Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s practice has often been defined as a quest for traces of life in the many ways it manifests to the human eye: the pulse of a heartbeat, the beam of light signaling embodied presence (human or extraterrestrial), the heat map of a passerby’s body fossilized in time, the shape of words emerging from a poet’s mind.

But his work is far from romanticizing what we make of life, which makes him almost uncannily Dutch in some of his existential observations, as when, in Last Breath, he reproduces he last echo of lives taken by the COVID-19 pandemic through a perfectly senseless machine, or mimics the annoying gaze of a surveillance camera. You never quite know whether, in his gesture, he employs the scientific method to protect himself, and us, from the brutality of life, or whether he uses it to meditate on phenomena that surpass our emotional capacity to speak of them.

What his work does instead, and perhaps this is one of the reasons why people are so drawn to it, is that it creates an embracing space for the shared observation of life and the passage of time. There is something inherently placemaking about his work, where every interactive installation becomes an invitation to get together and observe social and biological phenomena with active introspection and lucid contemplation.

There is nothing aesthetically misleading about his practice — no attempt to embellish reality. On the contrary, the use of technology allows us to break down what we usually miss as we rush through our daily routines: the constant stream of information and breaking news, where advertisement, poetry, and live-streamed human tragedy merge into one confusing, if not paralyzing, current of the real.

Lozano-Hemmer’s works take each part of this amalgam and address it one absurdity at a time, one battle after another, hoping that collective interaction in the process of discovery will offer us the mental distance we need to cope with the atrocities of the contemporary world. That the warmth of a human body and the regularity of its pulse still have the power to bring solace and a sense of security that comes from not being alone, of confronting what comes as a unit, as a group, as a community.

His work speaks to many technology fans, like myself, because it appeals to what we originally associated with it: a communal, shared plane of encounter, a space to look at each other anew and discover all the things nobody has shown us yet. This ethos is also reflected in the fact that all Lozano-Hemmer’s installations and technologies are bespoke and hand-crafted, which brings a sense of material quality and psychological comfort that we subconsciously associate with generosity and respect.

I want to bring in here the Taiwanese thinker Audrey Tang and how she described the possible, undone futures of the Internet in Plurality, a utopian manifesto for a different kind of worldwide network where ownership is distributed and creativity is a joyful objective, not a profit-generating automated activity. In that paradigm, the Internet becomes an archipelago of digital wild gardens, not a uniform grid of filtered frames where personality is unrecognizable and substance is penalized.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s practice has been shaped by—and for—a world in which the extractive, siloed version of the Internet is already unnegotiable, with all its consequences for our social, political, and personal lives in the physical realm. His work comes as an alternative to anxiety and isolation where individual human life matters regardless of context, and where togetherness and care become the only way to negotiate our continuous existence.

We had none of these words back then, and we still don’t really know what they mean nowadays, but in the same way as we always did, we navigate this young realm of digital creation that spans beyond the 16:9 frame, guided primarily by intuition, following the impulses that often happen to reflect both our creative desires and the needs of our public, to which we are inherently attached as representatives of a discipline that is primarily audience-centric. Perhaps this is why our emerging domain continues to be so attractive to newcomers and so suspicious to the gatekeepers of the traditional system that used to dominate the art world.

Marshmallow Laser Feast, although their practice belongs in equal manner to the museum and gallery world as to the worlds of botanic gardens and festivals, were always, for many of us, a key force in the short history of immersive creation. Their works were mentioned first whenever someone would look for a reference to a foundational experience or a milestone in their own professional development.

It was not so much about a particular work, more so than an approach and a language that we all started to associate with Robin, Barney, Ersin, and their omni-talented team of developers and producers who seemed to move with equal ease between commercial and independent worlds, keeping the collective spirit of an indie studio from Hackney while delivering some of the most powerful imagery of nature that the contemporary digital scene has known.

They wouldn’t necessarily bring in a painfully critical approach like Richard Mosse would (Ultra); their outlook on the matter of their study seems closer to the almost-spiritual take that we find in early VR experiments by Char Davies (Osmose).

The meditative nature of MLF’s studies of living species and life-giving systems is as secular as they come, nourished by data and scientific imagery, which is an approach that many digital artists have adopted over the past decades.

What MLF has initiated was not only the revival of the pursuit of beauty in spatial and immersive creation, and the discussion of how this beauty is mediated by data and technology, but also an ongoing debate on whether this is the right take at all considering the sensitive subject matter.

Perhaps the misunderstanding here is that none of what you see in ITEOTA, Ocean of Air, Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest, or even Evolver, is really about “bringing people closer to nature through digital technology.” This is not, and in my opinion never has been, the objective, or at least treating it as such would be somewhat diminishing.

After my fourth collaboration with MLF, I wrote:

There is the meta-potential of the immersive medium, where tools used in the making of the work add meaning to the work. A digital equivalent of architecture parlante. Marshmallow Laser Feast are using point-cloud technology to represent data through which you can meditate on vital processes that underlie the whole of life on Earth.

Their artworks, set in a forest or inside a human breathing system, take you inside a non-realistic universe to contemplate the rhythm of the natural world we have so many problems accessing. They translate the mystical nature of the Ceiba pentandra, an Amazonian tree, into data, and then transform that data into digital imagery, enveloping you in a secular homage to a world we’ve lost access to.

If MLF’s practice can be interpreted as a quiet meditation on what we’re losing as we allow the illusion of infinite growth to devour our lives in the same way as it devours our planet and all the living species around us, the angle from which we look at their sublime digital paysages shifts in a direction that offers more, even if it makes us somewhat uncomfortable.

