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Zürich’s Kate Vass Galerie opens “The Game of Life,” an online exhibition in tribute to the late mathematician John Horton Conway . Curator Jason Bailey invited four generative artists, Jared S Tarbell , Alexander Reben , Kjetil Golid , and Manolo Gamboa Naon , to interpret Conway’s titular cellular automata experiments from the 1970s. “I love when simple rules become really complex,” Naon writes about layering several automata for his contribution (image). “I feel that they even explain the world in a very reduced way.”
An output of the British Council’s TransLocal Cooperation initiatve, Probiotic Rituals is a resource for learning about and engaging with the soil underfoot. Initially shown IRL at London’s Furtherfield in an exhibition that (re)launched online today, designer Ioana Mann’s research on the microbiome is presented as a website that prompts actions—rituals—for participants to learn about, communicate with, and tend to their microscopic neighbours.
“There’s a LIDAR scanner on the right side, most likely to help scan your surrounding environment to help overlay 3D images in a realistic manner, but so far no cameras.”
– Sci-fi writer
Tim Maughan , sardonically quoting
Popular Mechanics ’ report “Everything We Know About Apple’s Smart Glasses”
Serpentine R&D Platform, in collaboration with the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, launches the Creative AI Lab database “to aggregate tools and resources for artists, engineers, curators & researchers interested in incorporating machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence into their practice.” One of the launch highlights is a list of 65 essential tools, contributed by creative AI curator and researcher Luba Elliott.
Iconic English music collective Massive Attack teases new EP Eutopic featuring AI-generated artwork by German machine learning virtuoso Mario Klingemann.
“This is the story of the eccentric but charismatic commune leader John P Allen [and] the rebellious young billionaire Ed Bass, who offered to put some of his family oil money at Allen’s disposal to realise one of his most cherished visions: building a gigantic biodome-style enclosed ecosystem.”
– Film critic
Peter Bradshaw , summarizing
Spaceship Earth , Matt Wolf’s documentary on the (failed) 1991 experiment that quarantined eight individuals inside Biosphere 2, a replica of Earth’s ecosystem
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) permanently pulls its highly cited 80 Million Tiny Images dataset, after researchers found offensive content and labelling. Scraped from Google Images in 2008, the photo library was created for training computer vision systems in advanced object-detection techniques. “It is clear that we should have manually screened [the images],” CSAIL’s Antonio Torralba told The Register . “For this, we sincerely apologize.”
“As much of the world grapples with a cultural moment of materiality, Your Progress Will Be Saved shines back the close-yet-far tension of being alone online, together.”
– Avatar artist
LaTurbo Avedon , on their playable installation now live at “
Virtual Factory ,” Manchester International Festival’s newly launched digital playground (and temporary online home) inside
Fortnite
Hit hard by the COVID-19 lockdown, the founders of Zurich’s Museum for Digital Art (MuDA), Caroline Hirt and Christian Etter, announce the non-profit’s untimely end. “It is heart-breaking to have to make such a short-term decision after all these years building this project up from zero.” Crowdfunded in 2016 and recognized for exhibiting the likes of Zach Lieberman and Vera Molnar , MuDA will host its final finissage on July 19th.
LaTurbo Avedon ’s interactive experience Your Progress Will Be Saved (2020) launches as the first commission for “Virtual Factory ,” Manchester International Festival’s (MIF) temporary home inside the Fortnite videogame. Visitors join the avatar artist on a journey through shifting spaces, across illuminated dance floors and into private booths, making and collecting memories in anticipation of the Factory’s reopening in 2023.
Icelandic–Danish installation artist Olafur Eliasson launches Earth Speakr , a new artwork and AR mobile app that “invites kids to speak up for the planet and adults to listen to what they have to say.” Using the app, kids can map cartoon versions of their faces onto their environment and record messages for us to hear. A selection of them will be streamed at the European Parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg as well as at the German Federal Foreign Office in Berlin.
In the Bloomberg webcomic The Perfect Art Heist: Hack the Money, Leave the Painting , illustrator Anna Haifisch and writer James Tarmy relate the ongoing dispute over who owns John Constable’s 1824 painting A View of Hampstead Heath . Art dealer Simon C. Dickinson had sold the prized landscape to the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, for $3.1 million in January, but a (still at large) hacker intercepted the money transfer by hijacking Dickinson’s email.
“People underrate the idea of storing material in DNA. If you store a video on a hard drive, it will have a lifespan of maybe half a century. If you code it into strands of DNA, it will last a million years and is probably just as easily retrievable.”
– American multimedia artist and filmmaker
Lynn Hershman Leeson , on the ‘life project’ of encoding her archive in DNA
Part of his incomplete series of quarantine collaborations, Japanese composer and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto premieres low tide , a contemplative piece produced together with American experimental music veterans Laurie Anderson and Arto Lindsay featuring video art by New York collective Zakkubalan, within the 2020 Festival de Cannes livestream.
“Mr. Williams knew that he had not committed the crime in question. What he could not have known … is that his case may be the first known account of an American being wrongfully arrested based on a flawed match from a facial recognition algorithm.“
–
Kashmir Hill , revisiting the (unprecedented) circumstances that lead to the arrest of Robert Julian-Borchak Williams by the Detroit Police Department in 2018
“They were delicious: I couldn’t taste any off notes, which suggests that the fungus had fully metabolised the text.”
– Biologist
Merlin Sheldrake , on eating an “amazing crop of oyster mushrooms” that sprouted from his book
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures (2020)
“The uncritical acceptance of default assumptions inevitably leads to discriminatory design in algorithmic systems, reproducing ideas which normalize social hierarchies and legitimize violence against marginalized groups.”
– An open letter signed by hundreds of scholars, to Springer Publishing, about the forthcoming publication of a paper entitled “A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing”
OUT NOW :
Neural 65
Redirecting Networks
Co-edited by Irish researcher and lecturer
Rachel O’Dwyer , the 65th issue of the media art journal explores the networked panopticon. Highlights include interviews with artists
Kyriaki Goni ,
Tiziana Terranova , and
Roel Roscam Abbing , as well as articles on wireless community networks and music streaming services.
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