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“It might be best understood not as incriminating some of the 20th century’s most iconic artworks, but as defending against a future where all authorship is swallowed by the digestive system of a quasi-sentient reproduction machine.”
– Writer
Sam Venis , defending the recent
U.S. Supreme Court ruling against Andy Warhol’s
Prince silkscreens (photographer Lynn Goldsmith, whose work they are based on, had sued the Warhol Foundation) as a much-needed precedent for protecting creators against generative AI platforms’ insatiable appetite for training data
The LAS-commissioned Berlin edition of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg ’s living sculpture series, Pollinator Pathmaker (2021-), opens outside Museum für Naturkunde —the first in Continental Europe. Part of a growing global network of gardens optimized for pollinators, the British artist uses a special algorithm to generate ecological planting schemes. For the next three years, a total of 7,000 plants of 80 regional varieties will ‘rewild’ the museum’s 722-square-metre forecourt plaza.
“The things that cost money are the things that give magazines their quality—photo editors, designers, journalists, editors. It’s why those who love magazines do so fiercely. And it’s why I’m conflicted by Midjourney Magazine . I want to like it. But it’s soulless.”
“Catalyst,” a hybrid exhibition featuring artists including Carla Gannis , Auriea Harvey , Caroline Sinders , and Sammie Veeler simultaneously opens at Los Angeles’ Honor Fraser and online at EPOCH . The final instalment in a trio of shows curated by EPOCH’s Peter Wu+ set in CGI models of LACMA and its environs, this edition is set in architect Peter Zumthor’s forthcoming building for the county museum—in post-apocalyptic LA (image). IRL visitors plug-in to the dystopian vision via VR headset.
“How do we prevent these language models from scraping our archives? But if they are going to scrape our archives, how do we at least make sure that we’re getting paid for that?”
–
New York Times tech columnist
Kevin Roose , summarizing the dilemma faced by Reddit, Twitter, and other platforms currently “locking down” their application programming interfaces (APIs) to protect their vast archives (of user-generated content) from being scraped by OpenAI, Google and other companies developing AI language models
Field Observatory , a “site-sensitive” installation by Finnish artist Teemu Lehmusruusu opens in Kirjurinluoto park in Pori (FI). Inspired by the root systems of alfalfa and other plants, Lehmusruusu’s “underground weather station” monitors underlying soil conditions and translates that data into a generative animation and soundscape. Drawing on dialogue with farmers and researchers developing carbon farming practices, the installation is a “portal into the volumes of the ground.”
Turning his eponymous 2021 NFT collection into an immersive video installation, Memo Akten ’s solo exhibition “Distributed Consciousness” opens at ACMI, Melbourne (AU). 256 AI-generated octopi, each containing a hidden verse, invite meditation on non-human intelligence and human-machine co-creation. “Staged as a place of worship, our tentacular deities invite us to face our final Copernican Trauma, the reality that humans may not be the sole keepers of intelligence, creativity or even consciousness.”
“The Goose looks like nothing in the collection and however many times you would have run the algorithm before or afterwards, you would not expect to replicate it.”
– Pseudonymous digital art collector
6529 , contextualizing his $6.2M purchase of
Dmitri Cherniak ‘s NFT
Ringers #879 (The Goose) in a Sotheby’s
auction
Ringers #879 (The Goose) , from Canadian artist Dmitri Cherniak ’s 2021 Art Blocks NFT series , is sold at a Sotheby’s London auction for $6.2M. The sale to collector 6529 completes an ‘only in crypto’ journey, as the NFT was amongst the liquidated assets of collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital . ‘The Goose’ is perhaps Ringers most beloved output, for the avian neck, beak, and eye that serendipitously peeks out from an algorithmic exploration of the myriad ways to wrap pegs with string.
“I would pick a subject, write something on it, and then shrink the text to what I hoped were the essentials—banishing adjectives and dreck.”
– Conceptual artist
Jenny Holzer , on the wordsmithing that propelled her to fame. In conversation with
Artnet Europe editor Kate Brown about her
retrosepctive at Düsseldorf’s K21, the American artist discusses her formative years, the writers she draws on, and archival research.
“This new study is different because it measures tiny variations in the way that Bitcoin mining equipment generates random numbers. These variations serve as a fingerprint allowing us to directly estimate the proportion of different machines.”
– American media artist
Kyle McDonald , parsing the methodology of a new
Coinmetrics study on Bitcoin energy use that offers the most accurate picture yet. “It basically confirms what we already knew,” writes McDonald, “Bitcoin is using about as much energy as the entire internet (around 12GW or 100TWh/year).”
What Just Happened? :
Total Refusal Collective Casts NPC Workers in Critique of Contemporary Labour
The Austrian pseudo-marxist media guerilla discusses their award-winning Machinima film Hardly Working (2022) and videogame interventions writ large
“This study could pave the way for a transformative shift in climate communications and science communications in general. Highlighting the power of art to provoke emotions and promote self-reflection.”
– University of Wisconsin researcher
Nan Li , discussing her team’s
analysis of the real-world impact of eco art. In their survey, Li and team tasked 671 people to look at both
Diane Burko ’s
SUMMER HEAT (2020) mixed-media series and the
Keeling Curve it is based on. The result: Burko’s artwork was perceived just as credible, sparked positive emotions, and moved participants to the middle, politically.
Ars Electronica announces the 2023 winners of the prestigious Golden Nica media art prize, awarded in New Animation Art, Digital Musics & Sound Art, AI & Life Art, and other categories. Winning projects, selected from 3,176 submissions, include Atractor Studios and Semántica Productions ’ sonification of Colombian agricultural soils, A Tale of Two Seeds (2022), and Winnie Soon ’s Unerasable Characters Series (2022, image), that reveals the chilling scale of censorship on China’s biggest social media platform, Weibo.
“Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah.”
– Security engineering expert
Ross Anderson , on the dangers of
model collapse as AI trains on AI-generated content. In a
new paper , Anderson and team demonstrate a rapid degenerative AI feedback loop where “true underlying data distribution” is forgotten. “This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web,”
Anderson warns , “giving an advantage to firms that already did, or that control access to human interfaces at scale.”
Trevor Paglen ’s solo exhibition “Hide the Real, Show the False” opens at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), presenting new works on mind control, disinformation, and psychological operations (PSYOPS). Case in point: Doty (2023, image), a video installation and the show’s centrepiece, features testimony by former US Air Force counterintelligence officer Richard Doty, who recounts his efforts targeting UFO researchers in disinformation campaigns while actual UFO programs ran in secret.
“Shouldn’t You Be Working? 100 Years of Working from Home,” a group show about the blurring of domesticity and labour, opens at Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum in East Lansing (US). Featured are photos of 20th-century domestic labour from the museum’s archives alongside works contrasting “newfound freedom” and “the threat of total digital surveillance and exploitation” by contemporary artists including Keiichi Matsuda , Marisa Olson , Theo Triantafyllidis , Jon Rafman , and Angela Washko .
“I’m so grateful that the AI revolution came along if for no other reason than that it showed us what it looks like when consumers actually get excited about something. It truly revealed that the crypto story was about 98% hype.”
– Tech columnist
Casey Newton , chiding crypto boosters who keep saying that ‘it’s time to build!’ “There is not one crypto product to my knowledge that has, say, 100 million users,” Newton vents. “Meanwhile, ChatGPT comes along and gets 100 million users, allegedly, within the first couple of months or so.”
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