About

Mit seinem Film »Blade Runner« aus dem Jahr 1982 wagte Ridley Scott einen Blick in die Zukunft.
Seine urbane Vision des Jahres 2019 zeigt Bewegtbild-Projektionen und Megascreens, die mit einer Stadtkulisse eine symbiotische Verbindung eingehen. Eine riesige Schriftanimation wirbt für die verheissungsvolle Off World.
Reale fünf Jahre später für November 2024 planen wir ein Multi-Projektionsszenario für die Offenbacher Innenstadt.
Die Fassade des ehemaligen Kaufhofs und weitere umliegende Gebäude werden durch bewegte Bilder ergänzt und aktiviert.
Auf ca. 15 Projektionsflächen zeigen internationale und regionale Videokünstler_innen, TikTok- und Instagram-Artists in wechselnder Bespielung Werke zum Thema Urbanität zwischen Utopie und Dystopie.
Über einen Open Call haben Bürger_innen die Möglichkeit, selbst aktiver Teil der bewegten und bewegenden Kulisse zu werden. Historische Filmausschnitte ergänzen das Programm.

Feelings Inc. delves into the delicate interplay of vulnerability and connection in online matchmaking and beyond. The project does not take an explicit position for or against the right or possibility to have a certain emotional relationship with a non-human (machine). Rather, she tries to form an opinion about the possible polarizing effects that this could trigger. It attempts to understand the meaning and implications of individualization that is developed through exponential usage and normalization of non- human (machine) relationships. The focus extends beyond dating apps to include embodied AI chatbots like Replika, where people fall in love with an avatar created by Luka inc. and experience emotional loss when the newest update caused a data loss.

The art exhibition COOKIES, co-organised by the cultural organisations TILT Platform and M.A.M.A. Contemporary, explores the concepts of consent, acceptance, care, and surveillance as they are shaped in the ever-changing digital environment. Greek and international artists and artists' groups present different stories about the Internet, which is approached as both an experience and a medium while exploring the nature and use of the information we create within it.
The exhibition focuses on the data we produce at any given moment through paintings, video projections, films, and installations. It explores how digital technology reshapes our understanding of the world and raises questions about the power dynamics between people and technology.

12:30 – 13:00 Uhr: Vortrag !Mediengruppe Bitnik
Unreal Data – Real Effects

Konferenz:
Daten sind schon längst zum Rohstoff sozialer Lebenswelten geworden; dies schließt unser wirtschaftliches Handeln mit ein. Zugleich werden über Daten neue Ökonomien geformt – z.B. Aufmerksamkeits- und Plattform-Ökonomien. Ausgehend von alltäglichen Situationen möchten wir daher beleuchten, was Daten mit uns machen und wie folgenreich die Veränderungen in Bezug auf unsere Welt- & Selbstwahrnehmung sein können. Jenseits der einflussreichen ‚Big Tech‘ stellt sich außerdem die (politische) Frage der Daten-Souveränität.

Wissenschaftler*innen und Kunstschaffende gehen darauf aufbauend dialogisch den Fragen nach: Was sind Daten?
Was machen Daten mit mir und zwischen uns?
Was machen (smarte) Technologien mit unseren Daten und wir wiederum mit diesen Technologien?
Wie verändern Daten unsere Beziehungen und unser Selbstverhältnis?
Welche Perspektiven und Lösungswege im Umgang mit Daten & KI können Medienkunst und kunstbasierte Forschung bieten?

Symposium to mark the end of the two-year international project Figure it Out: The Art of Living Through System Failures. The project researched the practices and phenomena of carelessness of systems and institutions towards individuals or whole communities, with emphasizing the ways in which people in that context cope with and resist institutionalized neglect and hostility.

Figure It Out; The Art of Living Through System Failures is collaborative project that has been granted support under the Creative Europe program, sub-program Culture, of the European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Collaborators are Drugo More (HR) (Project Lead), Kiosk (RS), La Labomedia Association (FR), Vektor (EL) and Unfinished Art Space (MT). The project explores a range of practices that enable disenfranchised groups to overcome barriers established by administrative, institutional, and algorithmic regimes.

Group exhibition to mark the end of the two-year international project Figure it Out: The Art of Living Through System Failures. The project researched the practices and phenomena of carelessness of systems and institutions towards individuals or whole communities, with emphasizing the ways in which people in that context cope with and resist institutionalized neglect and hostility.

