While sparsely occupied ultra-thin “pencil towers” develop in our cities, functioning as speculative wealth storage for the superrich and cavernous “iceberg” homes extend architectural assets many stories below street level, communities around the globe are blighted by zombie and ghost urbanism, marked by unoccupied neighbourhoods and abandoned housing developments
Author: Regine
The digital revolution has given rise to new models of collaboration and knowledge production but also to new forms of exploitation, precariousness and dependency that have been likened to feudalism
Video games maker Pippin Barr talks about his mischievous and perverse works, about the gamification of work and about the place of games in contemporary art
advertising
A panel that looked at how activists, thinkers, researchers and creative minds are trying to make digital technology more “frugal” or sustainable
Artists and writers examine the bombardment of information, misinformation, emotion, deception and secrecy in online and offline life in the post-digital age
An exhibition packed with artworks that are bold, socially-engaged and smart. This review focuses on the pieces that look at labour conditions, migration and the ghosts of past conflicts
social
Dani Ploeger’s performance explores the tensions between the unavoidable barbarity of war and the increasingly sophisticated technologies that enable a greater distance (both physical and emotional) between combatants
The artists in the show challenge anthropocentrism by playing with machine learning, robotics and computer vision but also by challenging the idea of a presumed hierarchy that places our species over everything else. Be it organic or algorithmic
In Data Garden, the artist imagines how a plant endemic to the Acropolis hill could one day secretly host our digital data in its DNA. Counting Craters on the Moon sparks a collaboration between a 19th century astronomer and an AI to calculate how many craters cover the surface of the moon…
Richard Mosse subverts equipment designed for surveillance in order to challenge documentary tropes and force us to look anew at images we’ve seen again and again
Interview with a multimedia artist, engineer, educator and designer whose practice focuses on the practical and experimental applications of sustainable energy technologies, particularly photovoltaic solar power
The authors explore emerging forms of algorithmic governance and AI-augmented apps that collect data about individuals and keep wages and worker representation under control. They also provide case studies of new and exciting form of resistance across the globe
What place did the African continent occupy in the development of discourses presented as narratives of the future? What remains of the utopias of the non-aligned futures?
A book that unpacks the notion of the mass image through the lens of affective, representational, political, logistical and material economies
While exploring the “de-extinction” movement, artists and designers are also questioning its motives, highlighting its shortcomings and challenging the promise that we can resurrect the animals and plants that we have driven to extinction
Based on a collaborative and experimental approach, Robert’s projects attempt to translate sounds and rituals into tangible works of art that directly echo the traditions of the communities he meets
Inspired by medieval bestiaries and observations of our damaged planet, A Bestiary of the Anthropocene is a compilation of hybrid creatures of our time
The DAOWO Global Initiative asked groups of artists, curators and thinkers from Berlin, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and Minsk to design new prototypes to address key questions about the potential of blockchain to replace outmoded models, decentralise power structures and rewire the arts
A practical guide for working with data in more ethical, creative and responsible ways
The Antilibrary looks closely at artists’ books in order to identify atypical trends and future attitudes. Its material of choice tends to be very speculative, decidedly science-inspired, slightly bizarre and never without a touch of humour
Can the values that blockchain makes possible -such as transparency, sharing of resources and equal access to information- be applied to how the art world thinks and functions?
In previous centuries, Europeans believed that human interventions could tame heavy storms, dry landscapes and unseasonably dark Summers and modify the climate as they wished
Maggie Kane: On the role of creativity when helping marginalised communities in capitalistic systems
“You have to be creative to operate in this capitalistic system. You have to find all kinds of walk arounds and work with pretty much no assistance from the government”
What make her works so compelling is that they go beyond confronting the audience with uncomfortable ethical questions about the history of museum collections. They also present new counter narratives and new strategies to examine issues of decolonisation
Building on a long-shared history in the region, the projects covered in this volume use design and architecture to address social, political and ecological concerns along the shared border between Mexico and the USA
What would aerospace engineering look like if its methods were decoupled from the corporate and military interests?
In this manifesto, climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tyres and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse
Next month, I’ll be giving online classes titled “Art & Politics for Plants. On plant geopolitics, phytoengineering and uncanny crops” with the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe
The artists who opened their own bank, printed their own money and then bought £1 million worth of predatory debts, which were then blown up in the shadow of London’s financial district
In her keynote, Manuela de Barros explored the limits of Earth resources, the responses to climate change, the sharing of a limited territory with non-human beings, the energy and ecology transition and other environmental issues through the lens of artistic proposals
In Pre-Star Wars films not only was there a variation in the way different cultures visualized space, but that there were regional trends in the design of their soundscapes
A tarot deck that features inspirational women of science on the minor arcana cards, plus a guidebook with scientist biographies and other information
If you click around Santamaria’s website and feel like you’re falling down the rabbit hole, that’s part of his plan. He wants you (and the data) to go to places where you’re not supposed to go
My notes from a round table with curator and COAL co-founder Loïc Fel, artist Claire Bardainne as well as artist and activist Joanie Lemercier
In her talk, art historian and curator Bénédicte Ramade explored the differences between ecological art, environmental art, green art, ecologist art, Anthropocene art, etc.
An art installation at Furtherfield Gallery and on the Internet explores what happens when networked surveillance tools and AI capabilities get sick in the head
The book looks at the many dark facets of the corporation, including automation, surveillance, tech work, workers’ struggles, algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy and much more
“The witch may be a technophile — she is, however, squinting skeptically at capitalism in everything that she does, and twisting technologies towards beautifully weird outcomes”
Examining the potential benefits and risks of using artificial intelligence to advance global sustainability
The exhibition invites us to challenge the dominant narratives about growth and progress and explore the radical implications of a speculative economic model based on the energy emitted by the Sun