The world premiere of Evolver in 2022, which we hosted in New York City during my tenure at Tribeca Festival, was an important moment on both artistic and personal level. The experience was in the making for many long years, and the team was spread across countries, the COVID-19 pandemic adding to the complexity of the already ambitious and demanding production that was intended to be a journey through life and death. Eventually, with the help of film producer Sam Pressman and the French co-producer Atlas V, the project found its closure, at least in its first iteration (it has grown and expanded to a large-scale format since).

In New York, Evolver was shown in its early version as a multi-user VR experience with an adjacent gallery space and an audio-guided mediation as part of the onboarding process. The team presented in a dedicated venue in downtown Manhattan, in a symbolic triangle between the World Trade Center, the 17th-century Trinity Church cemetery, and Wall Street.

After the Tribeca premiere, the project was brought on tour, notably to ACMI, where it expanded into a multi-channel video projection with an additional VR opportunity. The Melbourne exhibition was impressive and highly successful, but at its edges, it is hard not to notice how the spell of “high throughput” that has been cast on so many contemplative projects that were conceived as intimate moments of focus, has not spared the Hackney gang.

Even if the Tribeca version was more of an audience test rather than a revenue-driven run, it had the quality that I appreciate most in what MLF does: a chance to dive into darkness in which, in silence and without social distraction, we’re offered the opportunity to look at various phenomena of life and its mysteries from up close, from the inside.

Evolver teaser

I remember spinning in the whirlpool of blood and shedding a tear while facing the human cell that became a flamboyant nebula in front of my eyes. I remember thinking of all the lives that were lost during the confinement period. I thought about my own late father, whose memory I carried with me to New York and who drove me to convince the producer of Evolver to premiere the work in a place that understands life and death like no other (Tribeca Festival was founded in the wake of the 2001 attacks). I remember celebrating the world premiere of Evolver with one of the EPs of the work, Edward Pressman, the legend of American cinema, his wife Annie and their son Sam. Barely a couple of months after those happy moments, Sam told me about the passing of his father.

Stories of life and death touched many members of the team that year. And yet there is so little that can be convincingly said about the non-negotiable power of those moments in life when we know something important has just happened, and that there is no way to capture it, nor to go back.

That the only way is forward, and what lies ahead is most likely a profound, rich darkness with, hopefully, a couple of bright point-cloud shades dancing in front of our eyes.

The text was originally commissioned by BMW Art Club Poland, which presented Evolver as part of its annual exhibition in 2024.

Perhaps this is the only artwork of its kind ever made. Perhaps you've never seen it or even heard of it. But most certainly, there is at least one person walking this Earth who has felt the sharp edge of teamLab’s philosophical blade.

What you see is a six-channel interactive digital installation that represents a town with its inhabitants busy with everyday activities. Villagers cross the bridge connecting the two riversides, take advantage of the shadow cast by the willow, or chat under a garland of paper lanterns. Gold-toned, misty clouds envelop the multi-fold panorama, offering the viewer a god-like perspective of the enchanting micro-universe.

One of the first stages of interaction between the audience and the artwork is reading the description. Here’s a fragment:

“The world of the artwork changes with the real time of its location. Morning arrives in the artwork with the sunrise in the real world, and when the sun sets, evening begins. The people’s lives also change continuously depending on the time of day and weather of the real world, and the festivals and events that are celebrated change with the seasons.

The actions of viewers influence the world of the artwork. The people in the artwork respond when a viewer touches them, but if the interaction is limited, they return to their daily lives. If the interaction is continuous, however, fights break out amongst the people in the artwork that are near to each other, leading to deaths.

As the city burns to the ground, the people in the artwork eventually die out. In the ruined city where not a single person remains, the seasons still pass and the sun rises and sets with the time of the real world. Once the world of this artwork begins to burn, the world from before can never be returned to.

The people who interact with the artwork cause this outcome.” (source: teamLab)

The artwork description is a warning about the high risk related to any interference in the world occurring in front of you. Touching it means creating disruption; making a move carries consequences and is potentially destructive for its inhabitants. Would it stop you from seeing what happens if you don’t follow the rules? After all, it’s just a digital installation.

If I paid for it, I bet anything I do can be reversed.

This isn’t real anyway.

*

The origin of the six-channel format of The World of Irreversible Change can be traced back to Japanese screen paintings, known as Byōbu (屏風, lit. 'wind wall'). These elaborate multi-panel visual representations first appeared in Japan around the 8th century and flourished during the Edo period (1600–1868) in response to the growing demand for highly decorative artworks that both showcased the wealth and power of their owners and served a practical purpose as easily movable pieces of interior architecture. Looking at some of the most impressive examples of seventeenth-century Byōbu, there are several characteristics that are remarkably echoed in teamLab’s installation.

First, the painting unfolds in a linear way across six panels to create a sense of a narrative universe, an animated miniature of a world. Byōbu masters (similarly to early Renaissance Western artists like Giotto) didn’t use linear perspective, which is responsible for the illusion of depth. Flat pictorial structures, where all elements coexist on the same plane, along with purely symbolic representations of characters and landscapes, traditionally carry a sense of timelessness and eternity. In essence, Byōbu opens the viewer to a world beyond the ordinary, where time is suspended in a cyclical eternal return, and the natural order rules over mundane human routines.

