A hollow Earth under the glass roof.
As Art Basel Paris (@ArtBasel) holds its Vernissage at the Grand Palais, the Rotonde d'Antin, new to the fair, hosts GENER8ION, the duo of producer Surkin (@Surkin) and filmmaker Romain Gavras, with GOD HATES SPACE on a double-sided 12-meter screen, presented with Live Nation France (@LivenationFR): a propaganda video from an imagined insurgent group in an independent Idaho in 2034, whose members believe the Earth is hollow and forbid space exploration. Free, through Sunday.
Forty voices, forty screens.
At the Beaux-Arts de Paris (@beauxartsparis), Kutluğ Ataman's Küba (2004) fills the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins through Sunday: forty residents of a former informal settlement on the edge of Istanbul, founded in the late 1960s by people fleeing political persecution, each speaking straight to camera from a television set among mismatched armchairs.
The pioneers pick their own work.
AND PRAXIS opens tonight at the NEWART Centre in Reus, near Tarragona, with no curatorial selection: 36 artists and duos, authors of The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of New Media Art, Volume II, each chose the one work they want to be remembered by. Jeffrey Shaw, Stelarc, Donna Cox, Ernest Edmonds, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau and William Latham share one room of screens, with a telematic performance by Paul Sermon. It doubles as a living archive for works whose machines are disappearing.
Agents drawing maps.
Tonight in Karlsruhe, ZKM | Center for Art and Media opens Agentic Constellations by Daniel Heiss and Marc Schütze in the foyer of the EnBW headquarters: several autonomous AI agents search the internet for freely available data about the energy company, form hypotheses about hidden connections, and draw them as diagrams, networks and maps on a large LED wall. Every new piece of information reshuffles the constellation.
New on http://catalogue.gallery: send more mail.
On Friday, Vinnie Hager (@VinnieHager) brings Letters From Marfa to the Artist Fair at Art Blocks' (@artblocks_io) Marfa Weekend, turning his 2021 genesis series of 1,000 hand-drawn envelopes on Ethereum into real postcards: "Bring a physical address. Send a physical postcard." And Rapha Mey (@rapha_nyc) calls IOR "my only 1/1 work for 2026," a code-made loop of a glass vessel that behaves like water, letting the red and blue of American politics pass through each other, for the Searching for Balance auction by ACCOMPART'S (@accomparts) on Tezos.
And a history: in late 1979 Maryanne Amacher wired a window at the Battery Park fire house to her Pearl Street studio for six months of harbor sound, 24 hours a day.
It belonged to City-Links, the 22-part series she began in Buffalo in 1967 by sending a steel plant, flour mills and the airport over phone lines to a radio studio for a 28-hour live mix. Blank Forms (@BlankForms) calls it "a very early example of telematic performance," and helped rehouse her archive, which the New York Public Library acquired in 2020.