2025 YCC Artist Collaboration with LaJuné McMillianFor this year’s Young Collectors Council (YCC) Party, the artist will take over the iconic Guggenheim rotunda, making it an arena for a collective experience of “motion witnessing.” Syncing different technologies, McMillian will transform the environment into a fractalized universe liberated from limitations of space, time, and other constructs.
Digital Highlights at Art Basel Miami BeachIn a bold effort to connect the worlds of traditional fine art and cutting-edge digital technologies, Miami Art Week has once again made a significant stride in fostering the emerging crypto art community. This year’s events and satellite fairs not only showcased renowned artists and galleries but also continued to champion the fusion of contemporary art and blockchain technology through a series of dynamic digital dialogues and exhibitions.
Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow Opening April 2025Marina Zurkow’s The River is a Circle consists of an animation based on custom software and an accompanying installation. The animation presents a view of the Hudson River in a horizontal split between the world above and under water, depicting a complex ecosystem of rivergoing vessels, wildlife, and the evolution of the meatpacking district. The installation extends the underwater environment to the terrace in a landscape combining maritime wreckage and oyster reef balls, devices used to provide habitat for oysters. The River is a Circle speculates on a circular economy, and a potentially positive cyclical flow back to modest strategies of maintaining ecosystems.
hollywood protest meets AI news in marco brambilla’s US media critique video installationVisual artist Marco Brambilla unveils Limit of Control, his first solo exhibition with bitforms gallery, New York, a two-channel video installation that interrogates America’s media landscape, civil unrest, and the visceral intersection of violence, power, and news coverage in contemporary society.
OPEN AiR | Sarah Rothberg: MEETINGS RESEARCH (HUMAN IN THE LOOP)MEETINGS RESEARCH (HUMAN IN THE LOOP) is a performance-experiment by 2024 Artist-in-Residence Sarah Rothberg which uses improvisation, conversation, and AI language models to (literally) reflect the present moment.
Marina Zurkow: Exploring Ecological Art Through Digital MediaIn a wide-ranging conversation with bitforms gallery, Zurkow discusses her artistic practice, her relationship with scientific research, and how she uses technology to explore environmental themes.
The Crowd Goes Wild: Marco Brambilla’s Timely Video Confections of Violence and ProtestA new installation at bitforms gallery weighs the possibilities and pitfalls of A.I. art in a moment of political upheaval, our critic reports.
Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991 at The Contemporary Art Museum of LuxembourgRadical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991 surveys the history of digital art from a feminist perspective, focusing on women who worked with computers as a tool or subject and artists who worked in an inherently computational way.
Electric Op at Buffalo AKG Art MuseumAn emerging movement called “Op” (short for “Optical”) took art and popular culture by storm. Op artists use abstract patterns to create optical illusions that are dynamic and interactive, much like the electronic images of the time.
Manfred Mohr in Electronic Dreams Exhibition at Tate ModernElectric Dreams celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who pioneered a new era of immersive sensory installations and automatically-generated works.
quayola to transform gaudi’s casa batlló facade with arborescent digital mapping projectionItalian multimedia artist Quayola will reimagine the iconic facade of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona with Arborescent, an immersive projection mapping inspired by natural growth systems and environmental responses.
Modern Patrons: Refik AnadolThe leading new media artist leverages the power of Web3 technologies to support and uplift the Amazon’s Yawanawá tribe
Visions of A.I. Art From OpenAI’s First Artist in ResidenceIn February, during a three-month stint as OpenAI’s first artist in residence, Alexander Reben gained early access to the start-up’s Sora text-to-video tool, which instantly generates videos up to a minute in length from written or spoken prompts.
Quayola x LG OLED bring digital Impressionism to Frieze LondonQuayola conceived Jardins d’Été using the complexity of floral formations moved by the wind as a dataset to generate new computational paintings. Speculating on the traditions of landscape painting, the work ‘explores a hybrid substance between the pictorial and the algorithmic.’
Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing, 1960-1991Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 surveys the history of digital art from a feminist perspective, focusing on women who worked with computers as a tool or subject and artists who worked in an inherently computational way.
Marco Brambilla Debuts a Times Square UtopiaOn June 18, film artists Marco Brambilla took over more than 95 of Times Square’s LED billboards with Approximations of Utopia.
Auriea Harvey’s Digital Worlds Are Love Stories, Without Neat EndsHer story is also a cybernetic romance. As the show’s title puts it: “My veins are the wires. My body is your keyboard.” The wires are everyone’s, but the keyboard is only for “you” — invoking the as-yet-irreplicable intimacy of a lover’s touch.
THESE TRIPPY ‘APPROXIMATIONS OF UTOPIA’ ARTWORKS ARE TAKING OVER TIMES SQUAREFor Approximations of Utopia, Marco Brambilla harnessed AI to help produce the visuals—all based on archival imagery from six World’s Fairs, starting with the 1958 edition in Brussels through the 2010 edition in Shanghai.
Can A.I. Rethink Art? Should It?It was all part of Anadol’s overarching project to make the invisible visible: to demystify A.I., show where the data used in it comes from and trace the origins of the whooshing and undulating images that audiences see onscreen.
“Hoarding is a Virtue”: Documentation from our ArtBase Anthologies launch with Auriea Harvey is now online!On April 3, Rhizome celebrated the launch of ArtBase Anthologies at Onassis ONX with a conversation between Michael Connor, Rhizome Co-Executive Director, Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome Preservation Director, Auriea Harvey, Artist, and Regina Harsanyi, Associate Curator of Media Art at Museum of the Moving Image.
In the galleries: Jonathan Monaghan at Addison RippleyOriginally inspired by video games, Jonathan Monaghan has projected his computer-animated videos into a realm all his own. “Power Trip,” his Addison/Ripley Fine Art show, includes two short videos but consists mostly of digital prints that wittily mash up Renaissance-style portraits with examples of modern technology.
An Inside Look at How Refik Anadol and Digital Art Were Finally Welcomed into MoMA and the Traditional Art WorldRefik Anadol had emerged from the same digital art communities that nurtured the careers of artists like Mike Winkelmann; however, the Turkish-American artist had three fine art degrees and a thriving studio practice with a dozen employees by the time he started selling NFTs.
King’s College London: Claudia HartClaudia Hart has always been at the forefront of experimentation with virtual imaging, using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, then later as they were invented, other forms of VR and AR. Hart’s work is about issues of the body, perception, nature collapsing into technology and then back again.
Who’s afraid of immersive art?Kay Watson, head of arts technologies at the Serpentine, tells me: ‘It’s taking a very long time for technologically based practices to be accepted by the mainstream art world.’ Watson is keen to stress that the growing field of projection or screen-based immersive art is only the beginning.
Jerusalem Biennale stays on the map in the shadow of warInternationally known video artist pioneer Beryl Korot’s video “Etty” weaves visual, textual, and stormy sound elements as its weft, warp, and diagonal threads, quoting the soon-to-be-murdered at Auschwitz young Dutch diarist Etty Hillesum (1914-1943). This presentation is Korot’s Israel debut.
A conversation with OpenAI’s first artist in residenceAlex Reben’s work is often absurd, sometimes surreal: a mash-up of giant ears imagined by DALL-E and sculpted by hand out of marble; critical burns generated by ChatGPT that thumb the nose at all AI art.
BITFORMS GALLERY EXHIBITED A GROUP SHOW THAT EXEMPLIFIES NEW MEDIA ART A pioneer and champion of new media, digital and internet-based art, New York-based gallery bitforms presented the works of Ellie Pritts, Claudia Hart, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Manfred Mohr, Jonathan Monaghan and Refik Anadol.
Live from GTC: A Conversation with Refik AnadolRefik Anadol in a recorded conversation with Richard Kerris, VP of Developer Relations, NVIDIA. Anadol and Kerris discuss the artist’s Large Nature Model.