Second, the generous use of gold leaf (kinpaku) in Byōbu signified not only the financial status of the patron, but also evoked a mystical, heavenly quality. A similar use of gold can be observed in the Byzantine tradition, where mosaics, and icons employed gold to channel sacrum—a material and color reserved for the divine realm and the resurrected Pantokrator. From a purely technical perspective, the golden background created a luminous visual effect, allowing the screen to glow and change with the shifting daylight or candlelight. It also provided a striking contrast with the richly colored pigments used in the painting, making elements of the composition—trees, mountains, water—appear more dramatic.

While Japanese Byōbu masters, through flat pictorial space, lack of linear perspective, and the use of gold, elevated historical or mythical scenes into an almost sacred realm, teamLab's symbolic space in their digital artwork lacks this holy aura. Instead, it feels more like a dreamy video game—a real-time preview of a realm beyond time abandoned by gods—where yellow pixels are transformed into fake gold, covering the nameless town with a glow that, like every replica, is devoid of the original’s magical qualities and symbolic power. In the Western iconographic tradition, yellow was associated with deceit and betrayal; ‘fake gold’ was linked to Judas, who wore yellow as a symbol of his false loyalty to Christ.

Does this mean that digital art is forever condemned to be an imitation? Intuitively, we feel that LED screens are not exactly made to host sacred representations. Perhaps because the technology used to create them was conceived in an era that no longer believes in the sacred or knows how to deal with it. Or maybe there’s another reason.

*

One might say that the lack of trust in realism in Japanese elaborate and graceful representations of nature grows out of a deep respect for it and an understanding that, for humans, nature is a narrative. We are the readers of the fragments that nature allows us to perceive through our imperfect cognitive apparatus. Only through profound, everyday effort can we attempt to translate what we have learned from our contemplation of nature (or the lack thereof) into how we treat our surroundings — and that includes the entire cohort: landscapes, plants, animals, but also our neighbors, and Starbucks baristas; the people we don’t usually notice because they appear to us as NPCs, teamLab’s funny figurines crossing the bridge, relaxing in the shadow of a willow, or celebrating under the lanterns suspended across the street.

The World of Irreversible Change took five years to create, but like all great examples of appropriation in art, its spirit reaches far beyond that short timeline through its deep roots in the Byōbu tradition. It echoes the past wisdom of the Edo masters, even if it does so in an almost holographic manner. The work also calls upon the beauty of the ancient tradition to bear witness to the understandable anger of its contemporary creators, who, hidden behind the collective banner of a well-established entertainment brand, can see the dangers of what we have become as a consumer society more clearly than anyone else.

The appreciation for craft and the time dedicated to it is something Western capitalism has long forgotten. It has become an enemy to the reflection we owe to the world before making moves that may disrupt it. We are taught and convinced at every step of our journey that everything, including us, is replaceable; that people, like devices, clothes, and furniture, are mere mass consumption commodities. We are intoxicated with libertarian dreams of perpetual life, where the ultimate border of mortality is eliminated—not because we have something particularly exciting to offer ourselves through eternity, but because it would finally give us enough time to consume everything we can purchase but do not have enough lifespan to swallow.

teamLab’s ingenuity lies in the gesture they made and the form they chose to make their accusation even more somber. They have created a perfect trap for what is at the heart of the crisis we see unfolding around us each day, and used the very same technology they employ to entertain the masses to deliver a brilliant and bitter modern day morality play. The rules they set for us this time seem simple: do not intervene in what you don’t understand. Do not assume that everything is replaceable or reversible purely because it’s synthetic. And yet they knew that there would always be someone who would put their finger on the screen, and in a gesture of dominance, set the world on fire. Greed and contempt are sins that—like all life-changing mistakes—start with little decisions, these benign streams that penetrate a space we were supposed to keep intact, let it live, and leave it alone. Noli me tangere, we were once told. The rest of the story is yours to write.

During the research process, I utilized the Metropolitan Museum of Art's open source publications, including The Arts of Japan by Barbara Brennan Ford, Bridge of Dreams by Miyeko Murase, and The Tale of Genji by John Carpenter, as well as other resources available through the museum’s collection. Additionally, I referenced the online catalog of the Kobe City Museum (via Google Arts & Culture) and the Harvard Art Museums' Painting Edo online exhibit.

Grazie mille, John, Valentine e Agnese, per aver commissionato questo articolo e per averlo stampato con amore a Milano.

One should either write about something adjacent or imperfect, where the analysis can happen in a more solemn way, so that what you eventually end up with isn’t just a mildly camouflaged set of compliments, but an actual conversation with the artwork.

That is exactly why I shouldn’t write about the work of Rafael Rozendaal: an artist whose practice I’ve been fascinated with for many years. Today, I discovered that he is having a major solo show at the MoMA, curated by Paola Antonelli. 

This exhibition, introduced by a curator who is an indisputable luminary in the field, is an important recognition Rozendaal deserves more than any artist I can think of in the digital space.

If I were to explain to someone unfamiliar with Rozendaal’s work why I believe he is worth their attention, I would probably choose these treacherous words: his art doesn’t feel like digital art. Not in terms of medium or technique, but in terms of its breadth of scope, gravitas, and attention-arresting narrative quality—things that you rarely find in works created specifically for electronic screens.

What I also mean by this is that Rozendaal’s art reaches far beyond what we might normally consider the limitations of digital media—like depth of colour and texture, dependence on sense of scale, or a specific display type or format. His work feels, for a lack of a better word, universal.

As a result, in an almost seamless way, it elevates the entire ecosystem.

His 81 Horizons series brings unexpected complexity and substance to the curious ‘NFT series’ format (I’ve never fully understood this format or been able to appreciate its meaning as a medium for artistic expression). His large-scale video works bring a sense of silent nobility, and timelessness to otherwise intrusive, often overwhelming immersive video projections.

