New on http://catalogue.gallery: one square mile of America, in code.
In 1785 the young United States began dividing the land west of the Ohio River into sections one mile on a side, and the roads that followed still run a mile apart across the Midwest. SECTIONS, the first long form, fully onchain generative project by Grant Yun (@GrantYun2), takes that grid as its subject: farmland, centre pivot fields and grain elevators, then street grids, towers and freeways. Each work lists figures converted from US federal data for the land it shows, from residents to water use. It launches with Fellowship (@fellowshiptrust) on Nov 18: 1,300 sections as 1/1s on OpenSea (@opensea) and 12 Megacities in a 24-hour auction. NODE (@nodefnd) in Palo Alto opens a Sections exhibition on Nov 19.
A museum as a city lab.
In Shenzhen, the Guan Shanyue Art Museum has opened Gezhi Laboratory: Tech-Art and Future City, through Dec 11. It is the first show of a new Shenzhen City Art Lab, run with the China Academy of Art, after artists and writers spent three days this spring inside 12 research institutes, from genomics to AI and synthetic biology. Of 21 works, 13 were made by artists and scientists together, in four sections: landscape, city, future and generation. The landscape section uses AI to rewrite the brush and ink of the Lingnan school.
New on http://catalogue.gallery: a painting that learned from Polaroids.
In the early 1980s David Hockney built pictures from grids of Polaroids, each taken from a slightly different place and moment. Back on canvas in London in 1982, he painted David, Celia, Stephen and Ian on eight equal canvases, each sitter split at the waist so the seams do the work of the Polaroid borders. It comes to auction for the first time at Phillips (@phillipsauction) New York on Nov 17, estimated at $10 to 15 million.
A palace turned into a camera.
On Nov 13, Benrath Palace in Düsseldorf opens Upside Down // Inside Out by Bärbel Möllmann, through Dec 20, 2027. She sets three ways of making an image side by side: a walk-in camera obscura lit by the palace's own windows and garden, the photograph, and images generated by AI from language and data. The show treats them as parallel processes, not a line from old to new. Admission is free.
New on http://catalogue.gallery: the machine, bound in tin.
On Nov 27, 1968, MoMA (@MuseumModernArt) opened The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, more than 200 works chosen by Pontus Hultén of Moderna Museet (@ModernaMuseet), with a catalogue bound in tin can steel. From a Dürer woodcut and Duchamp to a Bugatti Royale, it also showed nine new works from an E.A.T. competition pairing artists with engineers, while all 150 entries went on view at the Brooklyn Museum (@brooklynmuseum). Kenneth Knowlton of Bell Labs (@BellLabs) presented an evening of computer-made film.
