British artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg commemorates the evolution of chloroplasts—the plant organelles that capture sunlight and convert it into energy—in a new stained glass commission for Barcelona’s Manifesta 15. Every Thing Eats Light (2024) depicts Proterocladus antiquus, a microscopic seaweed fossil considered the ancestor of all green plants. Installed at the iconic former power station Tres Chimeneas, the vibrant shadow play seeks to remind visitors of the site’s troubled environmental and social history.

Fashion collabs, streaming, NFTs, immersive experiences: Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen’s group exhibition “ALL I EAT IN A DAY” pokes fun at “the growing spectacle of contemporary art formats.” Curated by Giovanni Carmine in collaboration with artist Cory Arcangel, who contributes a “cheap, fly-by-night version” of a Picasso light show (image), the exhibition explores media contexts, hype cycles, and art as entertainment with playful provocations by Emily Sundblad, Jayson Musson, Laurel Schwulst, Sanko GameCorp ©, and others.

FACT Liverpool opens “Art Plays Games,” a rotating showcase of artists and indie developers creating videogames for cultural commentary and experimentation. The show kicks off with works by Rachel Maclean, Sahej Rahal, Angela Washko, and Loopntale, asking questions about screen culture, representation, and our collapsing ecosphere. In Rahal’s Distributed Mind Test (2023, image), for example, players explore a post-apocalyptic future by “thinking as and with the non-human to uncover stories of the world left behind.”

An extension of its “find.select.transform – Resilient Networks in a Wounded World” program, Berlin’s panke.gallery opens “Alt Nets,” a group exhibition offering powerful counter-narratives to extractive, hyper-capitalist technologies. Panke curators Noemi Garay and Sakrowski bring together seven works by Tega Brain with Benedetta Piantella & Alex Nathanson, James Bridle, eeefff, Ursula Endlicher, Matthias Fritsch, Everest Pipkin, and Alice Yuan Zhang that promote community, social justice, and environmental stewardship.

Jan Robert Leegte’s solo exhibition “Selection” opens at Office Impart, Berlin, presenting a series of digital artifacts such as scrollbars, JPG compression, and—all new—selection marquees as material objects, sculptures, and prints. “This ‘drag and drop’ creates a transformation from one semantic reality to another,” critic Sanneke Huisman writes about the Dutch artist’s signature practice of decontexualization. “By isolating digital elements, Leegte quietly monumentalizes them.”

Bridging software and bacteria, Anicka Yi’s “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One” opens at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul. The Korean-American artist debuts a new video work, Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon (2024, image), created by “a ‘digital twin’ of her practice”—software trained on a decade of her work. Also debuting: Another You (2024), a bacteria genetically engineered “to express a subtle palette of colours” that incorporates DNA from jellyfish and coral.

Calling attention to the fading “collective memory” of World War II, panGenerator’s media sculpture Erosion (2024) confronts visitors to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate with telling survey data. The piece, a fractured object covered in custom alphanumeric display units, draws on research conducted on behalf of the Pilecki Institute (that also commissioned the installation), highlighting “the mutability of historical knowledge and the seemingly inevitable process of forgetting.”

“This petal is a sonic staff,” Chilean transdisciplinary artist and researcher Nicole L’Huillier writes about her latest listening device, Pétalo (2024). Introduced in a performative procession during LAS Art Foundation’s Pollinator Pathmaker Summer Programme on July 29, “it is a guiding structure that aims to hold us,” L’Huillier notes. “It holds us with the sounds that touch its membrane. And as it holds us it teaches us to attune and practice vibrational ways of paying attention.”

“Pink Noise,” a major Troika solo exhibition, opens at Langen Foundation near Neuss (DE), foregrounding the Franco-German trio’s artistic reflections on mediated nature and our dis/orientation within it. The show explores “how our perception of ‘nature’ is calibrated to digital media’s frequencies and spectra,” write curators Dehlia Hannah and Nadim Samman about their selection of new and recent works. As new technologies invade the human sensorium, they ask, how does our environment change?