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
Category Archive: installation
Angela Washko actively seeks out new ways to facilitate or enter into conversation with individuals and communities who have radically different ideas and opinions in an attempt to create spaces for discussion, productive dissent and complexity
An exhibition in Erlangen (DE) looks at the role that technology can play to ensure or threaten the future of our planet
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The young Estonian artist is particularly active in the fields of sound art, installations and performances
The installation reveals the mechanisms of the blockchain as much as it challenges their promises and limits. It also raises questions about art funding, authorship, value systems, decentralised sharing economies, wealth distribution and many more issues
From quantum entanglement to the mysteries of the jellyfish, the exhibition provides an overview of the oeuvre of the artist and musician Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto)
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An installation exposes the unpalatable consequences of an AI-driven management of the environment
The French artist challenges the architecture of our perceptions
A participative installation that imitates the functioning of machines and embraces human imperfections and errors started quietly enough but ended up causing controversy and censorship in Hungary
A street artist’s critique of the privatisation of public space and natural resources
People affected by the disorder believe that they or part of their body parts are dead, dying or don’t exist at all
Adam Basanta, an artist, composer and performer of experimental music, likes to submit sound technologies to kinetic and sculptural treatments. Some can be fairly hostile, others are ironic or even poetical
This year’s edition of the STRP festival in Eindhoven decided to look at the future with an open, critical and -dare i say- hopeful eye. Their take on the future is not about being naive and resolutely utopian though
The project revolves around the idea of sending humans to one of the points in space where gravity is absent. Frozen bodies would float until their weak gravities make them assemble into a blob: in this way, a new ‘human’ planet is extra-terraformed
Despite a theme anchored in digital media, the event doesn’t have the ambition to be a new media art exhibition but a contemporary art event that explores the many ways technology challenges society today
Artist Quentin Destieu attempted to reconquer the knowledge surrounding the first microprocessor by re-creating and magnifying the inner architecture of Intel’s 4004 processor
Enter The New Newsroom where journalists, technologists, artists and designers investigate innovative formats, analyse the news and present their findings in stimulating visuals and installations
Surveillance and censorship are mutually dependent; they cannot be viewed separately
Hybrid war, fake-news, post-trough, surveillance, immersion and artificial intelligence – these are just a few of critical topics that were discussed and explored during this year’s RIXC Festival
The interactive installation invites “deep listening” within the body but also offers us an opportunity to reflect on how anthropocentric geological changes might be recorded, experienced and how they can be reproduced for other people in order to help them attune themselves to a future marked by man-made geological changes
What are the consequences of owning someone else’s DNA data? How does this influence the spatial privacy of the biological owner and his family members?
Robots and computers are acting more and more like people. They’re driving around in cars, hooking us up with new lovers and talking to us out of the blue. But is the opposite also true— are people acting more and more like robots?
The internet is everywhere. Set free from the websites and the screens, it now penetrates our thoughts and our bodies and everything around us. Each day, the digital and physical become more integrated – but how does this effect our experience and how do we express the new, augmented reality?
Alone or with the help of local communities, these artists have cleaned up polluted areas, planted wheat field, provided pollinators with colourful and appetizing flowery landscapes, built hanging and floating gardens, initiated edible and medicinal urban farms, developed schemes for sharing excess food and bred more resilient chicken breeds
Looking beyond the modernist vision of a utopian nuclear age, contemporary artists are engaging with the lived experience of radiation through nuclear objects, architectures and landscapes
Informed by several years of research in the Australian outback desert, It Was Like Experiencing a Fold in Time, She Said bridges the gap between, on the one hand, the landscapes, mythologies and life of outback and aboriginal communities and on the other hand, the brutal origins of our technological ‘progress’
Socle Du Monde, the biennale that opened a few weeks ago in Herning (Denmark), celebrates artists who have “accepted the challenge of turning the world upside down”
This year the theme, Senses & Sensors, explored perception: how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. How we absorb and comprehend what we see, and how rapidly progressing technological advances expand and augment our perceptions
It seems that humans have an inherent need for the unaccountable and the illogical. That’s why progresses in science and technology have often been accompanied by the arrival or renewal of paranormal phenomena
The French collective RYBN.org has applied the numerological system of transformations, associations and substitutions of Kabbalah to computing. Their Dataghost 2 installation seeks to reveal the hidden messages buried within the data traffic…
Good Luck, Archaeologists! reflects on the 10 years of OTTO-Prod‘s programme of shows, concerts, art residencies and performance in Maribor. You might have never been to Maribor, it’s Slovenia’s second-largest city, it’s charming and it’s actually not that large. And maybe you haven’t heard much about OTTO-Prod but i love what these young artists from Marseille have been doing, quietly and with far more talent than money, in Maribor and elsewhere for a decade
Empathy is the element that has enabled humans to work together and collaborate in order to flourish as species. The festival wants to question and propose that maybe empathy could be learned, found or especially re-found through eg. bodily presence, experimental communication and embodied and alternate visions of perception
Everyone knows about cybercrime and how owning networked computers and mobile devices makes you a potential victim of bank fraud, identity theft, extortion, theft of confidential information, etc. Data stored on your computer is never safe and its ghosts can come back and haunt you long after you’ve discarded your electronic device, long after even you’ve erased the data it contained
The two installations are composed of identical elements, connected in a network and exchanging information through electric signals. The collective behavior of the actuators and sensors create unpredictable patterns, as though a system of living organisms with their own variable program. A moving scene emerges, where the borders between a ‘natural’ order of things and the mechanical constructions of humans are tested
The installation’s mechanical workings and network of strings allow us to explore the poetic potential of technology via its materiality, so that Interface I sits on the boundary between an imaginary field and an epistemological condition
In 1961, Donald Michie, a British WWII code breaker and a researcher in artificial intelligence, developed MENACE (the Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine), one of the first programs capable of learning to play and win a game of Noughts and Crosses (or Tic-Tac-Toe if you’re American.) Since he had no computers at his disposal at the time, he created a device built out of matchboxes and glass beads to simulate a learning algorithm.
The Promise of Total Automation, an exhibition recently opened at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, looks at our troubled relationship with machines. Technical devices that were originally designed to serve and assist us and are now getting smarter and harder to control and comprehend. Does their growing autonomy mean that the machines will one day overpower us? Or will they remain our subservient little helpers, our gateway to greater knowledge and sovereignty?
A few years ago, artist Nick Laessing stumbled upon a book in a second-hand bookshop. Titled The Search of Free Energy, the publication introduced him to the world of people who are searching for alternatives to fossil fuel as a source of energy
Luque Sánchez uses matter and technology to seduce, puzzle and inspire viewers. His art installations, which double as science fiction works, materialize scientific concepts and theories that might seem arcane to most people: artificial intelligence, chaos theory, infinity
The exhibition brings side by side poetry and suspense, art and physics, children book and video art, Greek mythology and Einstein’s theory of general relativity, music by Philip Glass and Tarot cards, spirituality and human cloning. But in a form that is fortunately far more digestible than my introduction would suggest…