His paintings echo 1960s David Hockney’s wit and irony, crossing it with a soft and forgiving outlook on reality that encourages an almost philosophical debate, just as one might expect from someone born into the North European artistic tradition.

His Utrecht window installations make me think of secular stained glass artworks tailored to the taste of 21st century upper-middle-class art patrons raised on Poltergeist and playing Candy Crush —which, as a concept, feels almost too Dutch to be true.

Although Rozendaal is an excellent colourist, you wouldn’t situate his work anywhere near the post-Rothko space. His art carries a cool, comforting, down-to-earth approach to reality. This approach, mixed with a fair dose of self-irony and sadness—ones that only come with razor sharp intelligence—creates an ultimately hypnotic, or should I say scroll-stopping, experience. Paradoxically, Rozendaal reaches a similar level of captivating visual resonance as Rothko did, though through an entirely different path and by asking entirely different questions.

Rozendaal doesn’t seem particularly interested in tragedy, and his art doesn’t carry the pretense of creating a modern icon. And yet at the center of his practice we find the same light that defines his work as powerfully as it did Rothko’s.

Art history is an endless carousel of unexpected dialogues between artists whose desires and biographies couldn’t be more different.

I should add that the artist’s flamboyant defense of the good name of screensavers should, by default, mint him a loyal fanbase across an entire generation of the 90s Internet.

By fully embracing his digital-first provenance Rozendaal turns traditionally basic conversations about digital aesthetics into something far more subtle and mindful than what you’d often experience in mainstream debates about digital creation—where techniques are rejected, and tools and formats relegated to the “unworthy” space of computer-based labor, deciding whose work gets to be classified as art, or lands on the shelf with lava lamps and infinitely multiplying windows.

Light: Rafaël Rozendaal

• Curator: Paola Antonelli

• Museum of Modern Art, NYC; November 16, 2024 through Spring 2025

• Artist’s website

My recent work has been so dependent on technology and rapid AV market developments that I felt I needed to turn back to art history in order to re-evaluate my outlook on what I do and why I do it in an emerging field. In other words, it was meant to be a kind of therapy for what Matt Klein called an “anxiety-provoking perma-crisis and breakneck innovation” that many of us experience in our day-to-day practice.

The notes I made across a two-month period helped me focus my attention on phenomena that I found relevant or that were relatively unknown to me. They also turned out to be the best remedy to various forms of popular escapism — from pointless wellness rituals to travelling for no reason to places that don’t need me.

"Paik predicted, in 1965, that "someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors, and semiconductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk.”

It’s fascinating how artworks that use cutting edge technology to speak about the present day (no matter how relevant or powerful) quickly become an archive of what “contemporary” meant just a decade or two ago.

In that regard, art that relies on digital tech not only ages more rapidly, but also — what Jennifer Mundy says in her excellent book ‘Lost Art’ — the most advanced technological creations are often the most vulnerable and challenging to preserve.

Nam June Paik’s ‘Electronic Superhighway’ (1995) can be defined as an experiential media concept that lives somewhere between video art, sculpture, and visual representation of a territory that used to belong to scientists and cartographers and that, more recently, became a popular tool for advertising, news, and propaganda.

Building the main body of the installation out of neons and electronic devices straight out of the 1990s is at once a nod to cyberpunk (‘Blade Runner’), 24-hour news channels (CNN), and the glory days of cable television — which is the more interesting to revisit today since all the previously mentioned references are becoming obsolete as we speak.

Paik’s installation made me think about two multimedia works from 2000s that also play on the increasingly popular ‘symphony of noise’ note: ‘Babel’ (2001), by Cildo Meireles, a tower sculpture built of continuously broadcasting TV and radio sets (Tate Modern), and a digital work by Marco Brambilla called ‘Heaven’s Gate’ (2022), a hypnotising single-channel video that is a stunning contemporary take on the Last Judgment and Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Watch a fragment of the work here.

It's worth noting that Brambilla's 2022 piece may already feel outdated when compared to his latest work from 2023, a monumental AI-generated Elvis Presley collage created in collaboration with MSG The Sphere in Las Vegas (‘King Size’). 

The Cenotaph for Newton barely stands a chance with this immersive temple for ‘excess culture’. And yet, the prime time of the largest video art installation ever made lasted mere 3 minutes, the duration of a single U2 song.

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My recent work has been so dependent on technology and rapid AV market developments that I felt I needed to turn back to art history in order to re-evaluate my outlook on what I do and why I do it in an emerging field. In other words, it was meant to be a kind of therapy for what Matt Klein called an “anxiety-provoking perma-crisis and breakneck innovation” that many of us experience in our day-to-day practice.

The notes I made across a two-month period helped me focus my attention on phenomena that I found relevant or that were relatively unknown to me. They also turned out to be the best remedy to various forms of popular escapism — from pointless wellness rituals to travelling for no reason to places that don’t need me.

Before visiting Marina Abramovic’s retrospective that just opened in London I want to dedicate a while to thinking about her extraordinary practice, and bridge the 1974 performance, ‘Rhythm 0’, and ‘The Artist is Present’ (2010), which, when looked at as two opposite sides of the same coin, tell an unexpected story of a movement towards hope. 

It begins in a dark place, where a 23 y.o. Marina proved, channeling the atrocities of war with which she was raised, that a human being in a close, unsupervised encounter is always a potential killer.

Over thirty years later, in her seminal MoMA performance, Abramovic and curator Klaus Biesenbach, (who came up with the legendary title), achieved the ultimate goal, which was defining the simplest yet most essential artistic gesture  of unselfishness and generosity.