Figure It Out; The Art of Living Through System Failures is collaborative project that has been granted support under the Creative Europe program, sub-program Culture, of the European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Collaborators are Drugo More (HR) (Project Lead), Kiosk (RS), La Labomedia Association (FR), Vektor (EL) and Unfinished Art Space (MT). The project explores a range of practices that enable disenfranchised groups to overcome barriers established by administrative, institutional, and algorithmic regimes.

Beta is a new festival of art and technology critically engaging with the impact of emerging technologies on society. Taking Ireland’s role as a central node in today's wired world as a starting point, Beta will showcase and celebrate Ireland’s research and artistic communities through a combination of creativity, debate and experimentation. Beta allows members of the public to engage playfully and critically with new technologies essentially beta testing ethical issues facing society.

The festival exhibition «Unsettling The Algorithm: Seeds of Resistance» gathers work by artists, designers and researchers which propose paths to reclaiming agency within systems of control.

Increasingly our lives are lived within digital systems and infrastructures. Our online clicks and browsing habits are a key component of technical systems designed and optimised for profit through surveillance and tracking. Whether online shopping or browsing dating apps , these algorithmic systems not only track and predict but determine what information we see and what realities we make from it. Platform boosted disinformation has the capacity to influence elections and instigate riots, while AI generated images spread propaganda and anti-science clickbait turns profits. As software syncs across networks and platforms, and the economics of platforms become intrinsic to everyday life, our behaviour online increasingly conforms to data profiles and model user behaviour.

Unsettling the Algorithm: Seeds of Resistance questions this growing encapsulation of life, and asks how we can reclaim our agency within the systems that seek to control and influence us. Highlighting not only the mechanisms of control but also the subversive strategies that push against them, the works in the exhibition demonstrate the unfolding politics of extractive platforms and networks, and the possibilities for resistance and dissent within them. Imposing acts of defiance with and through technology, the artists show how subversive coding practices can challenge state surveillance, how virtual environments can reclaim marginalised cultural memory, or how wasting the time of CEOs and executives can make material gains against climate collapse. Moving beyond resistance and acting with new forms of agency, Unsettling the Algorithm subverts, resists and defies — demonstrating how opportunities for transformation still exist.

Featuring works by: Basil Al-Rawi, Robert Collins, Firas Shehadeh, Jennifer Gradecki and Derek Curry, Nora Al-Badri, Patricia Domínguez and Suzanne Treister, Sebastian Schmieg, Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, and TzuTung Lee, Winnie Soon and !Mediengruppe Bitnik, .

Mesh is a festival of art and technology. It focuses on the collaboration between artists and technologists and thus shows the influence of new technologies on society and how these developments are to be viewed. Tooling the Future is the focus of the first festival edition, which is dedicated to the question of new or different tools for a friendly future.

"When the Sahara dust turns the sky above the Adriatic islands into a yellowish haze reminiscent of Blade Runner, and heat waves no longer come in waves but permanently settle on the shores, we no longer need weather forecasters to tell us what’s happening.

The Mediterranean, as we know it, is rapidly changing. In the last 2,400 years, since the ancient polis of Issa was founded on the island of Vis, the sea level has risen two meters. Scientists predict that in less than 100 years, by 2100, it might rise by one meter. At the same time, the Mediterranean is warming 20% faster than the global average. We can already feel the impacts on ecosystems and communities, migration and tourism, and the ways we live and organise life.

While the Mediterranean, home to over 500 million people and economically dependent on tourism – which may soon vanish due to intolerable heat – is becoming the climate crisis “hotspot,” it is also becoming the perfect spot for much-needed discussion and reflection on what is happening and how to live, or how to create conditions for a “good life” in times of wildfires, water scarcity, droughts, and storms of all sorts, from the wild winds of capitalism to the dark clouds of fascism. Our aspiration is to create possibilities for navigation when favourable winds stop blowing and the ship remains immobile or starts to sink.

That’s why we have chosen To Live Together as the central topic of our ISSA voyage from 4 to 9 October 2024 on the island of Vis. The question is no longer whether humanity or the planet as we know it will survive; it will not. The question is how to live a life worth living – together – amid the ongoing collapse, with our myriad, human and non-human, differences.

