In celebration of Earth Day, Yoko Ono declares “I LOVE YOU EARTH” across billboards in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and other cities in the UK. The message, set in stark black and white, is a call for climate action and a nod to Ono’s eponymous 1985 song and text piece, which includes the lyrics: “I love you, earth (…) I know I never said it to you / But I wanna say it now.” The two-week action is part of Serpentine Galleries’ multi-year project “Back to Earth,” which has 60+ artists respond to the environmental crisis.

An output of curators Peter Kirn and Anna Titovets plus partner Kotä, “Experimental Music and Art” Expo opens at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA). !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Sara Culmann, Mikhail Myasoedov, and other participants’ expertise spans hard sciences, installation, and sound. The thematic: a search for new forms in a moment of crisis, as evidenced by Byrke Lou’s postdigital materials research (image: CODE_xi {isbtm}•{~} 2014-).

An effort to encourage NFT artists and collectors to transition to greener blockchains, curator Juliette Bibasse and visual artist Joanie Lemercier kick off a series of coordinated cryptoart releases on Hic et Nunc, an indie marketplace on the energy-efficient Tezos chain. Named “The FEN” (image: generative type by Mike Brondbjerg), the campaign launches with pieces by Dave Whyte, Zai Divecha, and Auriea Harvey. Drops from more than 30 other artists will follow in the coming weeks.

The Chelsea branch of Dia Art Foundation reopens with newly commissioned works by American artist Lucy Raven. Two kinetic light sculptures, Casters X-2 and X-3 (2021), surveil the gallery with moving beams, while the immersive film installation Ready Mix (2021, image) documents the workings of an Idaho concrete plant. Capturing the churn of mineral aggregates and cement binders with optical and durational experiments, the 45-minute film expands on Raven’s preoccupation with resource extraction in the American West.

Mario Santamaría’s installation Unfixed Infrastructures and Rabbit Holes (2020) opens at Aksioma, Ljubljana, articulating invisible data flows. The Spanish artist programmed a “rabbit hole” network to cycle signals through different geolocations, seeking the maximum possible route allowed by network protocols. The delay—a measure of the materiality of digital time—is visualised by two screens video-streaming a Foucault pendulum, one connected to the gallery WiFi, the other to the “rabbit hole” network.

From “Cybernetic Serendipity” (1968), to the first Ars Electronica (1979), to SFMOMA’s “010101: Art in Technological Times” (2001)—Wolf Lieser’s Digital Art Museum website adds a neat event timeline that lets visitors scroll through a genre chronology. The feature is one of several additions (see the essay section) since the site’s major overhaul in 2020. Launched in 2000, the online museum (that precedes Lieser’s eponymous Berlin gallery) is one of the first internet resources on the history of digital art.

“Unmanned aircraft were seen as popular because U.S. soldiers didn’t have to go to the battlefield. But what about the casualties in the countries that were attacked by our drones?“ American artist Sam Durant asks in a wide-ranging interview about his new public artwork Untitled (drone). “The idea was to bring this conversation home to America.” Originally conceived in 2016, Durant’s life-sized fiberglass sculpture of a Predator drone will be installed atop a 25-foot-tall pole on New York’s High Line in May.

Software artist Everest Pipkin launches an exhaustive directory of 600+ open-source tools for building games, websites, and interactive projects. Supported by the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and the Clinic for Open Source Arts (COSA), Pipkin’s list includes anything from quirky single-purpose utilities (ASCII PAINT) to major applications (Blender). “The goal is to enable making entirely outside of closed production ecosystems or walled software gardens,” writes Pipkin.

Artists Ben Rubin and Brian House’s “Terminal Moraine” opens at Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Taking a meta-historical approach, its lone eponymous work models the local impact of the Laurentide ice sheet. Approximately 18,000 years ago, the 600 metre wall of ice flowed down the Hudson Valley and shaped the landscape—Rubin and House simulate the glacial retreat and forest growth that followed. In their sonification “cells expand and branch while crystalline structures gradually break apart,” helping listeners contemplate the deep time of history.

A collaboration between sound designer Yuri Suzuki and musical artist and composer Miyu Hosoi, Crowd Cloud is unveiled at Haneda Airport, Japan. The site-specific installation distils the vowels of the Japanese language, sung by Hosoi, creating a unique composition that emanates from a choir of dozens of standing horns that converse with each other like people. Crowd Cloud is part of the Paola Antonelli-curated “Culture Gate” exhibition that sees artists offer fresh interpretations of Japan’s diverse culture in airports across the country.

“Take Me to Another World,” the first-ever Charlotte Johannesson retrospective, opens at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Named after a computer graphic the Swedish artist created in the 1980s, the survey traces 60 years of Johannesson’s image-making between craft and technology. A textile artist who turned to computer programming (in 1978, the autodidact swapped her loom for an Apple II Plus), Johannesson’s political tapestries are inwoven with 1960s counterculture, punk, and feminism.

A reimagination of Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic triptych for the digital age, Carla Gannis’ The Garden of Emoji Delights opens at Stockholm’s Fotografiska. In her 2014 collage, the American artist explores how Bosch’s visual world from 500 years ago matches our emoji dictionary, circa now. “There is humour, darkness, and absurdity,” state the curators. “Earthly, cosmological, and technological conditions are combined,” revealing ideologies and social constructs that have remained unchanged for centuries.

“Poetics of reality (encoded)” opens at max goelitz gallery, Munich, putting works by Austrian artist Brigitte Kowanz and UK-based collective Troika in juxtaposition. “Both question different forms of representation via a subversive examination of abstraction and new pictorial formulas,” notes curator Madeleine Freund. What unites them is a shared interest in human perception and the mediation of information. “Through language, codes, and algorithms they critically examine contemporary issues, from climate policy to digitization.”

“Activating Captions,” an online exhibition exploring the expressive potential of closed captioning launches. Curated by Christine Sun Kim and Niels Van Tomme for the ARGOS Centre for Audiovisual Arts in Brussels, it brings together Carolyn Lazard, Alison O’Daniel (image: The Tuba Thieves, 2013), Alex Dolores Salerno, and others to “highlight and undo [captioning’s] shortcomings and inadequacies” while raising related questions of equity and access.