bitforms gallery

bitforms’ booth presents new media works with a high-tech edge. Jonathan Monaghan’s Starship Baroque, from the series A Trace Left by the Future, stands out from most of the fair’s offerings for their apparent lack of photographic process.

My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard is the first major survey of the pioneering net-artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey. The exhibition will feature more than 40 of Harvey’s works, including her groundbreaking net-based interactives, video games, and augmented-reality sculptures from a career spanning nearly four decades. Auriea Harvey has persistently reimagined and redefined the creative boundaries of networked technologies for more than three decades. She possesses a remarkable sensitivity to how the digital revolution of the 1990s spawned a societal shift in the way humans connect. Her trajectory—from creating artwork to be viewed solely in a web browser to challenging lines between virtual and tangible experiences through 3D printing and augmented reality—consistently reflects the paradoxical power of computers to enable intimacy while interfering with corporeal contact and occupation of shared space.

...There are so many ideas - true and false - about what A.I. music is or can be, but also, because it hinges on the unanswerable question: what is good music? But, in the mess we found some interesting ways to organize the conversation. In particular, we felt it was helpful to define different aspects of what A.I. music is and might be, as well as how we listen to it and appreciate it…. or don’t!

Vetro Editions and Generative Hut partner up again to create a new AR publication featuring 100 contemporary cutting-edge artists. The use of pen plotters and other drawing machines has become an important part of the contemporary generative and digital art scene. Tracing the Line showcases the works of 100 contemporary artists who use these machines in their practice.

LaJuné McMillian earned a residency at Jacob's Pillow, which takes place November 8 – 19, 2023. Their work will be on view November 18, 2023 in Brooklyn. The residency will center Spirit and Child as a compendium of our collective experiences—beginning with the introduction of portraiture, expanding on the ritual of movement, and broadening to meditative aphorisms. In closing, Spirit reminds us that home, a place many spend lifetimes seeking, lives inside ourselves. The avatars and movements are self-created using motion capture and 3D modeling software.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is one of those rare artists who both understands complex technologies and can harness them to make works of art that are, miraculously, not only smart but spectacularly visually compelling.

Anadol will take over the exterior of the soon-to-debut Sphere in Las Vegas, a glowing, 366-foot-tall, globe-shaped events venue that will open Sept. 29 with a series of U2 concerts. The exterior of the futuristic-looking building, or the “Exosphere,” as it’s being referred to, is a 580,000-square-foot programmable LED screen that will be used as a 360-degree canvas by rotating artists.

"Artificial Intelligence: Its Promise... And Peril." Fareed Zakaria explores the exciting but frightening new world of artificial intelligence in technology, science, art and more.

Companies large and small are assessing how they can harness artificial intelligence to be more competitive and profitable. We have already seen legal briefs submitted with AI-hallucinated case citations, and situations where confidential proprietary code was revealed to the public through generative AI use.

Feral File, launched in 2020, is one of the more inventive projects to come out of the recent convergence of digital art with Blockchain and NFT platforms. Founded by programmer and artist Casey Reas, Feral File is an online gallery, in which NFT artworks are brought together by changing guest curators.

Last week Exosphere featured its first artist commission Machine Hallucinations: Sphere by Refik Anadol. “I am extremely honored to be the first artist to utilize the exterior of Sphere,” Anadol said in a press release. “This opportunity aligns perfectly with our studio’s long-term mission of embedding media arts into architecture to create living architectural pieces that are in constant interaction with their environments.”

The Turkish-American artist is inaugurating Las Vegas’s new Sphere with his swirling, real-time generated digital collages of space and nature. Not only a feat of technical ingenuity, it cements the Populous-designed venue as a platform for high-concept artwork in a city still lacking a major cultural institution.

Tracking technology, facial recognition and more are all at play in Atmospheric Memory, the Mexican Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s latest exhibition, which is designed to make air into something tangible.

When Y2K seemed like the world’s most pressing technological concern, the Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was using a dictionary and a set of grammatical rules to teach a computer how to write questions. The program he built can make enquiries in Spanish, English, German and French, in 4.7tn possible combinations. When the artwork showed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last year, it still had 271,000 years of new questions to ask.