Midnight Moment: StormsEvery night in March, London-based Italian artist Quayola takes over Times Square with Storms, a mesmerizing depiction of deep-sea waves that engages and reimagines canonical imagery, particularly landscape painting, through the use of contemporary technology.
The Evolution of Landscape Painting in the Digital AgeBy uniting code, datasets, and human touch, Quayola creates vivid digital landscapes that synchronize in a fluid ballet of texture and colour, echoing an impressionistic aesthetic.
Artist Quayola On Why Algorithmic Art Is Like ImpressionismIn his artistic practice, Quayola employs technology as a tool, exploring the interplay of dichotomies: the tangible and the simulated, figurative and abstract. Storms comes to life with high-definition footage of stormy seas in Cornwall, England, captured by contemporary technology.
Are NFTs dead? Not at Art DubaiFeatured artists include Jonathan Monaghan, whose work Mothership was the first piece minted on the beta version of Ascribe, a now defunct protocol that was built on the Bitcoin chain.
The Fever Dream: An Interview with Jonathan Monaghan“Symbols of power and finance and corporations come together in a fever dream, which is mixed with ancient mythology and references to childhood video games,” Monaghan said. “They are journeys through nostalgia but with a larger commentary on the situations that occur in the world.”
http://Web3 Travel Guides: Future Horizons, Art Dubai Digital And BeyondOne of the longest-running and most well respected new media art galleries, bitforms represents established, mid-career, and emerging artists critically engaged with new technologies, offering an incisive perspective on the fields of digital, internet, and time-based art forms.
Refik Anadol’s use of AI has made him the artist of the momentMr Anadol, a 38-year-old Turk who lives in Los Angeles, is riding widespread public interest in artificial intelligence to become the most visible digital artist of his generation. His work speaks to the innovation and anxieties of the current moment.
Auriea Harvey Has Been Breaking the Internet for Three DecadesThere’s still much to discover [in media art], particularly the artists who have been quietly pushing the bounds and formats of the medium for decades. Auriea Harvey is one such exemplar. If you’ve never heard of her, you’re probably not alone.
‘This AI model will be the voice of nature,’ Refik Anadol“It’s a whole new perspective as nature is a much different ecosystem. It’s not about finding information or using human constructed reality — which we love. But nature needs new ways of perceiving, recording, and preserving through AI and data. I’m dreaming that it is a technology that we can trust, rely on, and almost use like a teacher of nature.”
Hyperallergic Spring 2024 New York Art GuideAuriea Harvey: My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard presents interactive net-based works, video games, and computer-generated sculptures in this first major survey of the artist’s work.
Inside the Pillow Lab: LaJuné McMillianFor this project, LaJuné McMillian is developing “Spirit and Child”, a series of prayers between Child and Spirit, presented as a live motion capture performance and installation. via YouTube
The Endless Forest, 2005/2020-ongoing
Online multiplayer game” style=”aspect-ratio: 1.50557 / 1;”>
Auriea Harvey: My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your KeyboardMy 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.
REFIK ANADOL TO PRESENT HIS LARGEST INSTITUTIONAL SOLO EXHIBITION IN THE UK Serpentine is to present Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, an exhibition of new and recent works by internationally renowned artist, technologist, and pioneer in artificial intelligence arts, Refik Anadol.
Going big: digital artists who show on a grand scale at immersive institutionsMarco Brambilla, the London-based film-maker and digital artist, made a version of his Hollywood epic Heaven’s Gate for Outernet, London, in January 2023, and King Size, a work about the rise of Las Vegas and the death of Elvis, at Sphere.
Art SG highlights Singapore’s Art Market Momentum“This fair is more experimental with showing new media art than bigger more established fairs,” said the gallery’s founder and director Steven Sacks.
