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“I am not aware of a moment in history wherein the act of discovery by artists is more necessary. We need them to bring the innate mental, spiritual, and physical aspects of humanness into play and inquiry with technology in order to affirm our role as creators, not spectators, of our collective techno-future.”
– Eyebeam Executive Director
Roddy Schrock , reaffirming the New York City art and technology center’s mandate as it celebrates a new online home.
“WE DID THIS TO OURSELVES,” a survey of Ron Terada ’s news and typography-focused works, opens at The Power Plant in Toronto. Grimly articulating the surrealism and noise of the post-truth information landscape, the Canadian artist’s monumental painting series TL;DR (2017-22) takes centre stage, immersing gallery visitors in the “overwhelming experience” of perusing a wall of weird tech headlines (collected from The Verge ) rendered in the familiar and authoritative New York Times typeface.
“The majority of people aren’t users but subjects of AI. It’s not a matter of individual choice. Most AI determinations that shape our access to resources are behind the scenes in ways we probably don’t even know.”
– Signal Foundation president and AI Now Institute co-founder
Meredith Whittaker , discussing AI ethics with Credo AI’s
Navrina Singh , and Distributed AI Research Institute’s
Alex Hanna at the Bloomberg Technology Summit. “AI is a surveillance technology,” Whittaker insists. “The Venn diagram of AI concerns and privacy concerns is a circle.”
OUT NOW :
Logic(s) 19
Supa Dupa Skies
Contributors including
Meredith Whittaker ,
Şerife Wong , and
Edward Ongweso Jr. relaunch
Logic with a fresh mandate to transcend “the bleak uniformity of tech journalism” with Queer, Black, and Asian perspectives.
“As the white-collar workforce gets more and more automated, there’s gonna be a shift back to the office where people can prove to their co-workers that they’re in fact a human, not three ChatGPTs in a trenchcoat.”
–
New York Times tech columnist
Kevin Roose , theorizing that “AI is going to kill remote work” in conversation with reporter
Emma Goldberg . “People are getting anxious about their own replaceability,” says Roose. “So many of these uniquely human skills are things that are much easier to in person: collaboration, creativity, leadership.”
“Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop,” a send-up of disgraced crypto CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) Future Fund by Michael Stevenson , opens at Michael Lett in Auckland (NZ). The show takes aim at SBF’s defunct effective altruism charity by reproducing the text from the fund’s website on beanbag chairs—just like those beloved by the former billionaire. The New Zealand artist describes each chair (filled with shredded paper) as “a placeholder” for “good intentions and a compromised crypto ecosystem.”
DOSSIER :
“Be candid about current challenges—and dream big!”
How do we upgrade our cultural infrastructure? The Future Festivals think tank lays out a roadmap of seven major issues—from operations (funding, staff capacity) to ethics (inclusivity, sustainability).
“If we lift these disciplinary silos, then what we are left with are daring imaginations and skills, coupled with the profound knowledge that we are mired in layers of false assumptions.”
– Korean-American artist
Anicka Yi , taking on the “the impossible task of debunking the favourite Western notion: the autonomous self” with her newly-hatched nomadic research initiative
Metaspore . Speaking at NEW INC
DEMO2023 , Yi reveals the project as a “deeply personal transformation” in search of more sustainable meaning that seeks to “generate interdisciplinary spores of social trust and action.”
New York City’s (now nomadic) Postmasters Gallery premieres Damjanski ’s Napster (2023) at the artisanal bed and mattress showroom Charles P. Rogers. The venue is appropriate: The iPhone app scans the environment for comfy nap locations by placing a 3D model of Damjanski sleeping. Seeding AR snoozes is on brand for the Yugoslavian prankster and self-described ‘artist living in a browser:’ His 2019 app Bye Bye Camera erased people from photos, heralding the post-human era of AI.
“I gave credit to Mondrian, who inspired my investigation of the potential for digital art—this was not ‘copycat stuff.’ To some extent, the Mondrian experiment was a crude Turing test of machine intelligence.”
– Computer art pioneer
A. Michael Noll , rebuffing critic Jed Perl’s
dismissal of his 1964 experiment to algorithmically generate Mondrian-style compositions
“Plastic World,” a show exploring the politics and aesthetics of the ubiquitous polymer-based material, opens at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Its 50 contributors include contemporary artists focused on ecological critique (Monira Al Qadiri , Pınar Yoldaş ) as well as 20th century conceptualists (Christo & Jeanne Claude , Hans Hollein ); from the latter camp, kinetic sculptor Otto Piene ’s Anemones: An Air Aquarium (1976, image), has been reproduced, in all its inflatable glory.
Hayward Gallery within London’s Southbank Centre opens “Dear Earth,” a group show featuring 15 international artists including Agnes Denes , John Gerrard , and Hito Steyerl that explore “themes of care, hope, and connection” in times of planetary crisis. Denes, for example, recreated her iconic land artwork The Living Pyramid (2015, image) as a five-meter tall indoor architecture planted with wildflowers and grasses, invoking both “the past and the possible future we will invent.”
“I’m honestly at a loss to even characterize the current large-scale planetary wave pattern. Frankly, it looks like a Van Gogh.”
– American climatologist and author
Michael E. Mann , agast at the current
jet stream chaos . Normally, the narrow, fast-moving
band of polar winds help stabilize global weather patterns. As the temperature difference between the poles and tropics shrinks due to accellerated arctic warming, the jet streams weaken and swerve, creating unprecedented heat domes like the one currently
sizzling Texas .
Considering compassion and competence, “AI: Who’s Looking After Me?” opens at Science Gallery London. Co-presented with FutureEverything , invited artists including James Bridle , Wesley Goatley , Seo Hye Lee , and Mimi Ọnụọha interrogate “what it means to entrust our care to autonomous machines. ” Blast Theory’s Cat Royale (2023, image), for example, puts Ghostbuster, Pumpkin, and Clover in the custody of a computer vision system and robot arm, which monitor, tend to, and play with the three felines.
“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
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