Generative digital art remains in demand, even as the broader NFT market struggles. This summer alone, the medium has garnered eye-popping sales, the doting attention of elite brands and institutions, and the emergence of new platforms. But it wasn’t always that way. Casey Reas, an artist and software designer who has pioneered the use of automated computer code in creating digital art for over 20 years, recalls how much lonelier—and cumbersome—things used to be prior to the rise of NFTs, which made it much easier to sell original digital artwork.

After a year of teaching our grandparents how to Zoom, we would hardly dispute Oliver Laric’s 2010 assertion that the internet is not a space of representation but of primary experiences. The year 2020 was one in which we resigned ourselves to screen-mediated people and art. Disembodied Behaviors, curated by Zaiba Jabbar and Valerie Amend for bitforms gallery, gives us both. Importantly, it includes the digital work of non-white artists, who, as we have discussed before, are under-represented in both the tech and art worlds. Disembodied Behaviors is 2020 both as a celebration and a conceit.

bitforms gallery is pleased to introduce ​Alchemical​, a collaborative exhibition by Casey Reas and Jan St. Werner. ​Alchemical presents the artists’ suite of videos alongside a selection of prints by Casey Reas. The online component of this exhibition is presented in collaboration with New Art City.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, whenever someone dies, the pain of the loss itself is aggravated by the inability to collectively express our mourning in funerary rites and rituals of farewell. Lozano-Hemmer thus proposes the creation of a remote, participatory memorial for the pandemic’s victims, convoking the bereaved and friends of those who lost their lives in 2020 to send in photos for an homage that would be carried out remotely. The piece consists of a shared altar and a ceremony adapted to 21st Century technology and living conditions.

Refik Anadol’s Quantum memories, 2020, draws upon a dataset of more than two hundred million nature-related images from the internet, which are processed using quantum computing software developed by the Google AI Quantum research team in combination with a supercomputer that has been programmed with machine-learning algorithms. The resulting real-time video can be considered both an alternate dimension of the natural world and a radical visualisation of our digitised memories of nature. Anadol’s arresting visuals and accompanying audio are composed in collaboration with a generative algorithm enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing – a new form of computing that exploits the unusual physics of the subatomic world – turning the visual data that flows around us every day into an artwork that represents our collective memory of nature. Through the work, the artist encourages us to imagine the potential of this experimental computer technology and the immense opportunities it presents for the future of art and design.

Claudia Hart’s new exhibition focuses on the masters of Modernism, Matisse in particular, an artist whose work straddles early 19th-century and Modern art galleries in most museums. But it’s not the stylistic shift from one to the other that interests her, rather the very modern phenomenon Matisse also straddles: copyright. Matisse’s work remains under copyright in the US, because of the country’s prohibitive laws, unlike that of earlier artists which has since entered the public domain. Hart’s use of Matisse seems to relish the contradiction at the core of modern and contemporary art today; in a field with so much appropriation, borrowing, and stealing, what does copyright mean anyway?

Claudia Hart’s work range in media: architecture, painting/illustration, installation, eventually moving on to study animation – leading her to 3D animation art. Theory seems to be both the starting point and the end point of all of her artistic endeavours. Here, Hart, sits down with Tina Sauerlaender to discuss her work, career and how we are experiencing a crisis of truth.

Known for his large-scale, interactive installations, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer uses contemporary technologies like computerized surveillance, heart-rate sensors, and robotics to create participatory experiences and platforms for public participation and connection.

Kass Richards elaborated further in a statement: "What 'Atlantis' is attempting to get at is the sacred humanity of the creative act, the importance of returning again and again to that meditative process, especially in a world of so much creative undoing."

The front window of bitforms gallery displays Claudia Hart’s The Orange Room (2019), a bold crimson painting featuring energetic twists of lime green that slink down a wall, into and then across a table: the two dimensional wall becomes one with the three-dimensional table so that neither kind of space operates clearly. It’s a painting. But actually it’s a video animation that allows Hart to introduce rates of time to the dimensional illusions that Matisse created in his 1908 masterpiece, The Dessert: Harmony in Red.