Sotheby’s Offers Claudia Hart’s MORE LIFE in Sale of “Natively Digital: Ordinals”“This piece, MORE LIFE, was one of the first that I produced after the series of book works that I did in the early nineties. I consider it to be the beginning of my current installation-based 3D animation practice.’’ – CLAUDIA HART
At Davos, an art installation looks to bring people closer to nature with a little help from AI“Living Archive: Nature” is the creation of Refik Anadol, a Turkish-born, Los Angeles-based media artist, who said the piece is meant to move AI beyond its human-based training to bring people closer to nature and bring urgency to the need to protect it.
A Personal List of Some of The Most Interesting Digital-Art Experiments of 2023At bitforms gallery, Casey Reas’s latest exhibition, It Doesn’t Exist (In Any Other Form), delves into conceptual software painting, utilizing simulation and computer graphics.
The Art of IntelligenceCompressed Cinema is a series of five audiovisual works, a collaboration between Casey Reas and Jan St. Werner. Reas created the imagery in the tradition of experimental films that use existing films as raw materials. […] Each piece marries Reas’s visuals with Werner’s musical compositions.
Manfred Mohr, Refik Anadol, Quayola, Casey Reas at Art SGApplying what he has described as ‘programmed expressionism,’ Mohr is known for creating striking drawings using plotters, mechanical devices that hold a pen that sketches lines (generated by algorithms) on paper. His recent sculptural experiments, computer-generated algorithmic aluminum wall structures, will be a highlight of bitforms’ booth.
Nanjing’s Deji Art Museum Boasts Works by Monet and Beeple. Is It a New Beacon for Asia’s Art Scene?Upon visiting the museum, one might think The Deji Art Museum’s main focus is on digital art, as currently, two pieces by the highly acclaimed new media artist Refik Anadol, Melting Memories – Engram – Box and Quantum Memories Probability, are prominently displayed at the museum’s entrance.
Why Lulu Island is a ‘paradise for contemporary art’In an interactive exhibition entitled Translation Island, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has transformed Lulu Island in Abu Dhabi into an interactive playground of light.
An Artist in Residence on A.I.’s Territory“Given how young this creative tool is, much still needs to be solved, and confronting these problems falls on the shoulders of everyone involved, from its developers to its users,” Mr. Reben said. “The more people thinking about these questions the better.”
Siebren Versteeg in Outland: “The Best Digital Art of 2023”Siebren Versteeg’s For a Limited Time, released on Arsnl Art, incorporates the mechanics of blockchain editioning into the artwork itself—and the outputs are both aesthetically compelling and conceptually potent… – Sarah Zucker
Refik Anadol: Defining Artworks of 2023 on ArtNewsRefik Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA (2022), a generative artwork by arguably the premier digital artist of the moment, uses the museum’s visual archive to produce a machine-learning model that interprets and reimagines images of artworks in MoMA’s collection.
Lumiere 2023: Stunning images as festival returns to DurhamLumiere features 40 installations, with Bishop Auckland lit up for the first time. Spanish artist Daniel Canogar created a projection for The Spanish Gallery in Bishop Auckland.
INTERREALITY | (IN)TANGIBLE INTERACTIONSProduced following conversations around LACMA’S summer exhibition, Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 examines how the public perception of the physical and the digital– specifically in the art world–might be reimagined in a world where the jurisdictions of the two increasingly overlap.
The First Museum Retrospective on A.I. Artist Alexander Reben Explores His Playfully Conceptual Creations“AI Am I? Artificial Intelligence as Generated by Alexander Reben” at the California museum brings together deeply conceptual works from across Reben’s practice, which, since about 2012, has seen him co-create alongside A.I.
Bulgari marks 75 years of serpenti jewelry with live robot arm chiseling in its Milan exhibitionInteractive sculptures and installations delineate Daniel Rozin’s work for Bulgari’s ‘Serpenti: 75 Years of Infinite Tales’ exhibition in Milan.
Exclusive Interview: Inside MoMA’s Web3 Embrace With Postcard ProjectWe conducted exclusive interviews with MoMA, Autonomy, and all 15 participating artists to learn more about what the project entails and gain insight into its future.
