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Software for Less at Aksioma in Slovenia

Software for Less at Aksioma – Opening Night

My solo exhibition Software for Less is now on view at the Aksioma Institute of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia! It is Aksioma’s fourth and final installment in their New Extractivism series, which also featured solo exhibitions by Joana Moll, Vladen Joler, and DISNOVATION.

Software for Less at Aksioma (photo by Domen Pal / Aksioma)

Software for Less at Aksioma (photo by Domen Pal / Aksioma)

On view through 22 June, the show includes many of the same works I had at arebyte, including ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, DEFICIT OF LESS (not pictured), The Endless Doomscroller, Go Rando, Safebook, Platform Sweet Talk, Twitter Demetricator, and Minus. Events include(d) a public artist talk (watch here or below), a workshop on software recomposition at ALUO, and the opening on 25 May. Italian scholar and critic Valentina Tanni published a text alongside the exhibition titled The Great Algorithm.

Software for Less at Aksioma – Opening Night

Software for Less at Aksioma – Opening Night

Software for Less at Aksioma – Opening Night

You can view video of the setup on opening night, photos from the opening, and additional formal exhibition photos by Domen Pal / Aksioma. There’s also a recording of my artist talk at Cukrarna in Ljubljana.

This edition of Software for Less was curated by Janez Janša at Aksioma. It is an adaptation of my exhibition of the same title commissioned by arebyte Gallery (London, UK) in fall 2021, which was curated by Rebecca Edwards and featured the works Platform Sweet Talk, Minus and DEFICIT OF LESS commissioned by arebyte.

Twitter Demetricator in Estonia

Estonian National Museum in Tartu, Photo by Arp Karm

Twitter Demetricator is on exhibit at the Estonian National Museum in Tartu as part of the exhibition Number Fascination. Up through October, the show examines how counting and measurement have changed culture, especially in the age of the digital.

Twitter Demetricator in the Estonian National Museum, Photo by Me-Mind

Living by Protocol at Harvard Art Museum

My works Minus, Go Rando, and ORDER OF MAGNITUDE will be part of Living by Protocol at the Harvard Art Museum. Curated by Kim Albrecht and Sarah Newman, “Living by Protocol queries the contemporary reflections of artists and artistic researchers on, with, and by social media. While scientific research deepens the knowledge of a specific domain, art and artistic research has the power to transfer questions, problems, and opportunities into wider spectrums of society. … The use of social media has become a daily routine for billions of people throughout the last decade. The problems and possibilities of this new media reality were reflected and questioned by artists long before its popularization. Cyberfeminism and Net Art laid a foundation in the digital realm as an artistic medium in the early 1990s. Today, contemporary art is almost unthinkable without the network effects of Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook.”

The exhibition will run from May 17-July 3, 2022 at the Lightbox Gallery at Harvard Art Museums. Artists: Manja Ebert, Ben Grosser, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mirabelle Jones, Mimi Onuoha, Kim Albrecht, Sarah Newman & Jad Esber, and Winnie Soon.

Panel on (De)Quantifying Social Interaction with Zurich University of the Arts

On Tuesday, 29 March at 12pm CDT / 19:00 CET I spoke about social media demetrication, Zuckerberg supercuts, and radical platform alternatives with Cornelia Sollfrank and Martin Warnke as part of their Ambiguous Data talk series. Details here

Works at ADM Gallery Singapore

Information Wants to be Free? at ADM Gallery, Singapore

My works ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, DEFICIT OF LESS, and Minus are part of Information Wants to be Free?: Art and the Internet at ADM Gallery, Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore. Curated by Kristine Tan, the exhibition explores “a range of contentious issues surrounding the role of Big Tech on the use of personal data, algorithmic bias, surveillance, and more.” Artists include Kara Chin, Chong Yan Chuah, Thomson & Craighead, disnovation.org, Bani Haykal, Bill Posters & Daniel Howe, Rachel Maclean, Michael Mandiberg, Tabita Rezaire, and myself.

The exhibition opens on 25 March and runs through 13 May.

Recent Mentions of Minus in Washington Post, Atlantic, Newsweek

Washington Post and The Atlantic

I’ve been meaning to post about a few recent mentions of Minus. The Washington Post article by Will Oremus has me (happily) countering a statement from Facebook VP Nick Clegg, and talking about how Minus shows that social networks without feed algorithms can avoid some of big social’s problems. Ian Bogost’s post in The Atlantic and the Newsweek piece are both focusing on how smaller size networks that, like Minus, eschew scale, may chart a new direction forward.

Exhibition and Talk at SXSW

I have a couple of invited events at SXSW 2022 in Austin. The first is that my film ORDER OF MAGNITUDE is part of the SXSW Art Program. The second is that I’ll give an invited talk, titled Techniques of Resistance in a Platform World, as part of the design track. The film is up from March 7-15 and the talk is on March 12th.

Paper on Doomscrolling Published in Electronic Book Review

Paper published in Electronic Book Review

Last summer I gave a paper at the Electronic Literature Organization conference, where I talked about doomscrolling—using my 2020 project The Endless Doomscroller alongside theories by Wendy Chun, Christian Andersen and Sören Pold, and many others—examining the role that platform interfaces have played in our last two years software-enabled collective descent into despair.

Read the paper.

ORDER OF MAGNITUDE at Centre Pompidou in Paris

Centre Pompidou Logo

My film ORDER OF MAGNITUDE will be part of Réseaux-mondes at Centre Pompidou in Paris, running from 23 Feb to 25 Apr, 2022. Specifically, the work is part of an included video installation from The Wrong TV curated by David Quilles Guilló.

Interview with UN Today

February 2022 issue of UN Today

I gave an interview with UN Today, the official magazine of the United Nations in Geneva. We spoke mostly about my new social platform Minus.

Read the interview