Renowned new media artist Quayola will create a projection mapping video interpreting Fort Worth's nature using high-precision 3D laser scanning and digital tracking systems projected on all four sides of Pioneer Tower. The Arts Council of Fort Worth received a Cultural District grant award of $225,000 from the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA) for a free community event that premieres art works by internationally-recognized new media artists Quayola from Italy and Refik Anadol from Los Angeles.

Three artists have partnered to launch a digital platform that allows people unable to march in the streets to participate in Black Lives Matter protests. High-profile killings of several Black people by police sparked nationwide protests this summer, with marchers demanding police reform and racial justice. Jason Lazarus, Siebren Versteeg and Stephanie Syjuco founded Public Public Address on September 1 to help people with illnesses and disabilities participate in these protests and make their voices heard without putting their lives at risk.

In a year that includes a pandemic and widespread calls to end social injustices, those who have health concerns and political opinions can’t always put their bodies where their hearts want them to be. Public Public Address founders hope the outlet offers an opportunity to protest for a group that’s been accustomed to sitting out.

Siebren Versteeg’s In%20Memory is an email; a checklist of speculative objects, a series of links, and a PDF; together creating a daisy-chain as exhibition... Bitforms’s webpage for the exhibit provides a space to leave your email address, after which you will receive the email that is the show. It is a charmingly irreverent approach to exhibition possibilities while also quite seriously invigorating our musings on how we might exhibit work digitally.

An artist working at the intersection of architecture and performance art, Lozano-Hemmer creates participatory artworks that utilize technology like robotics, heart-rate sensors, and computerized surveillance tools in order to facilitate human connection. Technologically sophisticated yet deceptively simple in their execution, Lozano-Hemmer’s spectacular, immersive works are often installed in public places as a means of transforming these sites into forums for civic engagement.

The Ruins implements still lifes, the classical form of a memento mori, to contemplate the decay of western civilization. In this exhibition, Hart revises the canons of modernist painting and the manifestos of failed utopias. Exhibited works are meditations on the flow of history, expressed as a cycle of decay and regeneration. The Ruins is an antidote to a world in crisis, navigating from a Eurocentric paradigm of fixed photographic capture into a reality of malleable and inherently unstable computer simulations and systemic collapse. The exhibition presents a different notion of time, a present that viewers experience through the possibility of simulation technologies that use scientific data to model natural forces, the crystallization of past, future, and present into a perpetual now.

In In%20Memory, playful references to painting, readymades, and installation inquire toward the experience of isolation within our technological present. In effort to participate yet emancipate from the expectation of an artist to create “things,” In%20Memory advances viewing room culture with deep zoom technology while challenging visitors to engage in a meaningful temporal experience. The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by Katie Geha.

What exactly is extended reality (XR) and how is it being used in art? We bring together an international group of experts in the field to review and make sense of the cutting-edge, digital work that artists, museums, galleries and app-makers are creating across the spectrum of XR—from augmented to virtual reality.

⌘F is a conversation series focused on the presentation of time-and web-based artwork. These interviews start with a set of fixed questions that trace the effects of worldwide quarantine on artistic practice and later expand upon a single work in detail. This week’s ⌘F invites conversation with Clement Valla. Valla is a New York-based artist whose work considers the way computer vision systems apprehend the world, and the way in which automated image production entangles people and things in increasingly complex ways. The work we are discussing today is pointcloud.garden. To access the work, please click here. Read more about this work below.

After three months with the internet as my primary portal to the outside world, I was intrigued by the premise of Daniel Canogar’s latest work: “to expose the hidden threads of data networks.” Inside bitforms gallery, six large, wavelike metal structures covered with modular flexible LED screens hang on the walls or sit on the floor, all part of the artist’s “Billow” series (2020).

Daniel Canogar’s sinuous, ripple-like sculptures emanate colorful LED light in “Billow,” his solo exhibition here. It’s no accident that his bending architectural forms mimic hills, valleys, and mountains: Their slumbering shapes make the works’ cascading waves all the more hypnotic.