Faced with a planet where the 6th mass extinction event is underway and a world in a permanent “state of exception”, of which the never ending war is just one aspect, it is here and now – wherever we are – that we must explore, reinvent, and enact new forms of living together, different ways of imagining – ourselves, our environments, our relations.

We invite you to join our exciting school program in October and start building new ways of being, living and learning together beyond the ruins of capitalism.

We build the school, the school is building us."

The program will include lectures, performances, discussions and conversations, readings, dances, guided tours, cooking, work actions (physical labour), workshops, exhibitions, film projections, and lots of pomalo.

All events are completely free. However, you will need to register your participation to ensure you can take part in all the programs.

Please register here.

The detailed program of ISSA 2024: To Live Together will be announced soon.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik with collaborators Baruch Gottlieb and Sakrowski invite 16 artists based in South Korea for the 4×4 Random Generator. During 4 days, the artists form new collaborations and perform concerts at the opening of the exhibition.

4×4 Seoul Edition combines art, media art, music and performance and design across all genres and disciplines. This mixture breaks down boundaries and can lead to friction, but also favours solidarity and new forms of production.

The result is a temporary, permeable community of artists that culminates in a public concert.

The public concert will take place on Thursday, September 26, 2024, from 17:00–19:00 at ARKO Art Center Outdoor Lobby

↳ 4×4 Seoul Edition is part of the 2024 ARKO × OnCurating International collaborative exhibition «Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone» which will be exhibited at ARKO Art Center Gallery from 26.09 – 03.11.2024. The exhibition includes works by: Small Projects for Coming Communities, Maya Minder, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, San Keller, Sohn Younwon, Stirnimann-Stojanovic, Yagwang, Elisabeth Eberle, Yo Daham, Tangerine Collective, Paloma Ayala. Curated by OnCurating (Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb).

Figure It Out; The Art of Living Through System Failures is collaborative project that has been granted support under the Creative Europe program, sub-program Culture, of the European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Collaborators are Drugo More (HR) (Project Lead), Kiosk (RS), La Labomedia Association (FR), Vektor (EL) and Unfinished Art Space (MT). The project explores a range of practices that enable disenfranchised groups to overcome barriers established by administrative, institutional, and algorithmic regimes.
Gendered, racialized, bordered and exploited, marginalised, underserved, discriminated and vulnerable communities are often forced to develop tools and strategies that are considered unacceptable to the institutions of the system; thus developing practices and phenomena of coping, tinkering, making-do and circumventing exclusions. Sometimes these tools and strategies are forged out of necessity, of survival, sometimes to exercise rights or to secure access to basic services available only to ‘deserving’ citizens. Such tools and strategies are always aimed at a certain system (state, welfare institutions, corporations, workplace, credit, housing, utilities etc.) that has its own rules and conditions of access that these communities or individuals cannot meet, producing and reproducing systemic exclusion.

Finding ‘holes in the system’ and developing strategies to take advantage of system weaknesses, people use their ingenuity to avoid detrimental effects on their lives and lives of their communities.

Moreover, such practices have now expanded into the digital sphere, where they are facing new kinds of power structures and also getting recombined in interesting ways. As dataveillance, algorithmic governance and digital profiling seep into mechanisms of exclusion and dispossession, from border controls to public transport, education, health and housing, new workarounds, tinkering and hacking emerges. As they do with the growing impacts of climate change, forcing underserved communities across the globe to be resourceful and devise their own forms of adaptation.

Ghost Work
Performance Lecture
is part of Figure it Out Symposium (19. – 20. September 2024)
!Mediengruppe Bitnik

With Ghost Work, !Mediengruppe Bitnik looks at the ingenious practices which people with little or no power devise when systems fail them. Ghost Work collects mechanisms and resources devised to build resilience in remote work systems and on freelance work platforms. The research focuses on the ingenuity of workers in the global gig factory and particularly on tactics the workers on platforms such as Upwork based in the Eastern Europe and the Global South contrive to fake their location or presence to circumvent scant pay, surveillance and control that is frequently not expected from the gig workers in the Western Europe and the Global North.