It's hard to imagine a more poignant manifestation of the strength that art can still have than what Abramovic achieved by offering her presence and attention to anyone who needed it. The viral video of Ulay sitting with her added an electrifying moment of magic to the performance, a moment when we saw a lifetime defined in a single shot. Two people holding hands encapsulated all the risk and love they used to share with each other - and with generations of their viewers.

One could think that Marina’s art is made of an almost military stamina and dedication to art as a mission (Father), combined with her spiritual, christological side (Grandmother) where she performs her art as an act of social sacrifice, becoming an embodied mirror for humanity, for what it is and what it could become.

Not by accident, the medium she has chosen to inhabit and defend is, in her own words, a realm of nomads, displaced people who have no home or shelter. Their shattered history, both personal and political, has made them one with their artistic practice.

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My recent work has been so dependent on technology and rapid AV market developments that I felt I needed to turn back to art history in order to re-evaluate my outlook on what I do and why I do it in an emerging field. In other words, it was meant to be a kind of therapy for what Matt Klein called an “anxiety-provoking perma-crisis and breakneck innovation” that many of us experience in our day-to-day practice.

The notes I made across a two-month period helped me focus my attention on phenomena that I found relevant or that were relatively unknown to me. They also turned out to be the best remedy to various forms of popular escapism — from pointless wellness rituals to travelling for no reason to places that don’t need me.

This lesser-known happening has recently been following me a lot. It’s titled "The Sea Concert" and was created in 1967 by the prolific visual artist and theater director Tadeusz Kantor, whose visual and theater practice brings to mind the post-war works of Joseph Beuys and Samuel Beckett’s seminal stage writings alike. 

Even today, well over twenty years since I first encountered Kantor's and Beckett’s work, I still can't fully grasp how we've inherited the darkness of a war generation that we were never a part of.

The reason why I find this performance of Kantor particularly captivating is that it reflects in an absurd and surprisingly dramatic way the futility of human ambition to control the reality that, as a species, we barely begin to understand.

‘Nowness’ in this performance serves both as a proof and a means to embrace the unpredictable, counter-logical, and surreal nature of life. It’s at once bitter, monumental, ridiculous, and proud. Hysterical yet noble — the very essence of the first half of 20th century.

Somehow, it also encapsulates the ironic and god-less overview of human condition that we find in the Northern art, starting with the Dutch Golden Age, through James Ensor’s terrifying representations of vanitas, up to 20th-century artists like Jan Fabre. 

And when you take a closer look, you'll notice a subtle Fellini-esque vibe in the gesture that Kantor has deployed here: the fact that we perform means that we're still here, and as long as we remain, anything is possible.

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My recent work has been so dependent on technology and rapid AV market developments that I felt I needed to turn back to art history in order to re-evaluate my outlook on what I do and why I do it in an emerging field. In other words, it was meant to be a kind of therapy for what Matt Klein called an “anxiety-provoking perma-crisis and breakneck innovation” that many of us experience in our day-to-day practice.

The notes I made across a two-month period helped me focus my attention on phenomena that I found relevant or that were relatively unknown to me. They also turned out to be the best remedy to various forms of popular escapism — from pointless wellness rituals to travelling for no reason to places that don’t need me.

I was thinking the other day about Beuys and the notion of healing (it's astonishing that his art is so hard to grasp, even if you decode all the symbols, and contextualize his gestures — and still, you get the feeling that you're getting nowhere).

Was it because it was his proper process of healing that he was focusing on (from his own survival, and the guilt he carried, from witnessing and contributing to a genocide) or because his reasoning is so inaccessible today, for a variety of reasons? Could you imagine Beuys performing on TikTok? This question is intentionally ridiculous. 

Revisiting ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’ (1965), I was thinking about the honey and the gold on his mask, and about King Lear's madness in Act III, and actually not about the Pieta, but about Madonna and Child, which changes how we analyze Beuys' gesture, making it even more painful. The cosmogony that he's reaching for — a helpless limping Father-God figure presenting his creation to a dead child.

How to explain pictures to a dead hare, equals: how do you believe in art after the Holocaust? How do you speak about it to humanity that has lost its soul? (Adorno). It's a terrifying performance, however we look at it.

Maybe what Beuys wanted to point towards is that healing is only possible through facing the abyss of truth; much like his famous New York coyote performance in which he tried to speak about American history and its broken beginnings.

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My recent work has been so dependent on technology and rapid AV market developments that I felt I needed to turn back to art history in order to re-evaluate my outlook on what I do and why I do it in an emerging field. In other words, it was meant to be a kind of therapy for what Matt Klein called an “anxiety-provoking perma-crisis and breakneck innovation” that many of us experience in our day-to-day practice.

The notes I made across a two-month period helped me focus my attention on phenomena that I found relevant or that were relatively unknown to me. They also turned out to be the best remedy to various forms of popular escapism — from pointless wellness rituals to travelling for no reason to places that don’t need me.

Shirin Neshat, and “The Fury”. Although I curated this work at Tribeca and watched it many times, it still makes me feel quite emotional about what it says about the relationship between women and men, not only in Iran and not only in countries that are at war.

The 15-minute video installation is a black and white performance shot in Bushwick, New York, in the summer of 2022, before the killing of Mahsa Amini. Shirin speaks beautifully about how the choice of the location was important for her because of her deep connections to the local community, most of which is made up of, in Shirin’s own words, displaced people, immigrants, and refugees.