In The Tree of Life, the esteemed digital artist Claudia Hart curated a show about how nature engages us amidst “the speed of time, history, archiving, memory, hard drives and resolution” that define our mediated lives. Her musings on how certain objects create moments and the way technology determines certain spans of time are thoughtful and thought-provoking, and they provide a context for the nine artists’ works. The website, designed by Shi Zheng, imitates the graphics of timelines—images and memory being two things at the heart of Hart’s opening essay written during the period of isolation.

⌘F is a conversation series focused on the presentation of time-and web-based artwork. These interviews start with a set of fixed questions that trace the effects of worldwide quarantine on artistic practice and later expand upon a single work in detail. This week’s ⌘F invites conversation with Addie Wagenknecht. Wagenknecht is an American artist based in Austria whose work explores the tension between expression and technology. Blending conceptually-driven painting, sculpture, and installation with the ethos of hacker culture, Wagenknecht constructs spaces between art object and lived experience. Here, the darker side of systems that constitute lived reality emerge, revealing alternative yet parallel realities. In the context of post-Snowden information culture, Wagenknecht’s work contemplates power, networked consciousness, and the incessant beauty of everyday life despite the anxiety of being surveilled. This interview was conducted via email back and forth throughout April and May. The work we are discussing is titled Believe Me, a 2017 commission from the Whitney’s portal for internet art, ARTPORT(opens in new window). To access the work, please click here(opens in new window).

The arrival of the coronavirus in New York was marked by a paradox: As many people stayed home in social isolation, the days seemed to blend together, yet outside spring was coming. The world was turning, even as it felt like it was standing still. The artworks in the group exhibition “The Tree of Life” speak to this strange experience of time and nature, although they weren’t made in response to the pandemic. Videos with a meditative, almost existential quality — they don’t tell stories or have destinations, only droning loops and gradual shifts that require sustained attention.

Can an artist engage with surveillance technologies without being complicit in their use for control and oppression? Audiences tend to treat interactive works as a fun spectacle, a chance to take a selfie. So how do artists clarify their position? How do they present their work as commentary, rather than mere reproduction?

Luke DuBois, a digital media professor at NYU, tells the story of Motown’s sound — an iconic record label with a unique sound based on reverb and distortion.

Images capture us somewhere. Or we write on images that capture us. The ten-minute video work, Claudia Hart's The Swing (2006), part of the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, captured me within the first few seconds.

The works on my website timeline originate in the year 1995. Updating the early entries with higher resolution images was always the next thing on my to-do list. When Corona hit, it rose to number one. My update was to cover projects made between 1995 and 2014, which must have been the year I started thinking of myself seriously as an artist and the start of another story. In 1995, I published an illustrated book drawn with oil-paint, but stretched on canvas. I thought I should document it. In those days, documentation meant slides. In 1996, I bought a slide scanner.

The story will be familiar to artists, musicians and performers whose work has been interrupted, or simply obliterated, by the pandemic. But in Ms. Lialina’s case there was a lucky twist: As one of the first so-called “net artists” to gain a profile in the 1990s, she is used to showing work online. Much of it isn’t even designed to be exhibited in a gallery.

bitforms gallery is pleased to present our fourth solo exhibition with Daniel Canogar. The data-sphere is a driving force of society and the economy, despite its invisible nature. This lack of visibility can make it difficult to comprehend how information affects daily life. Billow attempts to expose the hidden threads of data networks.

“Arts has this quality of imagination. Artists are always inspired by the technology around them, they always try to use them in the maximum capacity of their imagination,” notes artist, Refik Anadol, the visionary behind Infinite Space and Machine Hallucinations.

The scheme entitled FACT Together will offer 10 early-career artists a grant of £1,500 each to develop an idea that will be presented online.

The space for politics has shrunk, either ’deported’ to social media and online spaces in general, self-ghettoized in homogeneous circles or lost in the crowd of leaders’ profiles, not to mention the pollution of human and bot paid troll armies. “my opsec haul from Sephora” is a series that Addie Wagenknecht performed on a barebone YouTube channel.

