“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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.”

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’.”

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.

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.

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.

“TRANSFER Download: Sea Change” opens at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), flooding a panoramic ‘video chamber’ with reflections “on the accelerating changes across climate, culture, and time.” The 9th iteration of TRANSFER’s travelling immersive format compiles works by LaTurbo Avedon, Leo Castañeda, Fabiola Larios, Cassie McQuater, Lorna Mills, Rick Silva & Nicolas Sassoon (image: Signals 4, 2023), and Rodell Warner into a playlist of “watery warnings,” rendered as generative art, animated GIFs, videogames, and CGI.

Irish curator Iaraith Ní Fheorais launches the Access Toolkit for Artworkers, a practical guide for planning, producing, and exhibiting accessible art projects including information on finance, workplaces, and display. Drawing on resources created by Caroyln Lazard, Sins Invalid, Unlimited, Leah Clements, Alice Hattrick, and Lizzy Rose, the toolkit is an effort to undo the ableism in art spaces and help eradicate access barriers for d/Deaf, neurodivergent, chronically ill, and disabled communities.

Eva & Franco Mattes solo exhibition “508 Loop Detected” opens at Apalazzogallery (APG) in Brescia (IT), premiering a series of AI Circuit (2024) works that loop AI-processed photos of past shows and an updated version of Personal Photographs (2024, image). The latter conceals a data transfer of newly taken private photos inside a brightly coloured cable loop that spills beyond Apalazzo’s baroque walls. Meanwhile, Roomba Cat (2023) roams around indoors, manifesting meme culture with motorized taxidermy.

Frustrated with the state of today’s social media platforms and how they extract attention (“I feel trapped!”), German graphic designer and creative coding enthusiast Tim Rodenbröker launches a radical alternative: 128kb Challenge is a distraction-free, community-first feed for discovering and sharing minimalist programmed works. Anyone working in Processing, p5.js, or GLSL can participate by submitting GIFs that adhere to the 128×128 pixels, 128 colours, and 128 kilobyte size limit.