The video shows a young woman dancing in front of a stunned soldier, a silent smoking man whose pertinent gaze is both hypnotized and ruthless, fascinated and dangerous. Her solo dance soon becomes a show for a larger group of old and young soldiers standing in a circle, and this scene was taken out of the 2D video and turned into a brilliantly simple 360 video — an immersive experience when the audience becomes one with the dancer, a trapped victim dancing for her life. 

The 2D video continues after the dancer, wounded and beaten, escapes the hangar and hits the streets of Brooklyn where she starts a revolution ending up with a spectacular scene of a social uprising led by women of the district.

All in all, this 20-minute video work is a poignant, yet simple essential statement on the relationship between men and women, male-led capitalism, its brutality, and the silent rage of the oppressed and the vulnerable. A kind of story that, toutes proportions gardées, takes you from an emotional landscape of ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’ to ‘Inglourious Basterds’ in less than ten minutes. All in Neshat’s signature artistic tone and style.

In the statement I wrote earlier this year I said,

“Cutting-edge technologies are born every day, to the extent that even avid tech users can’t seem to keep up with the exponential acceleration of tools and innovations. But when you take a step back and mute yourself from the digital world, you quickly notice that innovation in storytelling has little to do with technology. The gesture of the artist doesn’t require elaborate apparatus if it’s born of a profound understanding of what it tries to communicate.

Shirin Neshat's “The Fury” is a testament to the power of simplicity in 360 storytelling. Her virtual reality director's toolkit seems pure and almost ascetic, while her repertoire of symbols is as powerful and timeless as the one used by Vermeer in his portraits of women whose silence is a direct response to the presence of the men who observe them.

When you enter the Brooklyn warehouse where Neshat’s ritual takes place, time and space seem to bend. You become an integral part of the eternal conversation between men and women, where women - to borrow from Margaret Atwood's famous words - must do whatever is necessary to persuade men to let them live.”

It’s hard to put technology aside in the analysis of this particular piece because I believe that the actual personal connection with the dancer happens in the 360 video scene, not before and not after. The balance between what you ‘observe’ (2D video) and what you ‘become’ (VR) is crucial for the audience's journey, at least my experience was strongly influenced by it.

But what is the most important aspect of this work is its terrifying universality.

It’s about women – all women. It’s about brutality – all kinds of it. And it’s about the moment when the chains are broken – whatever the cost and final outcome. I’m amazed and profoundly moved by the timing of this experience, when the world is at war and when all the dreams of democracy are being shattered before our very eyes.

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My recent work has been so dependent on technology and rapid AV market developments that I felt I needed to turn back to art history in order to re-evaluate my outlook on what I do and why I do it in an emerging field. In other words, it was meant to be a kind of therapy for what Matt Klein called an “anxiety-provoking perma-crisis and breakneck innovation” that many of us experience in our day-to-day practice.

The notes I made across a two-month period helped me focus my attention on phenomena that I found relevant or that were relatively unknown to me. They also turned out to be the best remedy to various forms of popular escapism — from pointless wellness rituals to travelling for no reason to places that don’t need me.

I believe that we are entering a time when almost all meaningful art and creation, beyond the art market, will soon become a form of real-life activism.

It's not something I necessarily look forward to, but it feels inevitable given the rising level of emergency we are confronted with daily. How long this peculiar time of constant unrest will last depends on many factors, particularly on how we, as a species, deal with what the next few years throw at us. Of course, this is just an intuition from a concerned citizen with a bit of interest in history.

From where I stand, it seems that in 2023, artists who seek to inspire real change through their practice need to become either activists or hackers, to paraphrase Robert Wiener's 1950 words: Either the engineers must become poets, or the poets must become engineers.

While activism in art is often associated with harsh awareness-building that comes with a certain amount of pain that the audience needs to accept, JR's work uses the opposite mechanism to make his viewers re-examine their worldview and daily judgments. As an artist-activist, JR appears to be driven by an ultimate and unshaken faith in the notion that people are essentially good. Perhaps this is one of the reasons his art has become so wildly popular, to the point where that seems almost dangerous for its creator.

Or maybe it's because, like Barbara Kruger or Banksy, JR has mastered the ability to communicate his message in an unequivocally simple language, using black and white photorealistic prints of massive scale.

What is certain is that his work is not dark. It doesn't punish the audience for not being the subject of the depicted struggle. JR is not Lars von Trier who brings his viewers to the bottom of their worst nightmares and often leaves them there in order to create an emotional impact. His work brings people to tears because it opens an unexpected space for unconditional secular forgiveness and reconciliation. His non-judgmental approach possesses the shamanic power to suspend our everyday norms and mechanisms of reasoning, allowing us to overcome inner bias and fear.

I'd like to stop here and share a short video of a moving, and hilarious TED talk, in which JR explains his practice and describes in detail how in 2019 he worked with prisoners in a maximum security facility in Tehachapi, California.

He offered them a chance to tell their stories, rehabilitate themselves in front of their families, and even inspired them to change some of their beliefs (the moment when a former declared anti-Semite confronts his Jewish doctor is one of the most powerful parts of this successful presentation).

Watch it here.

JR is a French artist, born in Paris eleven days after I was born (there is something bonding in the fact that we are exactly the same age and therefore were shaped by the same historical events).

He is one of the rare artists I know whose decision to hide behind a seemingly simple yet pretty extravagant creative gesture comes from the deepest and most genuine forms of vulnerability, generosity, and hope that almost in every circumstance there's space for negotiation. He also doesn't consider himself an activist, which you can hear in the video.

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My recent work has been so dependent on technology and rapid AV market developments that I felt I needed to turn back to art history in order to re-evaluate my outlook on what I do and why I do it in an emerging field. In other words, it was meant to be a kind of therapy for what Matt Klein called an “anxiety-provoking perma-crisis and breakneck innovation” that many of us experience in our day-to-day practice.