This exhibition takes the purported net art’s “dead end” as a new starting point to chart a discursive trajectory of the practices since then, in the many manifestations of network-based art. Instead of prescribing it a categorical definition, the exhibition attempts to uncover the variegated developments, diverse strategies, critical positions and aesthetic experiments after the crash of the dot.com bubble, amidst the prevalence of neoliberalism and cognitive capitalism, and the rise of populism and nationalism. Sideways reveals the continuum of the Avant-garde “nettitudes” inherent in the works of these artists.

I WASN’T AN ARTIST BEFORE THE INTERNET. I’d studied journalism and film criticism, and cofounded the Cine Fantom Film Club in Moscow. We had screenings and self-made publications, and I started to make the website for our club in 1995. I got so immersed in this work, I didn’t want to write about films anymore. I wanted to work with HTML and create films online. At that moment, I didn’t think of what I was doing in terms of making art online but in terms of “Netfilms.” I wanted to tell a story for the browser alone. This was how I came to make My Boyfriend Came Back From The War, 1996, a graphic portrayal of a dramatic conversation between two people reunited after war, in the form of multiple webpages featuring grainy black-and-white gifs.

We should proceed with caution: As Net artists have helped reveal, the internet is the biggest surveillance tool ever devised; its algorithms are oppressive; and its apparent immateriality elides the exploitation of labor on which it depends. (Some are already voicing concerns about how this pandemic may be used to further erode our

Wagenknecht makes razor-sharp, critical, satirical art that takes aim at abuses of power and technology in society. She’s painted with Roombas and pigments made from makeup, she’s made art with drones, and she’s created a robot arm to rock your baby to sleep. You know what she’s up to? Taking the piss and undermining contemporary society’s bullshit with pizzazz and aesthetics.

As museums and other cultural institutions around the world announced indefinite closures to quell the spread of coronavirus this past week, Verhallen and her co-curator, Barbara Pollack, opened a new online exhibition, titled How Can We Think of Art at a Time Like This?, that features a new piece by a new artist each day, as unveiled on their website and Instagram.

From behind bitforms gallery’s glass facade, an artistic toilet bowl (“Toilet Joke I,” 2020) beckons passers-by into Wet Logic, Sarah Rothberg’s and Marina Zurkow’s digitized meditation on water’s unearthliness. The readymade ceramic toilet’s most noticeable feature is its bowl, which brims with blue and brown recycled plastic pellets; nestled in the pellets is an iPhone whose cracked screen plays footage of waves lapping against a sandy shore. The joke, as it were, is on all of us: our species’ synthetic waste clogs the septic device we use to dispose of our bodies’ natural waste. On the brown-painted wall behind the toilet is a white chalk drawing in which consumer goods occupy one layer of the planet’s sedimentary record — it emphasizes how humans are hoisting ourselves with our own petrochemical petard.

Early Video Art (1965–1976) situates video in a time when it was not yet in the mainstream of artistic circulation and functioned primarily as an experiment that remained outside the area of interest of art institutions, market and distribution. It presents single-channel works made on magnetic tapes. They can be characterised as intimate, spontaneous recordings, mostly made by the artists themselves. The selection of videos and the significance of the medium in the exhibition is close to thinking about drawing. A hand-drawn sketch on a piece of paper and a video, which is a kind of note on magnetic tape, have much in common.

The series Today’s Ideology by Casey Reas uses editorial photos from The New York Times to create generative collages. Images from each issue are shuffled daily and obliquely drawn. Each work in the series is made on the day referenced in the title and consists of all images from that day’s paper. On December 19, 2019 the House of Representatives voted to impeach the President. In response to this historically important day, Casey Reas and bitforms gallery will donate all proceeds from sales of Today’s Ideology (19 December 2019) to support Democratic candidates in the 2020 election.

Wet Logic, a collaborative exhibition by Sarah Rothberg and Marina Zurkow, presents a model of the world organized according to a wet, oceanic ideology rather than a dry, land-based paradigm. This is a world that manifests the circuitous nature of time, the enmeshment of humans to the planet, and the shifting boundaries of earthly spaces. Rothberg and Zurkow present a series of systems that further human connection to oceans by way of action and imagination.