Concrete Progression: Mohr, Morellet, Molnar, BöhmMohr, Morellet, Molnar, and Böhm are of the opinion that every thing can only be represented and known in relation to another. Together, their works playfully encourage us to discover patterns, deviations and differences – and at the same time show how the set of rules they have chosen seemingly takes on a life of its own during the creative process and produces unpredictable visual effects.
Does the First Amendment Confer a ‘Right to Compute’? The Future of AI May Depend on ItSince late 2022, visitors to New York’s Museum of Modern Art have been mesmerized by Refik Anadol’s 24-foot by 24-foot artificial intelligence–generated artwork “Unsupervised.”
Getty Releases AI-Image Maker Trained on Company’s DataGetty Images announced Monday the launch of a proprietary artificial intelligence tool that will generate images from its wide-spanning collection of digital media. The move will allow the media company, which holds ownership rights over millions of news, stock, and archival images, to avoid copyright issues that have plagued artificial intelligence companies.
“Solarpunk” installations feature at Earth Edition festival in CaliforniaCalled Earth Edition: A Festival of Eco-Consciousness, the ten-day event was located at the California Institute of Art’s (CalArts) campus in Santa Clarita and sought to “shift the tone of the conversation around the climate crisis” with AI technology, large-scale immersive installations and climate-oriented work by over 40 individual artists.
DiMoDA 4.0: Dis/Location Performances: Spirit and Child by LaJuné McMillianSpirit and Child is a series of prayers, poetic exchanges between the characters of Child and Spirit that are presented as a live motion capture performance and installation. A healing ceremony unfurls as Child extends gratitude to Spirit for holding them through times of struggle and abandonment.
Refik Anadol is betting his AI art can help build a better world“Artificial intelligence is a mirror for humanity,” says the Los Angeles-based artist Refik Anadol. “It’s all about who we are as humans.”
Coming 2024: Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate DisruptionIf the scale and complexity of climate change exceeds the limits of human perception, how can artists represent it? Atmosphere of Sound examines how sound-based artists, responding to the climate crisis, have found a unique point of entry to this representational challenge.
Seeking the Digital at PHOTOFAIRSbitforms’ 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.
In Las Vegas, Refik Anadol’s Biggest Undertaking YetThe Turkish-American artist is inaugurating Las Vegas’s new Sphere with his swirling, real-time generated digital collages of space and nature.
Refik Anadol lights up MSG’s Las Vegas sphere with collages of outer space and natureLast week Exosphere featured its first artist commission Machine Hallucinations: Sphere by Refik Anadol. “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.”
Artificial Intelligence: Its promise… And Peril“Artificial Intelligence: Its Promise… And Peril.” Fareed Zakaria explores the exciting but frightening new world of artificial intelligence in technology, science, art and more.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Gray AreaRafael 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.
✘ Listening to A.I. Music…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?
The latest canvas for Refik Anadol’s AI-generated art? The new Sphere in Las VegasAnadol 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.
<i>Tracing the Line: the art of drawing machines and pen plotters </i>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.
Casey Reas and Art After the Crypto CrashFeral 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.
NIST Framework Can Nudge Companies Toward Trustworthy AI UseCompanies large and small are assessing how they can harness artificial intelligence to be more competitive and profitable.
An Aesthetics of the Absurd for A.I.When asked about whether machines think, the Dutch computer scientist, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra replied: “Does a submarine swim?” Such a reply puts the terms of the question in question.
Pillow Lab: LaJuné McMillianLaJuné 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.
‘There’s no such thing as a neutral algorithm’: the existential AI exhibition confronting SydneyWhen 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.
New show may make you feel like you’re being watched. That’s because you areTracking 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.
The Godfather of Generative Art Goes GlobalCasey 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.
Marina Zurkow profiled in ART+TECHNOLOGYWe meet artists Olafur Eliasson and Marina Zurkow who are working to help heal the disconnect, developing democratic and expressive tools for storytelling and dialogue that encourage everyday activism.
