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Debrief :
New Art City Virtualizes The Gallery, Abolishes Gatekeepers, and Increases Access
The duo behind the California-based artist-run virtual space discuss their yearly showcase “MEMORY CARD,” and the politics and aesthetics of online exhibitions
Drawing on manar (the Arabic word for lighthouse), the inaugural edition of Manar Abu Dhabi opens in the UAE. Featured are light-based works by Middle Eastern artists (Asma Belhamar , Latifa Saeed , and others) and international figures, including Carsten Höller and teamLab . Rafael Lozano-Hemmer contributes “Translation Island ,” a site-specific retrospective featuring ten works, including Dune Ringers (2023, image), which transforms nocturnal desert topography into “travelling waves of light and sound.”
“Would anyone feel safer in autonomous vehicle technology on the road, knowing how often someone is, in fact, interacting and perhaps intervening? Does that make anyone feel safe? I certainly don’t.”
– American writer
Joanne McNeil , reminding us that the ‘autonomous’ in autonomous vehicle is sometimes bolstered by human intervention. In conversation about her
debut novel , McNeil discusses her field research hailing robotaxis in Phoenix and the empty utterances of tech billionaires.
OUT NOW :
Joanne McNeil
Wrong Way
Erudite tech critic
Joanne McNeil debuts as a novelist, exploring Silicon Valley hubris, self-driving cars, and the “treacherous gaps between the working and middle classes wrought by the age of AI.”
“They serve no positive function for society. They’re like mustard gas, polystyrene, lead in gasoline—all these crappy ideas we had to get rid of.”
– British conservationist and development researcher
Peter Howson , on the corrosiveness of cryptocurrencies. In his new book,
Let Them Eat Crypto (2023), Howson rescinds his initial blockchain advocacy, declaring the technology “industrial scale scumbaggery” that ought to be banned.
Coinciding with the 8th edition of the ACT Festival, “Planetary Pulse,” a showcase of the Asia Culture Center’s (ACC) residency program opens in Gwangju (KR). Featured are artists including Ahram Jeong , Su Jin Bae and Jonathan Lemke , Kim Joon , Matt Gingold (image: The Absent Orkestra , 2023), and Inhwa Yeom , who were selected from a pool of 340 applicants from 46 countries. Presented in conjunction with the ACC Sound Lab, the show focuses on soundscape and a “postcolonial analysis of the notion of listening.”
“My theory is that the glitches are very similar to our subconscious. There is too much or too little wanted from us, and we react with psychosomatic problems. When our body glitches, it’s telling us we have to make a decision or change something.”
– Artist
Pipilotti Rist , connecting the glitches in her early video art with embodied knowledge. “Analog glitches and mistakes are much nicer than digital ones. They are more physical,” she elaborates.
“Situated Listening,” an exhibition by Hong Kong-based composer and sound artist Samson Young , opens at Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover (DE). Featured are The Travelers and the Listeners (2023), a collage of musical films inspired by a Walter de la Mare poem, and Variations of 96 Chords in Space (2023, image), a video installation in which a palette of 96 colours (each linked to a chord played by violist William Lane ) blur across screens “in endless combinations, largely systematic, partly arbitrary.”
OUT NOW :
Joy Buolamwini
Unmasking AI
Emerging from her influential Masters and PhD research at the
MIT Media Lab , activist
Buolamwini challenges the ‘defaults’ in algorithmic culture and makes the case for ethics and equity in automated system design.
“What concerns me is we’re giving so many companies a free pass, or we’re applauding the innovation while turning our head.”
– AI researcher and activist
Joy Buolamwini , on how the public discussion around recent breakthroughs in machine learning is celebratory—not critical
Riffing on how film noir protagonists struggle to make sense of their broken and corrupt worlds, Lawrence Lek ’s “NOX” opens in Berlin. The speculative filmmaker’s largest show to date, Lek presents a facility where Farsight Corporation, a fictional AI conglomerate, train and service sentient self-driving cars. Exploring Kranzler Eck ’s multilevel layout, visitors consume film, sound, and videogame-based works to piece together an elaborate narrative about a rogue self-driving car and therapy bot.
“Our physical realities, the human body and the planet, are no less real just because technology is taking up more of our attention. We are still embodied, we still look with our eyeballs, we still type with our hands, and we are still sitting here getting bad posture.”
Organized by the NFT platform Verse, American generative artist John Provencher presents two playful net.art-inspired bodies of work at Cromwell Place in London. The first, over-time (2023), pays homage to the blocky visual language of Alexei Shulgin’s Form Art (1997) via dithered animations of twisting Lissajous curves , while the second, HAHA (2023, image), sardonically “visualizes and plays on the transactional nature of NFTs” by spewing an endless stream of “generative receipts” from a thermal printer.
“Silicon Valley runs on VC hype. VCs require hype to get a return on investment because they need an IPO or an acquisition. You don’t get rich by the technology working, you get rich by people believing it works long enough that one those two things gets you some money.”
– Signal Foundation president
Meredith Whittaker , demystifying the AI revolution at the
Washington Post Futurist Summit . “We need to be clear about what we are responding to: ChatGPT is an advertisement—a very expensive advertisement,” Whittaker insists.
OUT NOW :
Zara Rahman
Machine Readable Me
Technology and justice researcher
Rahman argues that the surveillent database, biometric, and social platform regime is ill-equipped to “fully capture our complex, fluid identities over decades of our lives.”
“The names of various cancer variants and hereditary syndromes flutter across the screen as if from an invisible source, but a few minutes later it doesn’t matter anymore because the universe will end one day.”
– Art writer
Helen Korpak , on the glib information deluge of
Ryoji Ikeda ’s
data-verse 1 . Lingering on the implications of the Japanese artist’s 2019 installation in a review of his Amos Rex
solo show (Helsinki, FL), Korpak underscores how “sequencing and shifts in scale give the work a heightened emotional charge.”
The Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale flagship exhibition, “The Spectre of the People,” opens in its namesake port city in Greece. Curated by Julian Stallabrass , artists including Lauren Greenfield , Carey Young , and The Archive of Public Protests explore populism. DISNOVATION.ORG contributes ONLINE CULTURE WARS (2018-19, image), a map of the “over-politicization of seemingly mundane topics, practices, and cultural elements,” with Donald Trump at the centre of a disinformation vortex.
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