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The lecture performance is part of the Figure it Out Symposium at the Society of Arts, Malte. The Symposium looks at the tools and strategies that gendered, racialized, bordered and exploited, marginalised, underserved, discriminated and vulnerable communities are often forced to develop; These communities develop practices and phenomena of coping, tinkering, making-do and circumventing exclusions, that are considered unacceptable to the institutions of the system. Sometimes these tools and strategies are forged out of necessity, of survival, sometimes to exercise rights or to secure access to basic services available only to ‘deserving’ citizens. Such tools and strategies are always aimed at a certain system (state, welfare institutions, corporations, workplace, credit, housing, utilities etc.) that has its own rules and conditions of access that these communities or individuals cannot meet, producing and reproducing systemic exclusion.

Finding ‘holes in the system’ and developing strategies to take advantage of system weaknesses, people use their ingenuity to avoid detrimental effects on their lives and lives of their communities.

What do we expect from the technologies we use? Artists have always been more than mere «users» of technology; they have helped design, reshape, hack, and invent tools. This international group exhibition considers artists as inventors of «tools for conviviality» and brings together a broad spectrum of artistic positions that create alternative visions for technology and society by emphasising access, creativity, justice, and interdependence. The concept of «convivial tools» (a term coined by the Austrian social philosopher Ivan Illich) forms the framework for this exhibition, which looks at artists‘ tools, both in the form of software and social structures, and shows how technology and society could be reimagined.

On the occasion of the exhibition "Tools for Change," ISSA brought its house library, a collection of texts, videos, images and audio files on the topics of convivial tools and "how to live well" to HeK. The library is hosted on a Raspberry Pi mini computer with an open source software called shareboxx that creates a wireless anonymous offline local file sharing system. This means that visitors can access the file system using their devices, they are invited to sit dow in the reading room, download texts, files etc. and take them home. 

NØ SCHOOL Nevers is an international summer school, held in Nevers, in Burgundy, aimed at students, artists, designers, makers, hackers, activists and educators who wish to further their skills and engage in critical research around the social and environmental impacts of information and communication technologies.

During 2 weeks NØ SCHOOL NEVERS offers to its participants, the opportunity to follow an intensive curriculum, mixing theory and practice, research and making, led by an international panel of artists, designers, critical makers and theorists.
Participants will work individually and/or collectively on projects that will be documented and presented at NØ RETURN during the closing weekend in Nevers.

Playing with Rules is a public video art exhibition that presents artistic positions that challenge the status quo and question how society is constructed everyday. From hunting in a supermarket in The Hunt by Christian Jankowski to a game of chess through hacking of CCTV by !Mediengruppe Bitnik or exploring how animals interact with human spaces, the video works invite visitors and passers-by to playfully reconsider the normality of everyday actions and the structures that shape us.

Videocity is an international curator-artist network promoting video art in public spaces with the aim to discuss current social issues and connect art with everyday life. The video art Videocity curates sheds new light on everyday environments, interplaying with the setting and the changing environment of public space. In turn, the exhibition location influences the way video works are experienced and perceived, with life becoming a soundtrack and framework.

2 – 4 pm
When imagining a more sustainable future, the role of technology in it comes to the foreground. Green tech solutions have their limitations and contradictions given the fact that their manufacturing depends on earth resources exploitation, and their eventual disposal is unavoidable. Living sustainably signifies a radical re-imagining of how to live, how to consume and how to be attentive to the impact anthropogenic activity has on the environment. This discussion brings together practitioners from the field of art and design working on and with relevant infrastructures, tools and ideas. Low tech solutions, traditional knowledges, radical prototypes, and forms of social relationship will be discussed as starting points for building, understanding and/or using technologies of different scope and scale.

Featuring works by !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Jimmy Beauquesne, Alex Clarke, Stevie Dix, Maria Guta and Lauren Huret, Jeanne Jacob, Danica Lundy, STURTEVANT, Anna Uddenberg, Steven Parrino, Julia Wachtel, “Tainted Love” is a collective exhibition that delves into the intricate subject of love, providing an exploration of its dissemination through modern culture. Drawing inspiration from Alex Coles’s essay «Tainted Love – From Nina Simone to Kendrick Lamar», this exhibition adopts its title from Soft Cell’s rendition of the 1965 Gloria Jones track, which gained widespread popularity in the 80s during the HIV crisis. Coles’s insightful inquiry into the twisted romantic ballad reflects on both its historical roots and modern relevance, serving as a guiding force, together with Bell Hooks’ love letter “All About Love”, for exploring various forms of tainted love that remain prevalent in contemporary culture.

