Resurfacing fabled 18th century partially-dissected wax figures used in the study of anatomy, “Cere Anatomiche” opens at Fondazione Prada Milan, presenting four anatomical venuses and 72 drawings from the La Specola collection alongside a companion film by David Cronenberg. Entitled Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection, the Canadian director’s short dwells on how the figures’ uncanny “body language and facial expressions do not display pain or agony.”

Foregrounding daylight and circadian rhythms in an era of deleterious screen time, “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time” opens at EPFL Pavillions in Lausanne (CH). Featured are works both evocative and therapeutic, “to remind us of the necessity of regular light exposure for a healthy life,” from artists including Kirell Benzi, Olafur Eliasson, and Anna Ridler. Helga Schmid presents a full-on sleep pod (image: Circadian Dreams, 2022), in which visitors laze and soak up LED lighting calibrated to optimize natural body phases.

Eliot Higgins, Founder and Creative Director of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, rattles Twitter with a series of deepfakes depicting Donald Trump’s arrest. Created using the latest version of Midjourney in anticipation of the rumoured bust, the AI-generated images show dramatic (and dramatically convincing) scenes of the former U.S. president wrangling cops and being taken in. In the real world, the Manhattan grand jury investigating Trump has yet to vote on an indictment.

Generative art NFT platform fxhash announces a new feature that “enables collectors to collaborate in the creative process.” Entitled fx(params), the functionality allows artists to designate certain parameters (e.g. colour, geometry, velocity) within their code as adjustable for primary market buyers. Instead of leaving an NFT’s appearance entirely to chance, the collector can tweak the artist’s system to their liking before minting their copy (image: fx(params) interface for 1mpo$ter’s Smash, 2023).

Honouring his Mexican heritage and the Latinx community in San Francisco, “TECH-MECHS,” a survey of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive installations opens at Gray Area. Featured are lyrical works like Pulse Topology (2021, image), in which 3000 dangling LEDs blink the varying rhythms of visitors’ recorded heartbeats, as well as bleaker perspectives on mortality and self-sovereignty, such as Sway (2016), an upside-down noose that moves from side to side “every time ICE arrests a person, like a metronome.”

Brazilian researchers report the finding of “plastic rocks” on the remote island of Trindade, part of a volcanic archipelago about 1,100 kilometres off mainland Brazil. Chemical tests revealed the main pollutant forming these plastiglomerates to be synthetic fishing nets that wash ashore and ‘melt’ into the sediment when temperatures rise. “This is new and terrifying at the same time, because pollution has reached geology,” says Fernanda Avelar Santos, a geologist at the Federal University of Parana.

Internet artist, former Rhizome co-editor, and are.na co-founder John Michael Boling resurrects his 2007 net art piece 20 Years Ago Today along with other parts of 53 os, a collaborative mid-2000s catalogue of GIFs, videos, and quirky web experiments. Cleverly, 20 Years Ago Today moves a playing YouTube panorama sequence across the browser canvas at matching speed, resulting in what net art pioneer Olia Lialina, then, praised as “a shining example of distributed work and tactful appropriation.”

Lorna Mills’ solo exhibition “The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common Part 1” opens online at distant.gallery, populating your browser canvas with dozens of Mill’s eccentric GIFs. Hosted in collaboration with TRANSFER gallery, LA-based curator Kelani Nichole’s digital art imprint and long-time Mills representative, the show also serves as an in-browser gathering for net art enthusiasts: “COME TO THE OPENING,” the Canadian media artist tweeted to her followers. “BE A GIF. BE A FUCKING GIF.”

London-based light and media art collective United Visual Artists (UVA) celebrates the 20th anniversary of their studio genesis: Tasked with the (now iconic) stage design of Massive Attack’s 100th Window world tour (2003-4), UVA founders Chris Bird, Matt Clark, and Ash Nehru developed LED typographic displays for politically charged, location-specific real-time data feeds. “At the time, our way of working together was unique,” they write on Instagram. “It went on to inform our practice and studio culture.”