Join us for a closing reception on Sunday, January 19 for a performance of Awoke & the Awokened by Surabhi Saraf. Awoke, a mythical artificial emotional intelligence comes from the earth. Within the artwork, the minerals and metals that make up digital technologies take the form of a moving, breathing, amorphous metallic blob. Awoke values human emotional vulnerability and helps its believers, the Awokened, build endurance against anxieties like FOMO. Communicating with humans through bodily movements instead of words, Awoke is a silent yet powerful agent. Its fluidity causes intensely physical effects in its human counterparts. Embodying her role as the first Awokened, Surabhi Saraf will evoke the genesis of Awoke through atmospheric sound exploration.

Marina Zurkow focuses her work on the intersection of nature and culture, offering wry and pointed critiques of this perilously dysfunctional relationship. She has spent extensive amounts of time researching what she refers to as “wicked problems” involving invasive species, superfund sites, and a worldwide dependence on petrochemicals. During a two-week residency supported by the Houston-based art center DiverseWorks, Zurkow traveled to Texas’s Permian Basin, from Marfa to Midland, meeting with geologists, naturalists, cattlemen, oilmen, and activists. Most everyone who lives on the U.S. power grid relies on petrochemicals for food, shelter, clothing, and mobility; yet few realize that the oil-based products that fuel so much of our lives emerge from this expansive plateau known as “The Big Empty.” Oil excavation relies on vast amounts of water taken from a semi-arid plain. The Thirsty Bird offers parallel narratives on two essential, yet incompatible elements: oil and water.

R. Luke Dubois’ Learning Machines are vintage voting machines augmented with digital technology to present an illusion of choice. These artists demonstrate that machines and technology do not always function as planned and may function mysteriously, or even counter to our input.

Wallplay is pleased to host the newest edition of Claudia Hart’s A Child’s Machiavelli, published by Beatrice Books and edited by Patrick Reynolds. The original 1998 Penguin edition has been redesigned in collaboration with the author, and will be available for purchase on December 1st, 2019 through Amazon Books. A Child’s Machiavelli was initially written and illustrated by Hart in 1995, inspired by Niccolo Machiavelli’s Renaissance treatise, The Prince, long considered the first book of political philosophy. Hart’s version began as a series of oil paintings and small catalog, produced by the Realismus Studio, at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin, 1995.

Bringing together artists, scientists, programmers, and art historians, Garage Digital aims to explore and support the new languages of visual culture that are emerging under the influence of advanced technologies and new media on everyday life and on artistic and research practices.

“Border Tuner, a timely and ephemeral light and sound installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, created a unique and powerful platform for interconnectivity and public participation at the U.S.–Mexico border. By melding performance, robotic technology, and social discourse, Lozano-Hemmer’s large-scale installation shared a lesser-told story by visibly highlighting positive counter-narratives about El Paso and Ciudad Juárez’s interdependent culture. A challenging public project to achieve, Lozano-Hemmer’s piece was able to brilliantly and poetically render intimate bridges between strangers standing in two different cities and countries that share so much.”—Nicholas Baume, Director and Chief Curator, Public Art Fund

The apexart Fellowship is an alternative educational program that invites creative individuals to leave their familiar surroundings for a month-long stay in an unfamiliar city. The program provides new sources of inspiration through exposure to new cultures, interests, and experiences. Unlike an artist residency program, the apexart Fellowship provides a rich, 30-day schedule of non-art activities, all while requiring Fellows to refrain from producing creative works. The apexart Fellowship schedule prioritizes educational experiences that are outside of the Fellow’s stated interests. This diversity of activities leaves Fellows with new ideas, approaches, and content to incorporate into their creative practices.

Sixteen years ago, a young Matt Clark stumbled out of art school and into contact with Massive Attack Robert Del Naja. Speaking with the enigmatic front man, Clark formed a vision for the band’s first major stage visuals, interrogating ideas of surveillance, misinformation and state control that have been key to Massive Attack’s subversive messaging ever since.

Imagine huge searchlights which can be seen over a ten mile, 15 kilometer radius talking to one another across two countries. This is exactly what electronic media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is creating this November between Ciudad Juárez in Mexico and El Paso in Texas. Called Border Tuner, the project will see enormous bridges of light connecting the US-Mexico border for the first time.