luminaries from the historical avant-garde (Alison Knowles , Vera Molnar , Nam June Paik , Yoko Ono ) to today’s (JODI , Eva & Franco Mattes , Trevor Paglen , Rachel Rossin , Hito Steyerl ).
Billed as the first show conceived entirely with ChatGPT, Jonas Lund ’s “In the Middle of Nowhere” opens at Office Impart, Berlin. The Swedish conceptual artist presents a series of new works—videos, tapestries, software—that emerged from lengthy conversations with the OpenAI chatbot. In The Fat Cats of The Art World (2023, right), for example, Lund pokes fun at shifting power dynamics, whereas the video piece The End (2023, left) rolls the credits for human-created art history.
“Ebrah K’dabri,” a solo show by Canadian artist Jon Rafman , opens at Sprüth Magers London. Diving headlong into prompt-generated AI imagery, Rafman renders scenes both mundane and horrific. Featured are large format inkjet prints of furry creatures, demon clubbers, and fleshy wrestlers, and the video piece Counterfeit Poast (2023, image), which animates similarly weird figures, abstracting tensions between online and private identities, and how they “constitute and distort” one another.
“We all knew this was inevitable, it is practically the only result when making work for a platform outside of your control. But even so. [This is] an actively destructive policy that really caps the era.”
– American software artist
Everest Pipkin , on Twitter’s decision to paywall access to their API. Unless their authors pay up, countless art and research projects including Pipkin’s Twitter bots
Tiny Star Field and
Moth Generator will stop working on February 9th.
American artist Evan Roth premieres a new video series, Skyscapes: Berlin-Mitte (2023), at panke.gallery and Zentrum für Netzkunst’s /rosa project space as part of transmediale’s “a model, a map, a fiction ” program. In the piece, Roth distorts photographs of the sky around his Berlin home with custom software that utilizes mapping projections dating back as far as 150 AD. This age-old “flattening process” translates a spherical world into a plane, Roth explains, and reveals “the biases of the mapmaker.”
A survey of DISNOVATION.ORG ’s ongoing Post Growth (2020–) research project opens at Kunsthaus Langenthal (CH) with the title “The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow.” The international collective challenges economic growth narratives with evocative thought experiments and prototypes that include videos, installations, objects, and texts. On view are, for example, the indoor farming experiment Life Support System , the diagrammatic CO2 cost analysis Shadow Growth , and samples from the 2021 book Bestiary of the Anthropocene .
“The world is a better place with 8 billion people than it was when 50 million people were (kind of) living in caves. I am confident that the value and progress in humanity will accelerate extraordinarily after welcoming artificial beings into our community.”
– Computer graphics legend
John Carmack , anticipating humans soon working alongside AI agents. Recently resigned from Meta, his new startup Keen Technologies is squarely focused on
artificial general intelligence . [quote edited]
Bob Bicknell-Knight ’s solo exhibition “Insert Coin” opens at CABLE DEPOT, London, debuting new works that explore predatory monetization practices within video games. “One of the most prevalent and destructive forms are loot boxes,” the British artist writes about purchasable in-game goodies that are now illegal in many countries. Bicknell-Knight presents one such specimen from the 2019 shooter Apex Legends as a larger-than-life 3D printed replica (image: The Loot Tick , 2023).
“Offline, I had Starbucks cake pop detritus lodged into my pink-and-purple braces. But on Stardoll.com, I was skisweetie2029, a digital doll with improbably shiny hair and the nose piercing that I always wanted IRL.”
–
Spike columnist
Adina Glickstein , looking for comfort in her digital past. “The temporal horizon recedes in both directions,” she writes about ‘neostalgia’ and extractive data horrors. “The coziness of ‘before’ can eternally be made anew, at profit. But also, undeniably, at cost.”
“We’re using this very powerful tool that is able to take information and integrate it in a way that no human mind is able to do, for better or for worse.”
– Stanford climate scientist
Noah Diffenbaugh , on using machine learning to model anthropocentric warming. In
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , his team’s model predicts we’ll blast past agreed-upon climate thresholds. As Brown University researcher
Kim Cobb put it: “This paper may be the beginning of the end of the 1.5C target.”
The latest in a series of posts elaborating on their Digital Art & Design collection , V&A curators publish a concise history of 3D printing. From locating the roots of additive manufacturing in the XY plotter and stereolithography , through collected bio art and furniture design provocations by Heather Dewey-Hagborg (image: Radical Love , 2015) and Front Design , they reconcile the gap between the “futuristic dream” promised by the medium and the questions of ethics and utility its use has raised.
“Rap Research Lab,” an exhibition showcasing Tahir Hemphill ’s eponymous studio and education initiative, opens at the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture (CADVC) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (US). Presented works interpreting hip hop lyrics as datasets include Picasso, Baby! (2014), which visualizes cross-connections between rappers and modern artists, and Maximum Distance. Minimum Displacement. (2014, image), which maps geography in lyrics of MCs including Jay Z and Missy Elliot.
“AI images don’t glitch, they gloop. They streak and striate. It’s the result of how these systems seek out images from the fuzzy noise they start with. While noise is an end state of a bad television broadcast, it’s the start state of AI images.”
– Systems design researcher and artist
Eryk Salvaggio , on the origins of “blobby” GAN aesthetics (as seen in the “smeary smorgasbord” that is Refik Anadol’s MoMA installation
Unsupervised ).
“They found a 95% similarity between the Madonnas in the two paintings and an 86% similarity in the Child.”
“My Body, a Coral Reef?” asks curator Julia Katharina Thiemann in a new evocative group exhibition at the Rudolf Scharpf Galerie of Ludwigshafen’s Wilhelm Hack Museum (DE). Works by Imayna Caceres , Alicia Frankovich , Dominique Koch , Pei-Ying Lin , Theresa Schubert , Saša Spačal , and others radically de-centre the self to remind us that “all living beings are meta-organisms and cannot exist on their own.” Spačal’s biotech installation The Library of Fallen Tears (2022, image), for example, contains vials of dried tear microbiome.
Rhea Myers ’ solo exhibition “The Ego, and It’s 0wned” opens at Nagel Draxler’s Crypto Kiosk in Berlin, offering blockchain-based “symbolic forms” that ponder property, representation, identity, and secrecy. In the titular piece (2023), for example, the British artist and hacker tokenizes her brain wave recordings while Type Opposite Images (2023, image) reverses colourful Vaporwave tropes. Also on view: new NFT editions of iconic Ethereum works that Myers created in 2014.
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