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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.”
– Digital artist Maya Man, pitching Notes (2024), a series of fictional fragrances released through the Artblocks platform. “The collection requests you to use your imagination,” she says of her NFT edition, in which each instance is a colourful collage of evocative and scent-inducing words and phrases.
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.”
Gender Trouble (1990) author Judith Butler, explaining that policing language is not the answer to anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. “I think a lot of people feel that the world is out of control, and one place where they can exercise some control is language,” she says of simmering global tensions around gender and identity.
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.”
– U.S. Attourney General Merrick Garland, describing the iPhone and App Store as an anti-competitive walled garden. “Apple has held a dominant market share not because of its superiority, but because of its unlawful exclusionary behaviour,” he says in a speech announcing sweeping antitrust action against the tech giant.
Madhumita Murgia Compiles Intimate Testimonies of AI Exploitation
OUT NOW:
Madhumita Murgia
Code Dependent
The intimate investigation of AI that we’ve been waiting for, Indian-British journalist and Financial Times tech correspondent Madhumita Murgia compiles the stories of marginalized people—BIPOC women, war refugees, gig workers, tribal communities—“living in the shadow of AI.”
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.”
– United Nations senior scientific specialist Kees Baldé, on new analysis showing the staggering numbers of global electronic waste production. According to the report, the world generated 62 million metric tons of e-waste in 2022. That is up 82% compared to 2010, and on track to rise a further 32% to reach 82 million metric tons in 2030.
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.”
– Writer and AI researcher K Allado-McDowell, speculating that person-to-person knowledge transfer is more enduring than any media format. “A way to commit something to the future is through practice—teaching people how to do things that they can pass on,” notes Allado-McDowell, discussing the fragility of books and hard drives with New ModelsCaroline Busta and Lil Internet. [quote edited]
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.”
e-flux Contributing Editor Evan Calder Williams, taking aim at white cube infrastructure porn. “As if a hunk of undersea internet cable on a gallery floor confronts us with the materiality of communication,” he writes in the second part of an essay on sweeping cultural paralysis. [quote edited]
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.”
– Artist George Legrady, reaching back to the Bauhaus to locate an early precedent for AI-generated imagery. Taking stock of his ongoing experimentation with MidJourney and Stable Diffusion, Legrady explores the aesthetic and critical concerns around prompt-based art.
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.”
– Critic Lilly Wei, conducting a close reading of the linework of AARON, late American artist Harold Cohen’s painting software. Taking stock of his Whitney retrospective, Wei concludes Cohen’s computer paintings “are animated by texture, touch, and the glow of colour, and better for it, so human artistry isn’t obsolete yet.”
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.”
– English trip hop juggernaut Massive Attack, ‘decoding’ a Guardian op-ed on ethics and precarity in the cultural sector. The piece cites the criticism and climate activism offered by Bergen’s recent International Literary Festival as an example for why festivals matter, but fails to explore the Faustian bargain that sustains a lot of cultural infrastructure.
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.”
– Veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher, on AI-generated clones of her memoir, Burn Book (2024), flooding Amazon. First reported by 404 media, the rip-offs have since blossomed in variety, sporting alt titles (Tech’s Queen Bee With A Sting), different authors, and illustrious synthetic cover photography. “So I, of course, put them all together, and I sent Andy Jassy [the CEO of Amazon] a note and said, what the fuck? You’re costing me money.”
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.”
Artnet critic Ben Davis, lamenting the gaudiness of American artist Jeff Koons’ Moon Phases (2024). Recently deposited on the Moon by a SpaceX rocket, it entails 125 stainless steel sculptures (each named after a historical figure), which Davis derides as “space junk.” [quote edited]
Tristan Perich Compiles Output of 3-Byte Random Number Generator
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Tristan Perich
Pseudorandom
Composer Perich complements his new conceptual circuit album Noise Patterns, Pseudorandom with a hefty 1024-page printout of the 16,777,215 numbers that comprise one complete cycle of its central 3-byte random number generator.
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.”
– Technology reporter James Purtill, on the accelerating degradation of the Web. Bot-overrun platforms like X were “never designed for a world where machines can talk with people convincingly,” says digital media scholar Timothy Graham of the deluge of AI-generated content. ”The platforms have no infrastructure in place. The gates are open.”
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.”
– World security scholar and author Michael Klare, on the dangers of emergent behaviour in autonomous weaponry as DARPA expands efforts to create military AI systems capable of true swarming. “Autonomous weapons might jointly elect to adopt combat tactics none of the individual devices were programmed to perform”, warns Klare, “conceivably engaging in acts unintended and unforeseen by their human commanders.”
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.”
– Artist Aura Satz, describing the noisemaking subject at the heart of her debut feature film Preemptive Listening (2024). In conversation with associate producer Tendai John Mutambu, Satz discusses sonic aesthetics and how adopting an abolitionist framework impacted her narrative.
Good Technology Is Feminist, Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney Argue in New Book
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Eleanor Drage & Kerry McInerney
The Good Robot
Building on their eponymous podcast (2021-), Cambridge University researchers Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney explore “why technology needs feminism” with leading feminist thinkers, activists, and technologists.
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.”
– Digital performance artist Sam Rolfes, urging personal backup measures as rumours of Vice going offline spread. The long-time poster child of digital media filed for bankruptcy in 2023 and just announced it will stop publishing content on its website for good. [quote edited]
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.”
– AI researcher Kate Crawford, on the soaring (and mostly secret) environmental costs of generative AI. “Rather than pipe-dream technologies, we need pragmatic actions to limit AI’s ecological impacts now,” Crawford writes, calling for a “multifaceted approach including the AI industry, researchers and legislators.”
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.”
– Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) associate curator Regina Harsanyi, on inflationary claims of artistic innovation. “If we acknowledge history, we can be transparent about the failures of the past,” she writes on X. “I can’t trust someone selling me an idea if they’re not familiar with past failings forward of the same concept.”
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.”
– Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) founder Eliezer Yudkowsky, doubling down on the impending AI apocalypse he warned about in his March 2023 TIME op-ed. “We have a shred of a chance that humanity survives,” the prominent doomer argues in Tom Lamont’s neo-luddite survey, advocating for an immediate development stop.
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.

Auriea Harvey Reflects on Exploring Intimacy in the Internet Age
“I wasn’t creating work that was about technology or about the internet or about computers, but about the humans using the computers, myself using computers, my body in front of the computer.”
– Artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey, on using digital tools to explore personal narratives, embodiment, and intimacy. “It’s a constant circularity between putting myself in and taking something out, like finding this organic way inside and outside of the screen,” she says of the net art pieces, videogames, and AR sculptures on view in her major Museum of the Moving Image survey.
Tech Columnist Puts Sam Altman’s Staggering GPU Fundraising in Context
“It’s more than Apple and Microsoft’s market caps combined. It’s more than than any company has raised for anything in the history of capitalism.”
New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, contextualizing the reported $5-7 Trillion in funding OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking to boost global GPU production. The staggering amount “is a really good indicator of what people in positions of leadership in the AI industry think that is going to take to get AI to the next level,” says Roose.
Simon Denny Monograph Tours Metaverse Landscapes
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Simon Denny
Landscapes
The survey of the Berlin-based artist’s recent Metaverse Landscapes unpacks “historical resonances between territory, abstraction, and financialization” with commentary from Christina Barton, Adina Glickstein, Martin Herbert, Omar Kholeif, and Fred Turner.
$40 USD