“The inscriptome is where the visual governance of COVID-19 is performed and the bodies of humans are administered under the regimes of #flattenthecurve and #opentheeconomy, and setting the #newnormal.”
“Louder for everyone in the back: a Chinese rail system was completely halted after Adobe finally ceased all Flash support which is to say that there is a railroad out there RUNNING ON FLASH.”
“There was a heightened atmosphere in the room when I erased it, and I almost cracked.”
In Stacking Traumas, a new site-specific mural opening at St. Louis’ Kemper Art Museum, born-Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim identifies three sources of traumatic experience, represented by three tables stacked on top of one another. Looming high above “dinner table syndrome” (table 1) and “hearing people anxiety” (table 2) is the name of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor, scientist, and eugenicist who vociferously opposed teaching sign language to Deaf children.
“It really started as a joke… I didn’t understand the game mechanics and how realistic the in-game lava and fire were, so my house burned down.”
Light artist Christopher Bauder teases the construction of DARK MATTER, a permanent home for seven of his iconic kinetic light sculptures, including Polygon Playground (2008), Grid (2013), and Inverse, a new site-specific piece. Built across from Bauder’s studio in East Berlin, the 1,000 square-meter “world of light, space, and sound” is set to open in 2021 and will be equal parts admission-funded exhibition space and research laboratory.
“The networks that determine artistic success are largely invisible to practitioners—even insiders see only specific segments of it. We relied on big data to map these networks out and remarkably, we find artistic success highly predictable.”
While many express outrage over the environmental impact of Non-Fungible Token (NFT) -based art, Memo Akten shows you the receipts. Building on an impassioned Twitter thread and Medium post, Akten has created a web app that calculates the ecological cost of tracking sales and bids on the blockchain for individual pieces of art distributed through SuperRare. Fire up the site, a random artwork is selected, and you’ll see its environmental impact as measured in number of flights or weeks of an average EU resident’s electricity consumption.
“TRANSFER is operating on a different timescale than most galleries trying to turn a profit to keep their doors open. The gallery exists to help bring artworks into the world, but our motivation is never around selling work in the short-term.”
Curated by Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Maya Allison “to be viewed in the palm of your hand,” N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi Art Gallery’s first virtual exhibition “not in, of, along, or relating to a line” opens on your phone. Organised like a “decentralized network diagram,” the show charts forking paths through 16 born-digital artworks by, among others, Cao Fei, Eva and Franco Mattes, Lee Blalock, Maryam Al Hamra, and Sophia Al-Maria. Among the highlights: a new entry to Addie Wagenknecht’s Opsec and Beauty YouTube series (image) that was specially commissioned for this show.
“UNINVITED brings to life a new being, born of the combination of surveillance data with the hallucinatory state experienced by many device systems when infected with a virus.”
The Society For Non-Trivial Pursuits (S4NTP, affiliated with UdK Berlin’s Generative Art class) launches “Future Voices,” a one-year-long radio broadcast generated from people’s “hopes, fears, and dreams,” uploaded as audio recordings from around the world. Commissioned for Berlin’s CTM Festival, the project hopes to amplify “voices that would otherwise remain unheard within an attention economy that favours loudness, provocation, and conspiracy theories.”