The notes I made across a two-month period helped me focus my attention on phenomena that I found relevant or that were relatively unknown to me. They also turned out to be the best remedy to various forms of popular escapism — from pointless wellness rituals to travelling for no reason to places that don’t need me..

First, I would argue that technology is not just a set of tools or a particular technique determined by a device, whether it's analog or digital. I guess it was Dr. Adam Rutherford who wrote that technology has always been with us since humanity began using simple wooden sticks or bones to extend the reach of their hands. What we consider modern technology today, he says, is a distant yet logical evolution of the decision our ancestors made thousands of years ago to enhance their capabilities.

Yet we shouldn't forget that in the so-called modern era, technology has become a philosophical challenge that many thinkers have tried to address with the shared goal of understanding and anticipating how prolonged usage changes our perception of reality and our interactions with it. There are serious reasons for this which go far beyond postmodern staccato debates we used to have when we were beer-drinking college students. 

The main difference between pre-digital technologies and what we deal with today is that modern day digital tools are not passive toward their users; on the contrary, they play a vital role in a) how we use them, b) how they influence our behavior, and c) how they extract information and data from us at any given moment.

So, what we consider "tools" are actually something quite different. They are active participants in our everyday lives and their impact on us is larger than we realize. 

For this reason, the work of creatives who use technology in a way that blurs the distinction between tools, form, and message is crucial. They often base their work on real data, exposing the process and technique. Heather Dewey Hagborg's work on surveillance and privacy could be easily extended with the use of new knowledge we have about how biometric data extracted through VR headsets can not only unmistakably help identify any user (our body movement and eye movement are like DNA; there are no two samples the same), but also assess the user's general health condition, including potential diseases (Stanford University). Privacy, manipulation, and mental health concerns in extended realities are exponentially larger than in any flat-screen medium we've known so far. A creative answer from artists-hackers is, in my opinion, one of the fundamental areas of the art market of the future.

While I agree that immersive entertainment and spatial or experiential art won't replace more traditional art disciplines, I do believe they will significantly impact how our expectations are shaped and how we perceive the cultural landscape, including collective forms of entertainment, and engaging interactive experiences for different types of audiences.

Venues like PHI Centre in Montreal, ACMI in Melbourne, Barbican Centre in London, or even the private-owned Fotografiska, are looking for a new model of a cultural venue, both in terms of what it means to create a “third space” of the future, but also how to keep a new generation of viewers both attracted to the offering and satisfied with the quality (fortunately, it seems that we’re beyond the time where a video-projected starry night would make anyone seriously excited).

In terms of spatial creation, truly immersive 3D works, whether they require a headset (VR/AR) or are available through LBEs (location-based experience) or personal devices (mobile AR), will become increasingly important.

What I find most interesting is the paradigm shift I've called a transition ‘from mediums to realities’, where instead of switching between different mediums to consume various types of content (art, television, games, etc.), we will move between layers of reality, most likely highly personalized for each user.

These layers will surround each one of us, almost like a cocoon of digital membranes, or — as I prefer to imagine them on a good day — personal digital gardens, offering us access to different realms and realities in different percentages of immersion. This era is still ahead of us, but it's likely closer than many expect.

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My recent work has been so dependent on technology and rapid AV market developments that I felt I needed to turn back to art history in order to re-evaluate my outlook on what I do and why I do it in an emerging field. In other words, it was meant to be a kind of therapy for what Matt Klein called an “anxiety-provoking perma-crisis and breakneck innovation” that many of us experience in our day-to-day practice.

The notes I made across a two-month period helped me focus my attention on phenomena that I found relevant or that were relatively unknown to me. They also turned out to be the best remedy to various forms of popular escapism — from pointless wellness rituals to travelling for no reason to places that don’t need me.

Recently, I spent a couple days at Paris+ Art Basel, during which a number of brilliant shows opened across Paris, including a profoundly personal exhibition by Sophie Calle, taking over the Musee Picasso, and a remarkably intense show at the Pinault Collection titled “Mythologies Americaines” featuring a monographic exhibition of American artist and performer Mike Kelley. What a treat – and what a weight to carry. 

At the recently reopened Bourse de Commerce, which after Punta della Dogana in Venice has become another spectacular home for Francois Pinault’s art collection, the first work that captures our attention as we enter is a larger-than-life 19th century panorama that was preserved and conserved by the new ownership:

a panoramic vision over the immense painting deployed over 360°, 10-meters high and 400m in circumference, beneath the dome.

This painting, completed in 1889, was orchestrated by the architect Henri Blondel who commissioned five painters to paint large murals symbolising the history of trade between the five continents: the four cardinal points by Alexis-Joseph Mazerolle, Russia and the North by Désiré-François Laugée, America by Évariste-Vital Luminais, Asia and Africa by Victor Georges Clarin, and Europe by Hippolyte Lucas.

While the motifs, such as the lion for Africa might seem caricatural today, they justly testify to the ambiguities of another era.' [source]

I want to think that instead of getting angry at the word “ambiguities”, it opens space for reflection.

The panorama reminded me of Kent Monkman’s diptych "mistikôsiwak", which increased my interest in various approaches to colonial art and current post-colonial social and cultural efforts to reestablish a shared understanding of the fact that most of what we know as Western history is founded on oppression, and genocide.

In the light of this uncomfortable truth and the backlash it generates, both amongst people who are openly supportive of white supremacism as well as those who consider themselves progressive, it becomes even more challenging to view the monumental fresco at the Bourse de Commerce without experiencing conflicting emotions.

