Shanghai gives data art a festival of its own.
On Friday the China Shanghai International Arts Festival opened the first show of X-TRA, its new visual art strand for digital work, at TANK Shanghai, the museum built inside former oil tanks, through Jan 24, 2027. Curated by the collector Qiao Zhibing, it brings together five artists and one duo on data and algorithms in art. Refik Anadol (@refikanadol) turns Pacific wind forecast data into flowing images, Pierre Huyghe's Camata lets AI edit footage shot in Chile's Atacama Desert in real time, Qiu Anxiong animates tales from the Tang dynasty in color ink, and Cao Shu draws on family memory through game engine imagery.
New on http://catalogue.gallery: a hotel lit floor by floor.
For the 8th ELEKTRA International Digital Art Biennial (@elektramontreal), its founder Alain Thibault has spread Lux Æterna through SonoLux, the Old Montréal hotel that bills itself as Québec's first contemporary art hotel. In the lobby, Matthew Biederman's Serial Mutations (z axis), a generative wall drawing driven by custom software and a projector, has run since 2014 without looping. Sabrina Ratté's Floralia (2021) sets flowers inside glowing, translucent virtual architecture, works by Baron Lanteigne and Inhwa Yeom fill the floors above, and a 20-minute sound work plays in the stairwells.
A sentence you can only read in a mirror.
On Saturday MMCA (@MMCAKOREA) opened its Museum Threshold Project in Cheongju with Rohwa Jeong, the duo of Noh Yunhui and Jeong Hyeonseok, through June 30, 2027. At the entrance, Passage sets embroidered panels at different angles in front of a mirror; walk around them and the marks on their backs join into one phrase, "How to Get to Tomorrow." On the building's media canvas, Still Life films the words "still life," embroidered in white on mosquito nets, at four places in Cheongju, from Sangdangsanseong Fortress to Chungbuk National University.
In Tokyo, Kiyoshi Furukawa's retirement exhibition, Resonating Sound and Media, runs through Nov 8 at the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts, free.
A composer and media artist who studied with Isang Yun in Berlin and György Ligeti in Hamburg, Furukawa wrote the virtual reality opera For Gods Yet Unborn for the opening of ZKM's new building in Karlsruhe in 1997, then came home in 2000 as the university's Department of Intermedia Art was being set up. The show mixes interactive works, research on sound, AI and care, and a concert.
Ahead, two museums ask what AI does to art.
On Nov 15, Museum Kranenburgh in Bergen, in the Netherlands, opens AI-Artist, through May 9, 2027: the critic and guest curator Edo Dijksterhuis gathers artists who use AI as a smart tool, artists who push back against it and artists who embrace it fully. On Nov 26 in Barcelona, Vectors: Art digital per pensar el futur, curated by Irma Vilà i Òdena, opens through Mar 14, 2027, from coexistence with machines and other species to the hidden infrastructure of the digital world, generative art and live creation.