What better way to write about an exhibition that emerged from the contextual backdrop of Tainted Love songs than to create a text-as-song-as-press-release ?

Music by Shesna and Julien Morin.

Beside Switzerland’s museum collections, there are major public art collections that are little known and hardly noticed by the general public. This includes the collection of Swiss Post, which goes back to the federal ordinance for the elevation and promotion of Swiss art, which has existed for approximately 100 years. Swiss Post in cooperation with Swiss museums is using this longstanding forwarding tradition as an occasion for giving insight into their comprehensive collecting activity. The Art Museum Graubünden is showing a selection of the Post’s works and presenting them in dialogue with the museum’s collection and with key loans. In doing so the focus is not only on the Post’s commitment to art but also on crucial notions concerning communication in a world that has become exceedingly fragile.

Peter Weibel geht der Frage nach, wie die Medien(-künste) die Welt und unsere Wahrnehmung konstituieren, simulieren und verändern.

In seinen wegweisenden medien- und kunsttheoretischen Texten geht der 2023 verstorbene Künstler, Kurator und Theoretiker Peter Weibel der Frage nach, wie die Medien(-künste) die Welt und unsere Wahrnehmung konstituieren, simulieren und verändern. Ausgehend von systemtheoretischen Überlegungen skizziert er die Medienkünste als Ort der Reflexion unseres Zugangs zur Welt. Seine Essays liefern Werkzeuge zur Analyse virtueller Welten und Bilder bis hin zur Kunst im Zeitalter künstlicher Intelligenz.

Weibel zeichnet darüber hinaus die Allianz von Kunst und Wissenschaft nach und zeigt, wie daraus neue Wissenssysteme entstehen. So finden sich in dem vorliegenden Band grundlegende Texte zur künstlerischen Forschung, zur Transzendierung des Menschen im Sinne eines Transhumanismus, zur »Exo-Evolution«, der »Elektrosphäre« und der »Infosphäre« sowie einer »Renaissance 3.0«.

Kunsttheoretisch hat Peter Weibel mit dem Begriff »Kontextkunst« die soziale Konstruktion von Kunst beschrieben. Seine Theorie der multiplen Modernen zeigt, wie die Repräsentation nicht nur von der Abstraktion abgelöst wurde, sondern auch durch reale Handlungen und reale Gegenstände sowie durch eine neue Werkzeugkultur, eine Verabsolutierung der Elemente der Malerei und der Materialmalerei.

Weibels teils prophetische Texte offenbaren die gesellschaftliche Relevanz von Medienkunst und ihr epistemisches Potenzial. Der Kunst und ihren Institutionen kommt demnach auch eine Bildungsaufgabe zu, die einen emanzipierten Umgang mit der Digitalisierung im 21. Jahrhundert ermöglicht.

"Snađi se, druže!" – "figure it out, comrade" – is a common phrase used in former Yugoslavia. It originated during the WWII indicating that partisans in action had to come up with solutions under extremely unfavourable conditions. The question, when given instructions for an impossible mission, would often be "but how do I do that?", and the answer would often be "figure it out, comrade". Later during the socialist period, this expression would be used for practices that people were devising when encountering bureaucratic or material constraints in everyday life. All periods and societies have such practices of common lying, cheating and stealing and common phrases to name them.

Figure it Out (FIO) is a collective exploration of stories of ingenuity that people with little or no power devise when systems fail them. The project involves partners from Croatia, France, Greece, Malta and Serbia who work with and engage different communities sharing their stories through art productions, exhibitions, a radio festival, bonfire events and web-zines.

This publication gathers some of the stories people have shared during the project's public "bonfire" events as well as reflections on the topic by members and collaborators of the research group.

(un)real data ☁️ – (🧊)real effects explores the inherent ambiguity of data as an opportunity to not only describe the world but strategically intervene in it. Is it possible to create specific real-world outcomes by modifying our data streams? Can we intentionally produce data to interact with an algorithmic environment that is opaque, elusive and at the same time all-encompassing? In this book, the authors and artists explore the production of unreal data as acts of resistance and opposition, and as attempts to carve out small and often temporary spaces of agency and autonomy when faced with systems that seem to leave little room for imagination and choice.

