Maya Man Generates Olfactory Poetry
“Could this be your new signature scent? Sample it on your skin. My algorithm feels confident that it can deliver you the computer conjured scent of your dreams.”
Judith Butler Will Not Be Joining the Language Police
“My version of feminist, queer, trans-affirmative politics is not about policing. I don’t think we should become the police. I’m afraid of the police.”
Libby Heaney Simmers “Quantum Soup” at Basel’s HEK
“Quantum Soup,” a solo show surveying Libby Heaney’s sustained exploration of quantum physics-informed aesthetics, opens at Basel’s House of Electronic Art (HEK). Curated by Sabine Himmelsbach, the show presents CGI works by the British artist including ENT– (2022) and slimeQrawl (2023), and her mournful VR experience Heartbreak and Magic (2024). Heaney “visually tests scientific concepts such as contextuality, entanglement, and superposition, making them accessible,” writes Himmelsbach.
Skawennati Invokes Superpowers of Ancient Indigenous Agriculture
Mohawk multimedia artist Skawennati’s new machinima, They Sustain Us (2024), premieres at Gray Area, San Francisco, expanding a music video built and filmed in Second Life into an IRL garment collection and runway performance. Two years in the making and Gray Area’s biggest commission to date, the piece reimagines Three Sisters, beloved personifications of Indigenous staple crops (corn, beans, squash) as futuristic superheroes that celebrate food sovereignty, sustainability, and femininity.
Chiharu Shiota Threads Interconnectivity in “Everyone, a Universe”
Threading connectivity in red, Chiharu Shiota’s “Everyone, a Universe” opens at Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. True to her signature delicate network aesthetic, the Japanese artist wires up 43 chairs purchased at a flea market and two thousand skeins of wool into the show’s titular work (2024, image). “Perhaps death is not a return to nothing but, rather, a matter of integrating ourselves,” says Shiota of her preoccupation with mortality and universal interconnection.
U.S. Attorney General Says Apple Squashes and Stifles Competition
“Apple selectively restricts access to the points of connection between third-party apps and the iPhone’s operating system, degrading the functionality of non-Apple apps and accessories.”
Madhumita Murgia Compiles Intimate Testimonies of AI Exploitation
Madhumita Murgia
Code Dependent
E-Waste Has Grown to Record Levels, New UN Report Shows
“This new report represents an immediate call for greater investment in infrastructure development, more promotion of repair and reuse, capacity building, and measures to stop illegal e-waste shipments.”
K Allado-McDowell Suggests Practice Is the Most Durable Media
“Maybe creating practices and transmitting them through physical, social embodiment is actually a more resilient structure than any particular media might be.”
Experienced Forager Warns of AI’s Incompetence at Identifying Mushrooms
Consumer advocates Public Citizen release “Mushrooming Risk,” a report on the danger of AI tools to foragers. Spurned by recent hospitalizations, researcher Rick Claypool outlines the folly of using apps to identify species and gauge edibility. “Mushroomers must take the time to develop their skills at their own pace,” he writes, championing local knowledge over app reliance. Experimenting with DALL-E compounded his fear; when he prompted it to label basic mushroom anatomy, it hallucinated utter nonsense (image).
24th Sydney Biennale Radiates Heat of “Ten Thousand Suns”
“Ten Thousand Suns,” the 24th edition of the Biennale of Sydney opens at venues across the New South Wales capital. Artists including Mona Al Qadiri, Dumb Type, Özgür Kar, and Lawrence Lek are featured at the White Bay Power Station flagship exhibition, which repurposes the former coal-fired facility as a cultural hub. Excitingly, Australian cyberfeminism originators VNS Matrix present a selection of their works from the last four decades on banners, displays, and zines throughout the venue (image).
Critic Makes Connection Between Art Trope and Cultural Paralysis
“A default move within contemporary art over the past two decades: defunctionalized objects pulled out of usual circulation or infrastructural location appear to offer a kind of freezing and deictic insight.”
