Seventeen Gallery, London
Meta-Mythical Optimisation depicts the world of Deemona, an ideal human society generated in a distant future by a synthetic Demiurg. The exhibition features eight video installations depicting isolated figures dressed in utilitarian fabrics, who are slowly performing subtle, considered movements. Each figure is situated in a static landscape filled with geometric architecture, arches, domes, a starved classicism most associated with past totalitarian regimes or utopian futures. The structure of the images alludes to the language of Renaissance painting, relocated to a post-work future, depicting a priest-class of technocrats. The precise gestures of these robed figures imply a meditative state, further underscored by a oneiric drone that rises and falls across the gallery’s rooms.
LACMA, USA
Artists
Including Andy Warhol, Cory Archangel, Jeff Wall, Laurie Anderson, Thomas Ruff, David Byrne, Jim Shaw, Andreas Gursky, Petra Cortwright
Over the last four decades, image-editing software has radically transformed our visual world. The ease with which images and text can be digitally generated and altered has enabled new forms of creative experimentation, while also sparking philosophical debates about the very nature of representation. Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film examines the impact of digital manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present, for the first time assessing simultaneous developments and debates in the fields of photography, graphic design, and visual effects. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition traces the emergence of distinctive digital aesthetic strategies, relationships to realism, and storytelling modes. The nearly 200 artists, designers, and makers in Digital Witness illuminate today’s visual culture where digital editing tools are easier to access than ever before.
Civa, Belvedere 21 Museum, Vienna
Fusing science fiction and documentary, Four Fluctuations chronicles a potential future history of humanity. A strangely familiar narrator guides us through four speculative ruptures, each created through advancing iterations of a single generative image system: the liberation from labour through artificial intelligence; the emergence of a post-corporeal reality structured by leisure; the digital extinction of humanity and its reconstruction by a synthetic entity, and the eventual convergence of humans, other-than-humans life forms, and machines into a shared cognitive assemblage.
Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, Germany
Artists
Anonymous, Aram Bartholl, James Bridle, Adam Harvey, Femke Herregraven, Jonas Lund, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Metahaven, Chino Moya, Olsen, Mimi Onuoha, Evan Roth, Eryk Salvaggio
With digital technologies permeating every aspect of our lives, reality increasingly becomes a predictable entity in which everything and everyone evaporates into information. The flood of information empties itself into the World Wide Web’s image flood that drowns us on the displays of our end devices, living a seemingly uncontrollable life of its own.
Whether smart phone, smart home, social software, bonus, navigation, traffic, or surveillance system – they have one thing in common: All of them collect personal information in the form of Big Data. The private sphere is thus dissolving and becoming transparent, while the processes triggered by these technologies remain opaque and hidden.
The artists gathered in the exhibition Decoding the Black Box shed light on the processes that take place in our end devices, the black boxes. They reveal the workings of digital technologies and at the same time visualise the effects they have on our perception of reality. While the capitalist and power-political structures of the internet and the virtual image economy are made transparent, the artists envision counter-designs for a decentralized and democratic use of technologies.
Solo Contemporary, Madrid
I reversed my usual approach to AI and instead used traditional digital tools and the crews and equipment I typically employ for live-action filmmaking to reconstruct an idealised human civilisation, but from an artificial entity’s perspective. I attempted to simulate xyr thought process: What would this synthetic demiurge perceive as quintessentially human? Which traits would xe preserve, discard, or refine?
A pattern emerged. Xe would recognise humanity’s relentless drive for functionality, efficiency, and the abstraction of reality into quantifiable structures. But xe would also see the flaw in this logic: our post-Enlightenment commitment to instrumental reason erased anything that couldn’t be measured. Spiritual knowledge, metaphysical traditions—entire ways of being—became irrelevant, leading to self-extermination.