Cracked smartphone displays, distorted images, colorful pixel structures: as one of the youngest and most unpredictable art forms today, glitch art specifically directs our attention to the aesthetic of the flawed. Initially used in technical jargon among radio and television engineers in the 1950s, the term glitch (from the early New High German verb “glitschen”, meaning to [left] glide or from the Yiddish “gletshn”, to slide, slip, or skid) soon comes to designate coding bugs or graphic errors in computer games. A glitch is the unexpected result of a malfunction. In the art context, disruptions find immediate expression in the realm of computer-generated images, in digital media and Internet art. The roots of technical “glitches” reach back to the early days of photography; as an artistic strategy directed against recognized forms of expression, they evolve in avant-garde film and video art and, finally, in digital image media and net art, where instances of image interference are intentionally provoked or deliberately programmed.

The catalogue Glitch. The Art of Interference is the first comprehensive survey with a historical derivation of the potential of glitches in art, media, and society. With works by Maya Dunietz, Jake Elwes, JODI, Joan Jonas, Germaine Krull, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Mame-Diarra Niang, Carsten Nicolai, Kazuma Obara, Nam June Paik, Jiang Pengyi, Sondra Perry, Man Ray, Pipilotti Rist, Steina Vasulka, amongst others, alongside with historical magazines and guidebooks on how to avoid photographic errors as counter narrative. In essays and free-forming writings, Franziska Barth and Markus Rautzenberg, Katrin Bauer, Nick Briz, Doris Gassert, Ute Holl, Justyna Janik, Franziska Kunze, Rosa Menkman, Mame-Diarra Niang and Agnieszka Roguski provide broader insights into the recent fields of research on the global phenomenon of glitch art.

The texts, ideas, instructions, and art projects gathered in this book reflect on our relationship with the earth and the lessons we can derive from it. The contributions not only urge us to respond to the pressing issue of climate emergency, but also remind of certain neglected or unlearned ways in which we can engage in dialogue with the earth. What they have in common is the question of how we can shape a more ecological and just future.

Catalogue to accompany the exhibition «I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen» at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth edited by Alison Hearst and featuring contributions by Marla Price, John Suler, Omar Kholeif and Tina Rivers Ryan

Surveying some 50 years of groundbreaking art related to digital technology and the screen, I'll Be Your Mirror examines how technologies such as home computers, smartphones and TV have affected art and life over the past five decades. It traces a trajectory stretching back to the late 1960s, a watershed moment in the rise of the screen in the home. Today, accelerated by the pandemic, our daily life is mediated through screens for work, entertainment and sociality.

This volume attempts to disassemble and reformulate what one might understand as AI by taking apart both notions of 'artificiality' and 'intelligence' and seeing what new meaning they produce when recombined.

We summon the trickster of the natural order, chimera, both a mythical creature and a genetic phenomenon. Drawing upon chimerism allows us to broaden 'artificial intelligence' into 'synthetic cognition'⁠—an approach that highlights the duality of 'artificial' and 'authentic', amplifies non-human methods of cognition and anticipates modes of symbiosis.

With this aim, the editors, Ilan Manouach and Anna Engelhardt, assembled an inventory in which one can find contributions from scholars and artists with interspecies, disability, monstrous, feminist, and decolonial approaches, as well as thinkers and technologists engaged in a broader field of AI. By questioning fabricated norms that constitute and maintain notions of 'artificial' and 'intelligence', this inventory acts as a toolbox one can use to merge these terms into a novel chimera.

The title of the book, The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age, is a reference to the exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age”, curated by Pontus Hultén for MoMA in 1968, highlighting how technology was influencing art at a time when mechanical machines were increasingly replaced by electronic and chemical devices. Through its selection of contemporary art works the exhibition thus came to function as a recording of technological history.

I never got to see the exhibition since I wasn’t born at the time, but a couple of years ago I came across a curious book with a tin cover. The book was published in connection to the exhibition, and the history recorded between its covers ends at approximately the same time that early computers start to make their way into the art world. In the fifty years that followed, art came to be marked by a digital presence.

It was that book, along with an interest in dead media, and a curiosity for art aided by algorithms, that sparked the idea for The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age.

Here you will encounter new works by a selection of artists, specifically invited to use algorithms/AI to contribute to a continuous, self-reproducing, anachronistic, machine aided recording of history. A way to preserve, revise and/or comment upon digital history from the vantage point of present-day technology or through the lens of imagined future media, perspectives and technologies.

