Two hundred works, one permanent home.
LACMA (@LACMA) announced a landmark gift of more than 200 works of digital art, offered over the next several years by members of LACMA Digital Leaders, the patron group chaired by Jeannie Vu and Jehan Chu (@collectionist), and others including the Mneme Foundation. The first donations include Refik Anadol (@refikanadol), Tyler Hobbs (@tylerxhobbs), Dmitri Cherniak (@dmitricherniak), Lu Yang, Trevor Paglen (@trevorpaglen) and Sarah Meyohas (@SarahMeyohas), alongside pioneers Rebecca Allen, Harold Cohen and Manfred Mohr. "Digital art belongs within the long arc of art history, not apart from it," said director Michael Govan.
Asking the machine to explain itself.
As ___ As Possible opens today at Centre Pompidou Hanwha in Seoul, a free commission by the Hanwha Foundation of Culture with Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) through Nov 13. Anthropic funded five Korean artist teams and gave them Claude to work through two research problems: interpretability, how a system reaches an answer, and alignment, whether it acts on human values. Kahee Jeong's 103 Early Hints hangs 103 small monitors that report a system's status but never why; Mirim Chu's Searching for a New Route draws with Claude; Inhwa Yeom's Chandra Chronicles: In Neuroverse puts visitors on a walking platform in augmented reality.
New on http://catalogue.gallery: the last Friday in the studio.
Since Aug 28, Casey Reas (@REAS) has used the online space of HEK, the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, as a studio: every Friday he paints a small watercolor live, then turns it into a score for his software agents. Omnia Ex Natura: In Situ, curated by Sabine Himmelsbach, holds its final session today at noon in New York and closes Oct 25. Instead of years in the studio and then an opening, he says, "I'm really interested in inverting that and being in conversation about the work while it's being created."
A light you can only play together.
Tonight at ICK Dans Amsterdam, during Amsterdam Dance Event, Matthias Oostrik premieres White Space: a monolith of blue and white light spinning on its axis, with generative music by Marcel Wierckx, that responds to the pose and position of everyone in the room. Only when visitors synchronize can they reach its climax. Alongside it, his SMILE turns visitors' portraits into flawless AI replicas, keeping the biases of the image generators in plain view.
And a history: 60 years ago tonight, 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering closed at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York.
Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver paired 10 artists, among them John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer and David Tudor, with some 30 Bell Labs engineers. In Rauschenberg's Open Score, every hit of a tennis racquet wired with a contact microphone rang out and switched off a light, until the hall was dark and a crowd of hundreds could be seen only through infrared cameras. It became the first of the projects known as E.A.T., Experiments in Art and Technology.