Tina Rivers Ryan

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  interviews March 15, 2023

  Sasha Stiles

  Over the past year, Kalmyk American poet Sasha Stiles has become the public face of the burgeoning world of poetry NFTs, which circulate and monetize poems outside of poetry books and magazines. She cofounded theVERSEverse, a “poetry NFT gallery,” in 2021, has sold her own tokenized poems through platforms like Christie’s and SuperRare, and has spoken widely about the commercial and even aesthetic potential of NFTs for poetry. Inspired by the idea of “ars poetica” and by text-based visual art, the homepage of theVERSEverse boldly declares “poem = work of art.” The 2021 exhibition “Computational

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  slant May 2021

  TOKEN GESTURE

  ON THE AFTERNOON of February 19—immediately after the classic internet meme known as Nyan Cat was auctioned for almost $600,000—digital art abruptly entered the most recent, and perhaps most heated, of its many hype cycles. In the weeks that followed, media outlets from PBS NewsHour to Saturday Night Live reiterated the story of record-breaking prices fueled by an enigmatic technology called the blockchain, which is a system used by techno-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists for encrypting immutable digital records in blocks of data across a decentralized chain of computers. Blockchains can be

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  passages November 19, 2020

  Aldo Tambellini (1930–2020)

  THE BEST ART I SAW on my “Grand Tour” of 2017 wasn’t in Venice, or Münster, or Kassel. It was in Karlsruhe, at ZKM’s major retrospective of Aldo Tambellini—the media artist whose seven-decade career celebrated the sensuous power of darkness, and who passed away last week at the age of ninety. My detour to the show was a kind of pilgrimage: Although not yet a household name in the art world, he has long been a cult figure for those devoted to experimental film and video. (I myself was introduced to him around twenty years ago by both Gene Youngblood’s classic 1970 book Expanded Cinema and the

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  interviews July 20, 2020

  Caitlin Cherry

  Caitlin Cherry has always been interested in the weaponized circulation of images. At the Brooklyn Museum in 2013, she mounted her paintings on wooden catapults modeled after martial designs by Leonardo, as if they were about to be fired into the air. More recently, she has produced prismatic paintings from photos of Black femmes (including models, exotic dancers, porn actresses, rappers, and influencers) culled from social media. Inspired by the promotional posts of a Brooklyn cabaret, her newest works feature its servers and dancers in suggestive poses, flattened by delirious patterns and

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  slant March 30, 2020

  No Fun

  10 AM ON THURSDAY, March 5, 2020: That was when I was supposed to have a coffee in Tribeca with the artists who use the pseudonyms Eva and Franco Mattes. I would be in town for the art fairs, and scheduling this meeting with the Italian duo, who are based in New York, was my consolation for missing “What Has Been Seen,” their survey at the Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montreal. Before Facebook transformed the internet into a place where we use our real (or “real”) names, Eva and Franco began making Net art under the moniker 0100101110101101.org, focusing on how identities and information

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  previews May 2019

  “HYSTERICAL MINING”

  Curated by Anne Faucheret and Vanessa Joan Müller

  In 2017, the Vienna Biennale—titled “Robots. Work. Our Future”—addressed technology’s role in the ongoing transformation of human labor. Under this year’s theme, “Brave New Virtues: Shaping Our Digital World,” the Kunsthalle Wien, one of the Biennale’s host venues, will open the concept of the “human” to a feminist critique, focusing on the ways in which gender is defined by technology (and vice versa, as evidenced by the recoding of coding as masculine labor). “Hysterical Mining” will include roughly twenty-five works by approximately twenty

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  print February 2019

  Trevor Paglen

  In his famed description of Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint Angelus Novus, Walter Benjamin conjured an “angel of history” who is blown by the storms of progress into the future while facing backward toward the piling wreckage of the “catastrophe” that is the past. Tellingly, a photograph of the back of Klee’s work is the first picture on Trevor Paglen’s Gold Artifact, 2013. Shot into orbit on a communications satellite, the etched disc bears one hundred cynical images of and about humanity, which it almost certainly will outlast. Like Benjamin’s angel, Paglen surveys the visible and not-so-visible

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  previews January 2019

  “THE BODY ELECTRIC”

  Curated by Pavel S. Pyś with Jadine Collingwood

  Walt Whitman’s ode to corporeality provides a fitting title for this ambitious survey highlighting contemporary art’s fascination with bodies mediated by technologies. Comprising scores of works made over the past six decades by artists such as Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sadie Benning, and Sondra Perry, the show pays particular attention to the interaction between bodies and screens. One of the exhibition’s most topical sections examines the “malleable body,” juxtaposing, among other pieces, Josh Kline’s Share the Health (Assorted Probiotic Hand Gels),

• previews January 2019

  “PRODUCING FUTURES: AN EXHIBITION ON POST-CYBER-FEMINISMS”

  Curated by Heike Munder

  In “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century” (1991), the Australian artist collective VNS Matrix declared themselves “saboteurs of big daddy mainframe” and “mercenaries of slime,” weaponizing an ecstatic, messy body as a wrench to throw into the gears of tech-bro culture: “corrupting the discourse / we are the future cunt.” “Producing Futures: An Exhibition on Post-Cyber-Feminisms” features VNS Matrix and Lynn Hershman Leeson as examples of the first generation of cyber-feminists; the show will also include a dozen younger international artists, from Tabita Rezaire

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  print September 2018

  Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

  In 2007, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer became the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale. Having won numerous awards and accolades from organizations such as Ars Electronica, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in the 1990s and early 2000s, he has since become one of the leading “new-media artists,” with works in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This year alone, he will have five solo exhibitions and projects across three continents, the most important of which

• previews September 2018

  “RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: IN THE OPEN OR IN STEALTH”

  After curating the 2016 Shanghai Biennale, New Delhi– based Raqs Media Collective (founded in 1992 by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) returns with this group show featuring more than twenty international artists, including John Gerrard, Hassan Khan, Rosa Barba, and Lantian Xie. Loosely organized around theories of the future—not the future of science fiction, but the future emerging from the conflicts of the “deep present”—the works examine themes such as collectivity, memory, ecology, and systems of knowledge. For example, Gerrard’s X.

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  print May 2018

  “Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today”

  “Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today” is a major survey of the impact of the internet on contemporary art, articulated into inevitably nebulous themes such as virtuality and surveillance. Comprising more than seventy works, the show includes almost as many artists, from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Hito Steyerl to relative newcomer Sondra Perry. As curator Eva Respini readily admits in the preface to the catalogue, this is not the first exhibition on this topic: Looking beyond the horizons of mainstream contemporary art to the field of new-media art that emerged in the 1990s, one finds