Auriea Harvey: Net ArcheologyYear Zero is an exhibition culminating in decades of Auriea Harvey’s mixed-media practice. Auriea Harvey: Net Archeology acts as a digital timeline and compendium to the exhibition at bitforms gallery, profiling Harvey’s artwork from the early ’90s to today.
Addie Wagenknecht’s “opsec for the impending coup and LARPing lip fillers” featured in NYUAD exhibitionIn Addie Wagenknecht’s series of Youtube “Beauty Hacks” she teaches methods of cybersecurity, in the guise of hair and makeup lessons. Through humor, she subverts the make-up tutorial, repurposing it to dismantle the patriarchal and alienating status quo in information security. This work was commissioned by The Art Gallery at NYU Abu Dhabi, for the exhibition “not in, of, along, or relating to a line.”
Disembodied Behaviors: an ultra-real virtual art show that sears the mind-haze of 2020’s unending March back to a state of clarityAfter 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.
Alchemical by Jan St Werner and Casey Reas now on view at bitforms gallerybitforms 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.
Visit “A Crack in the Hourglass,” Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s memorial to the countless victims of COVID-19, online through Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo 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.
Watch an interview with Refik Anadol on his “Quantum Memories,” featured in the NGV Melbourne TriennialRefik 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.
Art Data: Collecting, Preserving and Displaying Digital, Panel DiscussionPanel featuring Christiane Paul, Anna Frants, Lev Manovich and Anne Spalter, moderated by Natalia Kolodzei. Discussing digital, computer, internet, software, and multimedia art forms — from CD-ROM-based multimedia projects to net.art.
Public_Public_Address: A Nationwide Virtual ProtestPublic_Public_Address is an ongoing, 24/7, national virtual protest in support of and in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. The ongoing protest stream features video submissions of both supporters who are unable to place themselves at physical risk and those who can protest in person.
Claudia Hart Breathes Life into Static Tropes of Modernism, HyperallergicClaudia 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. 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?
In Conversation With Claudia Hart, International Journal for Digital Art HistoryClaudia 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.
Sara Ludy directs video for Kass Richards’ debut solo record, The Language ShadowKass 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.”
Quayola selected for Texas commission, “Pioneer Tower Public Art Project”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.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer featured in Art21’s “Borderlands” episdoeLozano-Hemmer highlights the intimate, personal relations in a public space that is otherwise systematically dehumanizing. The artist explains, “The most important role that art can play is that of making complexity visible. The usage of technology is inevitable; it’s up to the artist to use those technologies to create experiences that are intimate, connected, and critical.”
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Art 21 segment highlighted in artnet, “We as Artists Need to Intervene”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.
The Endless Forest, 2005/2020-ongoing
Online multiplayer game” style=”aspect-ratio: 1.50565 / 1;”>
The Endless Forest by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn June 23 – July 7, 2020bitforms gallery is proud to present The Endless Forest by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn as the second work in a series of streaming generative artworks, presented in collaboration with Small Data Industries.
“Public Public Address” featured on CNN: This website helps people with illnesses and disabilities participate in Black Lives Matter protestsHigh-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 Black Lives Matter protests without putting their lives at risk.
‘Email Exhibit! Yours Sincerely, Siebren Versteeg and bitforms’ by Charlotte Kent for CLOTSiebren 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.
Washington Post profiles “Public Public Address”: An around-the-clock virtual protest lifts voices of those unable to take to the streetsIn 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.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer featured in the new season of Art21Lozano-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.
DIRTSCRAPER by Peter Burr, September 16 – 30, 2020bitforms gallery is proud to present DIRTSCRAPER (2019) by Peter Burr as the fourth piece in a series of streaming generative artworks, presented in collaboration with Small Data Industries.
Claudia Hart: The Ruins reviewed in The Brooklyn RailThe 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 that allows Hart to introduce rates of time to the dimensional illusions that Matisse created in his 1908 masterpiece, The Dessert: Harmony in Red.
