A timely showcase of early computer drawing and painting in the age of generative AI, “Harold Cohen: AARON” opens at New York’s Whitney Museum. Curated by Christiane Paul, it honours Cohen’s pioneering 1970s and ’80s process, with recreations of his plotters running live in-gallery (each operating different versions of the AARON software) alongside key works. “Cohen used to joke that he would be the only artist ever who posthumously makes work,” says Paul of the late artist’s enduring prescience.

Haha Real, a very site-specific installation by Rachel Rossin, opens at Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern in Houston. Illuminating a path through the subterranean reservoir with LED panels, the American artist draws on eclectic sources including The Velveteen Rabbit (a 1922 children’s book) and “The Creative Act” (a 1957 Marcel Duchamp lecture). Musician frewuhn contributes a score to set the mood for the 400 m journey, which culminates in a “cascade of uncanny sunsets within the darkness.”

With “My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard,” New York’s Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) opens the first major survey of pioneering net artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey. Featuring more than 40 works spanning early net-based interactives, videogames (created with Michaël Samyn under the Tale of Tales moniker), mixed media and AR sculptures, curator Regina Harsanyi celebrates Harvey’s capacity to “reflect the paradoxical power of computers to enable intimacy” over nearly four decades.

“Hello, Human!” opens at MoCA Taipei, showcasing works by 16 artists and collectives including Morehshin Allahyari, Blast Theory, Mario Klingemann, Daito Manabe, Lev Manovich, onformative, Anna Ridler, and Winnie Soon that anticipate “the moment AI finally breaks through the black box and snarls at humanity.” In Dimension Plus’ (Keith Lam & Escher Tsai) post-humanity arcade machine VS AI Street Fighting (2023, image), for example, two AIs compete in endless content generation and reasoning sessions.

“Decoding the Black Box” opens at Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, Germany, exposing the corporate surveillance systems that invade the private sphere. 14 artists and collectives including Aram Bartholl (image: Are you human?, 2017), James Bridle, Adam Harvey, Femke Herregraven, Jonas Lund, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Metahaven, and Mimi Ọnụọha make transparent the capitalist power structures of the internet and virtual image economy with evocative counter-narratives and provocations.

LaTurbo Avedon’s “Trust Your Technolust” opens at panke.gallery, marking the avatar artist’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. Examining “the wavering promises of virtual worlds” through AR sculptures and projection, Avedon presents past and present works from Club Rothko (2012-), a “virtual nightclub rendered at the end of the metaverse.” Meanwhile, IRL clubbers get to exlore Avedon’s site-specific AR sculpture Sky Queue (2024) while waiting outside of Berlin’s Tresor.

After six years of dormancy, the Sapporo International Art Festival (SIAF) returns to Japan. Artists including Amy Karle (image: Echoes From the Valley of Existence, 2024), Quayola, Xin Liu, and Superflux contribute to a futurity-themed flagship exhibition alongside trio Tega Brain, Julian Oliver, and Bengt Sjölén. Pioneering inventor-performers Maywa Denki and MIT Media Lab Tangible Media Group instigator Hiroshi Ishii are standouts amongst a deep roster of Japanese artists and designers.

Carola Bonfili’s solo exhibition “Second Order Reality” opens at Aksioma, Ljubljana, exploring states of magical thinking and embodied otherness in virtual worlds. Drawing on the writings of Gustave Flaubert and H.G. Wells as well as videogame metaphors, the Italian artist tells the story of primate protagonist M’ling, The Stone Monkey (2022), across CGI video, an immersive VR experience (entitled Level 1, Illusions That We Should Have, But Don’t), and concrete sculptures.

LA’s Honor Fraser opens “SMALL V01CE,” a group exhibition that squares human instinct—the small voice inside our heads—with machine intelligence. Curator Jesse Damiani presents generative AI works by over 20 artists including Memo Akten, Alice Bucknell, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Sara Ludy, Rachel Rossin, and Caroline Sinders that demonstrate “unconventional modes of knowing and perceiving.” They ask: Can machines develop a form of intuition? And is it critical for making art?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launches the Street Level Surveillance Hub, a resource for learning about invasive technologies used by U.S. law enforcement. The website contains accessible intros to cell-site simulators, gunshot detection systems, predictive policing, and other troubling technologies, and identifies related civil liberties concerns. “Understanding this panopticon is the first step in protecting our rights,” says EFF Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia.

Over 9,000 Moon Drawings are headed into space aboard NASA’s Peregrine Mission One. Crowdsourced in 2015 by American media artist Golan Levin and the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Moon Arts Group, the drawings (“whimsical doodles, symbols of hope, solemn wishes, eternal visual forms”) are micro-etched onto a 40mm sapphire disc—the Moon Arts Ark. Sadly, these and other included “gifts to the moon” will never reach their final destination due to a fuel leak detected shortly after launch.

Honouring the centenary of late digital art pioneer Vera Molnar (1924-2023) as part of this year’s Genuary, American media artist and lecturer Golan Levin shares a re-code of Molnar’s 1970 plotter work, À la Recherche de Paul Klee. Realized in p5.js and fully accessible via the p5.js online editor, Levin’s tribute and countless others were prompted by generative artists Melissa Wiederrecht and Piter Pasma, who set the Molnar theme for the online creative coding sprint on Genuary 5th.

Retro computing blogger Josh Renaud reports the recovery of long-lost algorithmic music software developed by American-Israeli inventor and cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen in 1986. Magic Harp was a set of six thematic music disks to be bundled with the Commodore Amiga, each dedicated to a different genre. Found was a beta version of “baroque,” where a Bach-like “artificial personality” conducts digital organs and spinets (image). After the deal with Commodore fell through, Kirschen’s innovations were largely lost to obscurity.

In anticipation of the Steamboat Willey (1928) version of Mickey Mouse entering the public domain in 2024, Matthew Plummer-Fernández’ hack of the cultural icon, Every Mickey, resurfaces on X. First shown in 2015, at the British-Colombian artist’s solo show “Hard Copy” at NOME, Berlin, the 3D-printed composite of found 3D models “circumvents copyright by being a compilation,” Plummer-Fernández explains on X. Compilations constitute “an exception in copyright law for the creative compiling of other works.”