Berlin-based media artist Aram Bartholl plants a towering heart emoji, or Triangle of Sadness (2023), outside of Stadtgalerie Kiel, Germany, as part of the gallery’s “Tourismus. Let’s do it all” group exhibition. The latest in Bartholl’s series of supersized Internet iconography (Map, 2006-19, This is Fine, 2022) deals with the performative aspects of travel in age of platform capitalism and calls attention to the social cost of algorithmically driven content production and consumption cycles.

Marcel Schwittlick’s solo exhibition “Composition #84: The Long Run” opens at SP2 gallery, Berlin, juxtapozing three eponymous plotter drawings with videos documenting their creation. The pieces, each measuring 36 x 115 cm and comprising 2.5 million dots plotted over 23 hours, record the emptying of a collection of 30-year-old vintage felt tip pens, marking the “end of an era.” Eight stripes per plot, drawn with pens of the same colour, yield subtle variations that tell the “unique history of each pen,” notes Schwittlick.

A survey of artworks acquired by the Nam June Paik Art Center during its COVID-19 pandemic closure opens in Seoul. “On Collecting Time” presents Kim Heecheon, Sunmin Park, Jinah Roh, Sungsil Ryu, and 6 other artists whose collected works are thematically bound in their exploration of “human and machine time in various forms.” Unmake Lab’s Utopian Extraction (2020, image), for example, pairs video demonstrating janky real-time object detection and documentation of slowly evolving landscapes.

“Terms of Use,” a show exploring “(re)framing of individual and collective selves, as we grapple with living simultaneously online and AFK,” opens at PHI Foundation in Montreal. Curated by Daniel Fiset and Cheryl Sim, the exhibition draws inspiration from feminists Ursula Franklin and Legacy Russell, and invites artists including Skawennati, Shanie Tomassini, Wu Tsang, Nico Williams, and Chun Hua Catherine Dong (image left: Meet Me Half Way, 2021) to examine tensions between identity and virtuality.

Serendipitously coinciding with an economy on the brink, Isaac Julien’s multiscreen installation Playtime (2014, image) opens at Berlin’s PalaisPopulaire. Set during the 2008-09 financial crisis that catalyzed the Great Recession, the filmmaker experiments in visualizing the flow of capital from the perspective of seven interlinked characters (a pair of hedge fund managers, a journalist, an artist, an art dealer, an auctioneer, and a maid) whose lives and ventures span Dubai, London, and Reykjavík.

“Chain Reaction,” a collection of NFTs curated by Christiane Paul, is released on Feral File. Artists including Stephanie Dinkins, Sara Ludy, and Jennifer & Kevin McCoy contribute NFTs that probe the “social, aesthetic, and environmental contexts and networks in which these assets are embedded.” Ira Greenberg & Marina Zurkow’s The Dorises (image, 2023), for example, takes the programmable rarity associated with the medium, and uses it to generate weird oyster physiology and lore.

Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich’s single-channel video installation Onset (2023) opens at Aksioma, Ljubljana. Co-commissioned by transmediale, the film draws on medieval demonology, open-source intelligence, and CGI animation to ‘haunt’ Russian air bases the duo reconstructed from satellite imagery. “The true horror of Russian colonialism becomes manifest in the process of possession,” the artists write, “the imposition of external control that gradually destroys an organism from within.”

“Signals: How Video Transformed the World” opens at New York’s MoMA, showcasing over 70 media works from the past six decades that capture how “artists have posed video as an agent of global change—from televised revolution to electronic democracy.” Highlights include Nam June Paik’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984), Ant Farm’s Media Burn (1973), Martine Syms’ Lessons I–CLXXX (2014–18), and Dara Birnbaum’s Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission (1990, image).

Paul Kremer’s solo exhibition “Spring” opens at Library Street Collective (LSC) in Detroit, featuring a new body of paintings dependent on experiments in tool-making. Inspired by the simplicity of Henri Matisse’s découpés, Houston-based Kremer turned to ChatGPT to prototype a series of composition tools he then, with the help of digital artist Leander Herzog, developed into a “suite of personalized art-making software.” The resulting Blooms (2023) resemble abstract flower forms in striking colours.