Orpheus among the kouroi.
William Kentridge's Imitate the Sleep of Stones opened Friday at the Hellenic National Archaeological Museum in Athens, curated by Burcu Fikretoğlu, through Jan 24, 2027. Built on the myth of Orpheus going down to the underworld to bring Eurydice back, it places rust-painted steel figures and paper tree silhouettes among the museum's kouroi, sphinxes and funerary monuments. At its center is a diorama that uses Pepper's Ghost, the 19th-century theatre trick, to float reflected moving images inside a physical model. Kentridge's L'Orfeo is on stage at the Greek National Opera through Nov 14.
New on http://catalogue.gallery: you can touch the grass.
Leander Herzog's (@lennyjpg) Field is on view at Nguyen Wahed (@nguyenwahed) in New York through Nov 21, a field of grass computed live in JavaScript and WebGPU that never repeats a frame. It is split into 26 tokens on his own contract on Ethereum, one curated view per letter of the alphabet, and touching the grass in one view shows up in every view that sees that spot, in real time, with no wallet needed. "A screen with a static image is like a stuffed animal," he wrote. Mimi Nguyen (@drmiminguyen) put it simply: "Touch grass (literally)."
Today in Taipei, the Taipei Digital Art Festival opens under the theme Gray Autonomous Entity, through Nov 15, with more than 30 Taiwanese and international teams, its main show set for the first time in the Taipei Expo Future Life Pavilion.
Curated by Lien-Cheng Wang and Yen-Ju Lin, it treats AI as something living alongside plants, soil, fungi, animals and people. Jed Berk's Belugas' Sphere grows his 2008 Beluga Pod into a group of mechanical belugas that gather and move with the light and keep acting when no one is there.
Ahead: a generative collection ends on a stage.
From Nov 19 to 22 the Whitney (@whitneymuseum) premieres Act III of Human Unreadable by Operator (@operator_______), the duo of Ania Catherine (@aniacatherine) and Dejha Ti (@dejhati). Dancers perform the choreography hidden in the first hundred works of the 400 they released on Art Blocks (@artblocks_io) in May 2023, an 80-minute finale to what the artists call "the slow recovery of the human." It opens alongside artport: A History of Internet Art on Nov 21, more than 100 works commissioned for the Whitney's net art site since 2001, organized by Christiane Paul.
And a history: on Sept 6, 2001, Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea opened 2001, Wolfgang Staehle's first solo show in New York in 10 years.
Three live feeds reached the gallery around the clock, refreshing every 4 seconds: the Berlin TV tower, the Comburg monastery where he grew up, and a panorama of Lower Manhattan seen from Brooklyn. Five days later the camera was still running. "Tuesday morning it looked like our world ended," Postmasters' Magdalena Sawon (@magdasawon) wrote, and the feed went on showing "a disorienting gap where the towers stood before." The panorama, now Untitled, 2001, is in Rhizome's (@rhizome) Net Art Anthology.