Artists Weigh Global Flows and Social Atomization in “Universal / Remote”
“Universal / Remote,” a show chronicling how “capital and data flow freely on a global scale,” opens at the National Art Center Tokyo (NACT). Artists including Xu Bing, Maiko Jinushi, Trevor Paglen, and Evan Roth contribute works addressing globalization and social atomization. Hito Steyerl, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, and Miloš Trakilović stage their video installation Mission Accomplished: Belanciege (2019, image), a sardonic reflection on post-Berlin Wall European culture—and the luxury brand Balenciaga.
George Legrady Cites Bauhaus to Frame AI-Generated Imagery
“László Moholy-Nagy telephoned instructions to a factory in the 1920s to produce images without the need to be on-site to direct production.”
Critic Pits AARON against Matisse
“The line, when regarded close up, does not have the sweeping fluency or charm of the human hand, of a Matisse, for instance, whom some of the linear portraits seem to be channelling.”
Lauren Lee McCarthy Opens Saliva Bar at Mandeville Art Gallery
UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery opens “Bodily Autonomy,” Lauren Lee McCarthy’s largest solo show in the U.S. to date. Curator Ceci Moss brings together two major series of works—Surrogate (2022) and Saliva (2022)—in which the Chinese-American artist examines bio-surveillance through performances, videos, and installations. A newly commissioned Saliva Bar, for example, invites visitors to reflect on data privacy, race, gender, and class as they pertain to genetic material over traded spit samples.
Massive Attack Chides Toothless Guardian Editorial about Festival Funding Ethics
“We’d have kept our fossil fuel funding sponsors AND curated poetry competitions on climate change if it wasn’t for those pesky school strike kids.”
AI-Generated Kara Swisher Biographies Flood Amazon
“So literally, I was like, what the fuck? Get these down. What are you doing? It’s as if I was the head of Gucci, and there’s all these knockoffs.”
Oliver Ressler Documents How Climate Crisis “Dog Days Bite Back”
Underscoring the direness of the climate crisis, Oliver Ressler’s “Dog Days Bite Back” opens at Belvedere 21 in Vienna. Featured are works spanning photography, film, and installation by the Austrian artist that lament the state of stalled climate policy and fossil fuel crony capitalism run amok. His 2-channel video installation Climate Feedback Loops (2023, image), for example, starkly documents the ice melt around Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago that is rapidly disappearing into the Arctic Ocean.
February 2024
February 2024
Critic Derides Jeff Koons’ Moon Sculptures as “Space Junk”
“I hate this project. The idea that Jeff Koons may be the first point of contact when we encounter extraterrestrials—when they discover his crate left on the Moon—what a statement by humanity.”
Tristan Perich Compiles Output of 3-Byte Random Number Generator
Tristan Perich
Pseudorandom
NFTs Become “SOUND MACHINES” in Feral File Exhibition
“SOUND MACHINES,” a show exploring the untapped sonic potential of NFTs, opens on Feral File. Curated by MoMA, it features 0xDEAFBEEF, American Artist & Tommy Martinez, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, and Yoko Ono. Their works playfully introduce sound to tokenized art, as evidenced by 0xDEAFBEEF’s PAYPHONE (2022-, image), which allows collectors to purchase a phone card granting priority access to participate in a performance by the artist.
AI Zombie Content Floods Internet, Turning Platforms into Ghost Towns
“The internet is filling up with ‘zombie content’ designed to game algorithms and scam humans. It’s becoming a place where bots talk to bots, and search engines crawl a lonely expanse of pages written by artificial intelligence.”
Tomás Saraceno Makes Visible the Hues of the Cosmic Web
Tomás Saraceno’s solo exhibition “Live(s) on Air” opens at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles, showcasing, among other works, new cloud and foam sculptures that manifest as clusters of iridescent geometries suspended in mid-air. Juxtapozed with a series of infrared photography that suggests a new era of climate-neutral aerosolar flight, the Argentinian artist’s floating colour fractals “make visible the spectral hues and synaesthetic vectors that shape the cosmic web,” inviting meditation on “forms of life and eco-social interdependence.”