Daniel Canogar, Loom: Streaming September 10–October 25, 2020bitforms gallery is proud to present a first of its kind, cloud-based, 24/7 stream of generative software-based art, presented in collaboration with Small Data Industries.
The Art Newspaper reviews bitforms gallery at Untitled Virtual FairWhat 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 Interview Series: Clement Valla⌘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.
Daniel Canogar’s Data Abstractions, Art in AmericaAfter 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, “Billow”, Artforum Critic’s PickDaniel 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.
The Tree of Life curated by Claudia Hart reviewed in The Brooklyn RailIn 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.
Mesocosm (Northumberland, UK) by Marina Zurkow: Streaming July 8 – 21, 2020bitforms gallery is proud to present Mesocosm (Northumberland UK) by Marina Zurkow as the third piece in a series of streaming generative artworks, presented in collaboration with Small Data Industries.
⌘F Interview Series: Addie Wagenknecht⌘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.
⌘F: Clement Valla⌘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.
⌘F: Addie Wagenknecht⌘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.
Tree of Life featured in the New York TimesThe 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.
What makes music sound…good? With Luke DuBois 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.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer on Seductive Participation and the Oppression of Metrics, Art in AmericaCan 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?
Close Readings 1 – Claudia Hart: SwingImages 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 Tree of Life, curated by Claudia Hart, opens online May 15The 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.
With Galleries Closed, a Moment for Net Artists to ShineThe 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.
“World of Awe, Chapter 2: Destruction and Mending,” a virtual walkthrough – Yael Kanarek and Kerry Doran“World of Awe, Chapter 2: Destruction and Mending,” a virtual walkthrough led by Yael Kanarek and Kerry Doran, originally recorded on 4/30. This recording is Part 1, you can locate Part 2 on our IGTV Channel.
Virtual Opening of Billow by Daniel Canogarbitforms 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.
FACT Liverpool announces new online commissioning scheme to support artists in lockdownThe 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.
ARTECHOUSE Q&A: Refik Anadol“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.
Addie Wagenknecht: My opsec haul from Sephora, politics within makeup videosThe 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.
Olia Lialina discusses visibility and network portraiture on the World Wide WebI 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=Link: Ten Easy Pieces, A Chronus Art Center Special Online ExhibitionThis 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.
NO FUN, Tina Rivers Ryan on Net art in the age of COVID-19We 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.
Nine amazing artworks made for the internet, featuring Addie WagenknechtWagenknecht 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.
How Can We Think of Art at a Time Like This?, an online exhibition curated by Anne Verhallen and Barbara PollackAs 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.
Wet Logic reviewed by Louis Bury for Hyperallergic 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.
Samsung & Niio Art Launch Prestigious Global Digital Art CompetitionSamsung Electronics announced the launch of an open call competition in collaboration with Niio, a premium platform for new media art.
The Tools of Generative Art, From Flash to Neural NetworksJason Bailey writes, “Like it or not, we are all computer nerds now. All aspects of our lives are driven by computation and algorithms: how we learn, work, play, even date. Given this situation, one could argue that generative art—work created at least in part with autonomous, automated systems—is the art that best reflects our time.”
Today’s Ideology: For sale to benefit Democratic CandidatesThe series Today’s Ideology by Casey Reas uses editorial photos from The New York Times to create generative collages. 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.
Andrew Demirjian and Claudia Hart discuss emerging media, micro to macro.The weekly CAA Conversations Podcast continues the vibrant discussions initiated at our Annual Conference. Listen in each week as educators explore arts and pedagogy, tackling everything from the day-to-day grind to the big, universal questions of the field.
Claudia Hart’s A Child’s Machiavelli Book Release and Exhibition Opening at WallplayWallplay 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.
Can Computers Dream? Refik Anadol Explores The Future of Artificial IntelligenceFrom data sharing to hyperreality, Refik Anadol’s new installation at Light Art Space explores how our world will transform as humans and computers come closer together. Words by Alice Bucknell.
