Resistance, in six cities.
The fifth Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques, organized by Chroniques, opened Saturday in Marseille and runs through Jan 17, 2027 across Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Avignon, Arles, Istres and Port-de-Bouc, built around forms of artistic resistance. At the Centre de la Vieille Charité, Souffles terrestres, curated by Jean-Paul Fourmentraux and Mathieu Vabre, pairs Stéphanie Roland's Serpentine night, a video installation on California's geological faults, with Étienne Rey's Impermanence, where vibrations of water, seismic movement and underground frequencies make the Earth read as something alive. Free, through Dec 13.
A lighthouse made of corn.
salt 18: Amor Muñoz opened Saturday at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (@umfa), through June 6, 2027. The Mexico City artist, who has spent more than fifteen years working with experimental electronics and craft, built KaleidescopElote from enlarged resin corn kernels: part observatory, part seed bank, part oracle, an interactive kaleidoscope of stars and seeds with an augmented reality sound piece that answers visitors' movement.
New on http://catalogue.gallery: a block of Bitcoin goes to Los Angeles.
Robert Alice (@robertalice_21) confirmed that LACMA's (@LACMA) gift of more than 200 digital works includes "a BLOCK from Portraits of a Mind," his 40 circular paintings that together transcribe all 12.3 million digits of Bitcoin's first code. Each holds 322,048 raised digits, 32 of them in gold marking a place tied to Bitcoin's making, around a void where a coin would carry a ruler's face. The Centre Pompidou acquired BLOCK 10 in 2024. "Coordinated generational gifts at this scale get the attention of every museum in the world," he wrote.
Ahead: from Oct 28 to Nov 1, Gray Area (@GrayAreaorg) in San Francisco shows Scaling Intelligence, eleven new commissions made with Modal, by artists including Cezar Mocan, Ira Greenberg, Parag Mital and Sasha Sorokina, set against "a prevailing narrative where AI inference equates to automation, homogenization, and slop."
And a history: in 1977 in New York, the Public Access Synthesizer Studio rented a Buchla 100, an EMS Putney and a Moog oscillator bank to any artist "for just $4 an hour." It was the seed of Harvestworks (@harvestworks), founded by Gregory Kramer and Gerald Lindahl.
In 1983 it sponsored Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine, whose first tape carried Sonic Youth, Rhys Chatham and Barbara Ess; in 1992 the first Max user group met there. Bob Moog and Suzanne Ciani have sat on its board, and it says it has now supported more than 14,000 artists from its home at 596 Broadway.