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“Can’t join that panel because it’s all men, can’t show at the place you’ve always wanted to show because they’re silent on the most pressing human rights issues, can’t take that life-changing NFT money because it’s burning down the forest.”
– American media artist
Kyle McDonald , contemplating artist integrity, idealism, and how “caring actually diminishes opportunities.” Grappling with the widespread moral fluidity and opportunism in the arts, a defeated McDonald concludes “there are no rewards for having ‘better values.’”
“Earth is dividing into two realms of combustion. One burns living landscapes; the other burns lithic landscapes. Satellite views of Earth at night show the two realms clearly: countrysides aflame, cities aglow.”
– Environmental historian and
The Pyrocene (2021) author
Stephen J. Pyne , on the current age of raging fire. “Through greed and a lust for power, we have turned our ancient companion from our best friend into our worst enemy.”
“When you’re standing on a mountaintop, looking out into the distance, you’re seeing the effect of trillions of leaves of trees. In the aggregate, they don’t behave as ordinary solid objects.”
– Epic Games CEO
Tim Sweeney , describing how making videogames and
Unreal Engine have changed his perception of nature. The central subject in
Anna Wiener ’s feature on the increasing prominence of simulation in culture and industry, Sweeney provides insight into the state of videogame engines—and what the future holds.
Presenting selections from four perception-warping bodies of work by Korean artist Kimsooja , “Meta-Painting” opens at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. Featured are ongoing projects including To Breathe (2003-24), an ethereal projection that invites viewers to contemplate a colourful plane floating in space, and Deductive Object (1990-2024, image), a blacker-than-black ovoid sculpture inspired by the Brahmanda stone , which represents a “totality that alludes to birth and death.”
Swiss artist duo AATB & Leonardo Angelucci’s robot provocation, Friendly Fire (2024), premieres in the storefront window of SPBH Space, Milan, reminding audiences how rapidly AI and robotics are converging. The robot—a cyclops, equipped with a monocular camera and bolstered by a robust neural processing system—wields a toy water gun, aiming and sometimes shooting at passersby. “Is it acting out of self-defence, aggression, or perhaps mere amusement?” It may just learn what it means to be human, the artists muse.
“There is a death drive in all of this. It is a drive to lethality. It is a drive towards self-destruction but also the destruction of all others. That is what underlies these systems.”
–
This Machine Kills co-host
Jathan Sadowski , emphatically rejecting
Lavender , an AI system Israel uses to compile ‘kill lists’ of Gazans to target. Drawing a connection to using AI to screen and reject healthcare applicants, Sadowski argues the logic is the
exact same , but Lavender “will lead to an immediate kinetic death rather than a somewhat slower social death.”
In her solo exhibition “GHOST_WORLD” at Slash, San Francisco, Taiwanese-American artist Jen Liu problematizes labor activism and women electronics workers in South China. Inspired by the 2023 social media phenomenon of “frog mothers ”—unlicensed street vendors in China wearing inflatable frog costumes and selling frog-shaped balloons—Liu presents videos, AR paintings, and amphibian glass sculptures that are “haunted by the workers making the phones, and the greater violence of compression in a digital existence.”
An immersive, data-driven experience that links fluvial systems, glaciers, and climate change, Theresa Schubert ’s solo exhibition “Melting Mountains” opens at MEINBLAU , Berlin, bringing together all three parts of The Glacier Trilogy (2021-22) for the first time. In it, the German bio artist draws on field research in the Western Alps to synthesize fictional archives of snowy peaks, trap ancient meltwater in hand-blown glass sculptures , and drive simulated glacial water systems with visitors’ CO2 exhalations.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen ’s installation, The Ephemeral Lake (2024), premieres at Hamburger Kunsthalle, reinterpreting the landscapes of 18th century Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich as immersive, computer-simulated ecologies. The piece explores themes of water, deep time, and crystallization, Steensen says, and “goes beyond contrasting the human figure in the environment.” Instead, it invites a worldview “where our bodies and minds merge with environmental energies and other species.”