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art launches Garage DigitalBringing 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.
Artsy names Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Border Tuner among best public art of 2019“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
Claudia Hart announced as apexart FellowThe 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.
Massive Attack and the digital age: Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews UVA’s Matt ClarkSixteen 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.
Why Video Is the Art Form of the MomentAlina Cohen describes a video art renaissance derived from an ever-growing range of exhibition methods, improvements in technology, wider institutional acceptance, and artists’ growing ambitions.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer interviewed on BBC regarding his new work, Border TunerImagine 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.
Workspace Residency in Buffalo, New YorkSqueaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency is a project-based residency for artists and researchers working in media arts. Offered twice per year, the residency is open to applicants from Buffalo and across the United States who are seeking resources, time, and studio space to support ongoing projects or the creation of new work.
Here’s Why A.I. Can’t Be Taken at Face ValueCooper Hewitt’s new show, featuring R. Luke DuBois, drills down into the inherent biases lurking within computer intelligence systems.
Excavating AIThe Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets
Collecting in the Age of Digital Reproduction Casey Reas“In the art market, almost everything sold is an object such as a drawing, a painting, a sculpture, an installation, or a photograph, but there are some exceptions. These deviations may include a contract, a set of instructions, a digital video file, or a software file. These are all examples of art as information rather than material.“
Future Everything Explores The Impact Of Our Voice On The World In Atmospheric MemoryWhy are exhibits that seem so ephemeral and abstract so important today?
How Media Artists Relate to Art History: The Case of Claudia HartClaudia Hart is a pioneer of media art, one of the very few that worked at the onset of merging art and simulation technologies in the 1990s. But is being technologically vanguard enough for artists to gain credibility? Is it just about mastering new tools? These questions ask to ponder the blurring of roles between a creative and an engineer or IT specialist.
Art+Tech Summit: The A.I. RevolutionThe 2019 Art+Tech Summit will explore the ways in which artificial intelligence is making its impact in the art world, as well as addressing its potential implications for the future.
The Secret Tech Problem at Modern Art MuseumsWhat happens when changing technologies render once-avant-garde works of art outdated? See how a growing group of conservators is trying to keep art alive.
Exhibition Strategies For Digital Art: Examples And Considerations“The aim of this contribution is to contest itself — or, rather, its title. It is to demonstrate that […] there is no longer any point hypothesizing about whether it is necessary to develop specific exhibition strategies that may facilitate public presentation in the display spaces of contemporary art of works that make use of digital media in their production or distribution, and/or make reference to the themes, aesthetics, and procedures that have emerged alongside digital media.”
Surabhi Saraf performs Awoke and the Awokened at bitforms galleryAwoke, a mythical artificial emotional intelligence, comes from the earth: the minerals and metals that make up digital technologies take the form of an amorphous metallic blob. Awoke values human emotional vulnerability and helps its believers, the Awokened, build endurance against anxieties like FOMO.
What is the Future of Digital Art?Watch interviews with leading thinkers—curators, writers, and conservators—who offer unique insight into the rewards and challenges of their work.
Claudia Hart, The Ruins, opens at bitforms galleryThe 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.
Siebren Versteeg, In%20Memory, now liveIn In%20Memory, playful references to painting, ready-mades, 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.
Wet Logic, an exhibition by Sarah Rothberg and Marina Zurkow, opens at bitforms galleryWet Logic 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 and the enmeshment of humans to the planet. Rothberg and Zurkow present a series of systems that further human connection to oceans by way of action and imagination.
Learning Machines by R. Luke DuBois featured in Telfair Museum’s PULSE Art + Technology Festival 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.
Marina Zurkow’s exhibition The Thirsty Bird opening at the Contemporary Art Museum St. LouisMarina Zurkow focuses her work on the intersection of nature and culture, offering wry and pointed critiques of this perilously dysfunctional relationship. The Thirsty Bird offers parallel narratives on two essential, yet incompatible elements: oil and water.