Desires vs Needs: Pınar Yoldaş Charts Technocene at ICA San Diego
The Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego (ICA) opens “Pınar Yoldaş: Synaptic Sculpture,” the Turkish-American artist and UC San Diego Professor’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition. Expanding her oevre of speculative biologies, Yoldaş presents several new works including an algae bioreactor brewing plastic alternatives that illuminate the technocene. “If we ask ourselves what drives technological progress,” Yoldaş explains, “we can see that it is as much our collective desires as it is our collective needs.”
Beware the Swarming AI Killer Robots: Security Scholar Warns of Emergent Behaviour in Autonomous Military Systems
“Neither side in the debate on ‘killer robots’ has addressed the most potentially unnerving aspect of using them in battle: sooner or later, they’ll be able to communicate with each other without human intervention.”
Rosa Menkman Maps the Lost Colours of Nature’s Original Glitch
Rosa Menkman’s mixed-media installation, A Spectrum of Lost and Unnamed Colours (2024), opens at EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne (CH), concluding the “speculative dialogues” with computer and environmental scientists that informed the work and guided her EPFL residency. In a series of translucent, lens-like sigils, the Dutch artist and researcher tells the story of a future media archaeologist who, in mapping colour loss, uncovers how air pollution and AI deluge ‘dimmed’ the atmospheric rainbow—“nature’s original ‘glitch’.”
Aura Satz Describes Noisemaking Sirens as “Circuits of Ear and Mouth”
“Many technologies are modelled on our anatomy—they are extensions of us. I wanted to get closer to the sirens, to see them as a ‘circuit of an ear and a mouth, listening out for threat and broadcasting it to the population,’ to quote the film.”
Good Technology Is Feminist, Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney Argue in New Book
Eleanor Drage & Kerry McInerney
The Good Robot
Prep Now for a Collapsing Media Eco-System, Sam Rolfes Warns
“Artist PSA: Go download every bit of press you’ve received today, because the media industry situation is dire and not getting better any time soon.”
Simon Denny Turns New York’s Petzel into Multi-User Dungeon
Donning his curator hat, Berlin-based artist Simon Denny turns New York’s Petzel into a “Multi-User Dungeon (MUD)” that connects 1970s table-top RPGs, early BBS networks, modern MMOs, and the metaverse. On view are works by 15 artists including Genevieve Goffman, Jack Goldstein, Josh Kline, Suzanne Treister, and Anicka Yi that “navigate the uncanny skeuomorphism of virtual worlds as they evolve over time and spill over into politics, finance and culture.” Denny’s own solo show, “Dungeon,” explores similar themes in parallel.
Generative AI Accelerates the Climate Crisis, Kate Crawford Warns
“It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.”
Regina Harsanyi Pushes Back Against Media Arts Amnesia
“If you’re confident in a contemporaneous movement or your own work, you don’t have to pretend it’s novel. Without acknowledging over half a century of media arts, you are asking to be forgotten.”
New Gala Hernández López Film Links Crypto Culture and Cryogenics
Gala Hernández López’s sci-fi documentary for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world (2024) premieres at Berlinale. In the double-screen collage of YouTube videos, archival images, and 3D animations, the French artist-researcher and filmmaker explores the links between crypto culture and cryogenics as two speculative technologies that exploit the future. A key narrative figure: American extropian and cypherpunk Hal Finney, who, in a fictional future, implements societal biostasis for economic gain.
AI Researcher Anticipates Apocalypse in Five Years
“If you put me to a wall and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10.”
KW Berlin Illuminates Black Sites, Black Boxes, and Black Holes
KW Berlin opens “Poetics of Encryption,” an extensive group exhibition that builds on curator Nadim Samman’s eponymous book, illuminating “Black Sites, Black Boxes, and Black Holes”—terms that indicate how technical systems capture users, how they work in stealth, and how they distort cultural space-time. The show gathers both historic and newly commissioned works by over 40 artists including Nora Al-Badri, Clusterduck, Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, Simon Denny, Eva & Franco Mattes, Trevor Paglen, Rachel Rossin, and Troika.