“I can’t help you with your film because people just want a gay film or lesbian film, and this mixture of sexuality in your film is just not going anywhere.”
– Taiwanese-American filmmaker and pioneering internet artist
Shu Lea Cheang , citing a frustrated distribution agent’s rejection of her gender-fluid sci-fi cinema. “My films have always been diversely queer, in terms of race, gender and sexuality,” Cheang explains. “I was known for gender-hacking and genre-bending.”
“How do we move from just prioritizing the material, when there are some things beyond the material that could be preserved better? What are the conservation directions for something that is installed in your head?”
– Korean-Colombian-American artist
Gala Porras-Kim , on the institutional critique leveraged in her
MCA Denver solo exhibition .
Precipitation for an Arid Landscape (2021), for example, proposes that ceremonial offerings dredged from a sacred Mexican cenote and moved to Harvard’s Peabody Museum be “rehydrated,” because the Mayan god of rain, Chac, remains their rightful owner.
Angela Washko ’s solo exhibition “You Are: Mother, Player” opens at Public Works Administration, a digital art gallery on New York’s Time Square. The show centres on Washko’s narrative videogame, Mother, Player (2022), in which the American artist and educator shares her experiences of pregnancy and motherhood during the pandemic. “Players explore the maternal healthcare industry and parenting culture as a burnt out pansexual artist who has decided to have a child despite a geopolitical climate that deprioritizes and devalues care.”
“Our challenge has been to find a way to disrupt this banality visually, to reframe the material landscapes of surveillance in ways that pull this infrastructure back into focus.”
– Geographer
Colter Thomas , discussing “Infrastructures of Control,” his exhibition documenting the length of the U.S. border with Mexico. In an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) interview, Thomas and collaborator
Dugan Meyer reframe the border as a “patchwork of infrastructural parts—technologies, architecture, policy—that only looks cohesive from a distance.”
Drawing inspiration from the simplest of pixel aesthetics, Shinji Murakami ’s solo exhibition “2600” opens at New York’s NowHere. Down the Atari 2600 rabbithole since 2021, Murakami makes and mods 2600 games; at NowHere the Japanese artist builds bridges between his hobby and his art practice. The show presents recent acrylic paintings rendered in the 8-bit style (image: Pattern (Pizza Boy) , 2024), and some are accompanied by a QR code for viewers to scan, and then play Murakami’s retro videogame creations.
“Algorithms and datasets aren’t perfect; you should always rely on your common sense and Mk-1 eyeballs first and foremost.”
Presenting a new body of sculptures and murals, Auriea Harvey ’s “The Unanswered Question” opens at Bitforms in New York City. Artfully staged, the Rome-based artist juxtaposes totemic sculptural forms with collages brimming with art historical fragments under contrast-amplifying yellow light. In The Sacrifice (2024, image right), for example, one of Harvey’s figurines is pastiched into chunks of 3D-scanned wall frescoes—“not as simulacrum, but as a suspension of disbelief.”
A solo show showcasing Alice Bucknell ’s speculative project The Alluvials opens at Killscreen in Los Angeles. Presented on gaming PCs in a lounge environment are the machinma (2023) and videogame (2024) versions of the work, which construct narratives about Los Angeles water systems with the Grand Theft Auto V (2013) game engine. Drawing on queer eco-theory, Bucknell centres nonhuman perspectives including “the Los Angeles River, wildfire, a 400-year-old sycamore, and the ghost of a celebrity mountain lion .“
“I wanted to have you on and Apple asked us not to do it. They literally said, ‘Please don’t talk to her.’ Like, what is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?”
– Political comedy titan and returned
Daily Show host
Jon Stewart , telling U.S. Federal Trade Commission chair and antitrust lawyer
Lina Khan about his former bosses interfering in his short-lived current affairs program on Apple TV+. Launched in 2021,
The Problem with Jon Stewart was cancelled after only two seasons due to ‘creative differences.’
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