In Deemona, this synthetic intelligence reconstructs a world where late-capitalist logistics and automation merge with transcendence. Supply chains and factory rhythms synchronise with sacred rituals; automated processes blur into mystical experiences. These post-human beings no longer rely on language but communicate through post-symbolic resonance. They transcend bodily constraints, beyond time, into a state of perpetual optimisation—a condition close to enlightenment, or perhaps the final, perfected form of alienation.
Formica collaboration, Room Awards, Matadero, Madrid
The work is part of a larger series titled Deemona, which speculates on our identity and our future role in a new era in which we are no longer the dominant cognitive force.
This piece attempts to reconstruct an ideal human society in a distant future, seen from the perspective of an artificial intelligence entity. The world of Deemona seeks to reconcile seemingly opposing human traits—such as productivity and spirituality, functionality and contemplation—while merging visual styles as diverse as the artistic and architectural traditions of Antiquity and the Renaissance with late capitalism’s corporate aesthetics of the twenty-first century.
DongGang Photography Museum, South Korea
‘Aesthetic objectification’ refers to the process by which humans view and interpret certain subjects through the lens of beauty. This process can apply to everything from natural scenery to everyday items, and it is shaped by each individual’s unique viewpoint. During the objectification process, people project their emotions and interpretations onto the subject, thereby assigning new meaning and value to it. Through the act of seeing anew, we also recognize the discrepancies between what we see and what we know.
The world we inhabit is far from flat or simple. It is a multidimensional space where countless narratives intertwine. Thus, the relationship between seeing and knowing cannot be defined by a single point of view —it is fluid and constantly evolving. It is a state in which elements can be added or removed; in which what doesn’t belong can be carved away. During the process of such entanglement and deconstruction, new forms emerge—fresh, unexpected, and alive. This process ignites our imagination and invites new visions. It enables richer, more diverse experiences beyond the ordinary, expanding the boundaries of thought at the threshold between reality and ideal. As the realm of thinking itself widens, a platform emerges from which new creative ideas can spring forth.
Certainty, Solo Contemporary, Madrid
In Deemona, concepts associated to the late capitalism’s supply chain and the automated conveyor belt coexist with the transcendental experience and the higher states of consciousness that most mystic traditions across history longed for. As these generated individuals convey emotions and mental states through post-linguistic forms of communication, they transcend their bodily constrains and the restrictions of time and space to enter a nirvana of perennial optimisation.
Monosodium Glutamate, a series of staged large format photographs inspired by Baroque Spanish religious painting, represents the unfulfillment of the neoliberal promise – the collapse of the idea of a capitalist paradise and the decline of its centuries-old, uncontested patriarchal ruling class. Here, the body language that conveyed a mystical experience in classical paintings mutates into the silent screams or desperate mating calls of anonymous, isolated men trapped in a mundane hell, deprived of any spirituality.
Extract of Broken Frontier’s review.
It’s a rare thing indeed to read a debut comic as assured and confident in its storytelling, and as conversant with the language of the form, as writer Chino Moya and artist Tal Brosh’s Flat Filters. This surreal and metaphorical journey of self-discovery (or not!) begins with a young man waking up to find the world outside of his flat has gone and been replaced by a nondescript yellow plain and a featureless blue sky.
The soundtrack is pressed on «Wasteland Grey» marble vinyl, housed in a deluxe spined sleeve with double sided printed insert.
This is a limited edition release, only 500 copies pressed!
An otherworldly journey through a Europe in decline, as a collection of ill-fated characters confront their doomed futures and fortunes.
Says Golczewski: “Working on the score for Undergods was an awesome experience. Chino had a great and pretty clear vision of how things should sound and look. The whole creative process took a few months, with a ton of music being written, lot of ideas and variations. For the soundtrack I used a few of older machines that fit the theme and sound that Chino wanted for the film, so that 70’s feel of electronica with some ambience and atmosphere– it’s something unique just as the film is special and unique like there’s nothing else similar out there.”
‘A visionary dystopian anthology – the characters are propelled along on surges of Vangelis-like synth” – The Guardian ★★★★