The works have been created specifically for the book. Some are based on works by other artists, made in another era, repurposed for our time and technologies. Others are based on redundant technologies, revived and given new functions. Some adopt a critical or political approach to the algorithm and its impact on society. Several utilize it as an opportunity to create unique works for each separate copy of the edition. Thousands of files eventually compiled into 200 unique books, each with a different cover and different contents – generated, aided or influenced by algorithms.

A journey of discovery to the scrap heap and he treasure trove of the analogue eraAudio tapes, records, audio cassettes and Super8 film – once they were all media standards. In the digital age however they have been superseded and are being discarded or else stored at the very back of the cellar. Artists and collectors however remain faithful to obsolete media and create something new out of old machines. Like the Swiss artist, musician and engineer Flo Kaufmann, who in the role of “Lord of the Groove” combines knowledge of vinyl mastering and experimental music.Starting with select objects, different obsolete media are introduced in a technological and culture historical context. Works by Kaufmann and other artists and musicians, like Christian Marclay, !Mediengruppe Bitnik and many more, demonstrate the potential inherent in working with analogue finds and give concrete tips to inspire us to do-it-ourselves.

In October 2021, David Chipperfield’s new extension of the Kunsthaus Zürich opened for the public. The new wing doubles the museum’s space for art display. Perhaps more importantly, it offers the opportunity to present larger parts of the museum’s permanent collection in a new light and in new groupings. The Chipperfield building is now home to the renowned Merzbacher, Hubert Looser, and Emil Bührle Collections, all on permanent loan to the museum. The formidable selection of French impressionist paintings in the Emil Bührle Collection combined with Kunsthaus Zürich’s own holdings of that period constitutes the largest display of impressionist art outside France. In addition, surrealism, art from the postwar period, pop art, and contemporary art now have the prominent space they deserve.

This new book offers an introduction to the museum’s curatorial concept as well as concise essays on key aspects of Kunsthaus Zürich’s permanent collection.

A meteoric hype? Or avant-garde? At its Francisco Carolinum venue in Linz, OÖ Landes-Kultur presents PROOF OF ART, the world’s first museum exhibition on the history of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and digital art. The project surveys the origins of NFTs and their evolution, from formative early trial runs with digital technologies to the first artistic experiments with the blockchain and today’s cutting-edge crypto-art. Online and offline, the multimedia exhibition and the related publication each present the positions of twenty-six artists who grapple with the new system of meanings and values, examine the role that artists play in our high-tech environment, and discuss the repercussions of virtual spaces in the reality of our lives.

Released in conjunction with the exhibition, the publication is designed less as an accompanying catalogue than as a handbook that sheds light on NFTs in their (art-)historical contexts, from the media art of the 1950s/60s to contemporary positions. Experts in a range of disciplines contributed essays: Daniel Heiss and Margit Rosen, Fabian Müller-Nittel, Georg Bak, Anika Meier, Schoenherr Attorneys at Law, Charlotte Kent, and Claudia Hart. With a preface by Alfred Weidinger and an intro by Jesse Damiani.

Early on, the artists understood the transformative power of play, integrating it into their works for various purposes – escaping reality, social construction and transformation, subversion or as a criticism of the mechanisms of play and games themselves. The Playmode exhibition and catalogue offer a reflection on these aspects and on the era of ludification that contemporary societies are now experiencing, bringing together pieces by several artists, such as Brad Downey, Gabriel Orozco and Ana Vieira, who incorporate the theme while exploring new ways of seeing, participating and transforming the world, using gaming in a critical way.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik’s first monography injects code on online bookstores through its title: a line of Javascript that displays an alert popup.

On 16 January 2013, !Mediengruppe Bitnik sent a parcel containing a camera and a GPS signal to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to find out what would happen on the way. Would it be possible to break through the physical barrier surrounding Assange, who is living at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to escape being extradited to the USA? Would the parcel’s journey end with a picture of Assange’s face or would it be intercepted and destroyed by an intelligence officer of the British Secret Service?

This is the account of an extraordinary delivery and the uproar that followed on the Internet. The publication consists of two books, one in English, one in German – read in your prefered language and give the other copy away!
2016.bitnik.org/book