It is worth noting that beneath the panorama, in the Passage on the ground floor surrounding the rotunda, visitors can contemplate a collection of real-life colonial objects from Edith Dekyndt’s “L’ Origine des Choses”. Various pieces of fabric, hair, stones, and other natural objects from former colonies are showcased in tasteful Art Deco glass cabinets. Dekyndt's artistic repertoire doesn't limit itself to real life artifacts.

Another creation by this prolific Belgian artist is "L'ombre indigene" (Indigenous Shadow), a video that features a flag made of dark human hair floating in the wind. Dekyndt’s work recalls the infinitely dark cry of personal belongings from concentration camp prisoners displayed at the Auschwitz Museum; your entire worldview changes just by looking at them.

Back to the panorama, some visitors may find it absolutely normal to view this bombastic depiction of a triumphant colonial vision of the world that glorifies an unstoppable economic growth, celebrates eternal patriarchy, and salutes Western supremacy.

Others may wonder if this work was conceived as an act of metamodern irony, given its obvious disconnection from the contemporary social landscape. But one can easily imagine how some might find it painful and bitter to look at such a lavish manifestation of an oppressive worldview that — despite being kept at bay in a well-groomed contemporary art sanctuary — still haunts millions of people across the globe, especially those who are not as fortunate as those who can spend Saturday mornings hanging out in posh Parisian galleries. 

The moment when I felt my breath returning to normal was when I noticed one more thing in the space occupied by the panorama. It's almost invisible unless you stop and look patiently in one direction. After some time, you may notice a bunch of pigeons sitting on the balustrade surrounding the hall. A closer look from underneath reveals that these pigeons aren’t real; clearly they're not moving and they're attached to the balustrade. The discovery feels like a confusing joke, especially since real pigeons can be seen flying above your head through the dome’s massive glass ceiling. But then you think there must be a better reason for placing hyperrealistic pigeon sculptures in one of the biggest private galleries in France straight under a 360 degree fresco celebrating globalization, capitalism, and male dominance.

As you move toward the exit, you notice a tiny sign that's barely noticeable in the vast space of the classicist-grain-storage-turned-21st-century-temple-of-high-art.

And at that very moment the miracle of art happens — the title of Maurizio Cattelan's installation says it all, demystifying the original sin of discrimination and contempt, explaining in one word how we got here in the first place, carrying all the weight of colonial past and guilt that should never be forgotten.

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My recent work has been so dependent on technology and rapid AV market developments that I felt I needed to turn back to art history in order to re-evaluate my outlook on what I do and why I do it in an emerging field. In other words, it was meant to be a kind of therapy for what Matt Klein called an “anxiety-provoking perma-crisis and breakneck innovation” that many of us experience in our day-to-day practice.

The notes I made across a two-month period helped me focus my attention on phenomena that I found relevant or that were relatively unknown to me. They also turned out to be the best remedy to various forms of popular escapism — from pointless wellness rituals to travelling for no reason to places that don’t need me.

I’ve been walking around the Grand Palais Ephemere, soaking in the almost ecstatic vibe of the first public day of the show. It was a warm sunny day, early Fall in Paris, both the weekend, and the rain, were approaching slowly, and everyone in town looked and felt glamorous.

Pace was showing a Rothko-inspired curated selection of new works, lavishly dressed purple-haired people were making loud unfavorable comments on poor Mike Kelley, and TikTok influencers (or wannabe influencers) were having their Maison Ruinart moments in front of Urs Fischer and Georg Baselitz. A particular kind of a treat for an introvert who escaped the big city to watch tomatoes and sage grow between endless Zoom and VR sessions.

I felt attracted to this one particular booth because on the external side wall they put a formidable Richard Prince that made me laugh so loud that, although I was already wearing a mask, it grabbed the attention of the gallery owner, who was sitting in the middle of the booth surrounded by people who anxiously tried to please him. I felt the collector's look a couple of times during my visit, probably because I was one of the rare people within a hundred meters perimeter that actually didn’t want anything from him.

Inside the booth, I quickly noticed a smart and sharp curation of top-tier modern classics, a selection made with a lot of taste, wit, and humor. It immediately became my favorite place at the exhibition; it spoke volumes, felt poignant, yet still quite accessible. I waited until a spot on a bench was available and sat down to look at the booth once more.

I was looking at the white plywood half-open cube that became a temporary stage for the wealthy collector and his nervous guests, framed by absolutely exquisite (from left to right) Dubuffet, Basquiat, Guston, Max Ernst, Picasso, and (on the opposite side) - Richard Prince. People were steadily floating through the booth, the owner was still sitting in his armchair listening to the murmuring river of petitioners, and then I suddenly realized what I was looking at. The patriarch was surrounded by works made only by men. The booth, however, was staffed only with women. Women were working while men were looking at them either in person or symbolically, from the height of their established greatness. 

For a moment, it seemed as if they were all trapped in this unfortunate staging. Then suddenly, a young beautiful woman left the booth and sat down beside me, looking at her phone. Moments later, she rushed off after a man signaled to her with a gesture, much like calling a dog who sat down during a walk that has taken longer than expected.

I never thought I would look at art differently because of the frame that surrounded it, but this tableau vivant was so overwhelming, that the feeling of confusion and ennui suddenly bled into the rest of the Grand Palais, flooding it with all its purple-haired Mike Kelley critiques and female TikTokers having their Maison Ruinart moments in front of Urs Fischer or Georg Baselitz, — or any other famous (male) painter for that matter.

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