One key to the show’s success is that it eschews flashy technologies that make grandiose promises, instead addressing the mundane technologies all around us—which some of us have the privilege of not noticing at all. 

I learned from Being (2019)—an artificial intelligence that Rashaad Newsome has trained with texts from theorists and cultural critics including bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault—that slaves and robots have one foundational thing in common: “They are both intended to obey orders.” 

Images from the series were first shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2014, the year “post-photography” came into its own as an aesthetic category. Seeing the “Voynich Botanical Studies” six years later, in the age of deepfakes and ever-improving computer vision, brings a new, dark dimension to these manipulated pictures. 

The use of still photographs mounted in a format associated with moving images emphasizes the uncanny quietness of these spaces… Details like a naked fluorescent light bulb dangling in an elegant arched window are reminders of the deeply haphazard and unpredictable ways in which people actually live, in comparison to the ideals of architects.

Nicki Green’s tender sculptures intervene in her industrial source material, queering the assisted readymade…. Duchamp, eat your heart out.

Dionne Lee’ss images respond to the genre of landscape by pointing to its roots in property ownership, colonialism, and myths of the “natural.” She aims to uncover the fraught relationship of black subjects to the American terrain, and to reconstitute it. For example, in Test for Forty Acres, 2016, she covered a swath of land in mylar blankets, a protective gesture that also resembled an act of burial or a signal to the heavens. In this show of new work, Lee shifts her focus from land to water…

This gesture by SFMOMA points to larger issues about exhibiting performance retrospectives that otherwise run largely under the surface of “We Are Here”: What it means to experience the exhibition as a set of performances versus installations; and whether the institution is responsible for animating or recreating this kind of work in order to fully convey it to an audience who may otherwise see these performances as mere documentation of things that happened years ago, perhaps far away.

Cooper Hewitt’s team understands that accessibility work is a fundamentally creative process, rather than an issue of mere compliance—the latter being the attitude of many major American art and design museums

… the more speculative monitor-based work utilizes infinite loops, where digital compositions unfold algorithmically so that configurations never repeat. Mesmerizing and deeply strange, these works ponder what it means to always be looking at an image for the first time. 

The theme of iconoclasm—the destruction of images—is thus woven into Mirza’s installation, which teases out from the perennial contentiousness of representing religious figures a more formal question, asking how the relationship between a subject and abstracted information extracted from it and converted into another form can be understood

As the US government tries to delimit trans livelihoods, these photographers are defining transgender and non-binary identities for themselves, assuring their bodies are never erased.

Imagining future dystopias is easy. So is applying the Anthropocene as an all-encompassing, monolithic framework for describing various complex environments in the present. Instead, this group exhibition takes on the more demanding challenge of exploring contingencies of the potentially haphazard, entangled, and unevenly applied futures that we are generating.

… dominant cultural narratives, the kind reified in old-school exhibitions of historical Western European art, can be subverted as much by the presence of people who would have been absent when these works were first hung in salons — visitors who require different designs to enter gallery spaces and inspire different interactions with the art’s gatekeepers — as by the most critical art historians and activists.

As clever and self-aware as Julien has ever been, Playtime  presents a study of what we now call “late capitalism” as highly produced content displayed on massive screens in an immersive installation format. Julien has been making multiscreen works since the 1990s; this recent project suggests an evolution toward work that is both more cynical and more market-friendly than his past achievements in gallery and experimental cinema contexts.

…if Lum’s newer work is more grim and difficult, it is of a piece with, and a logical conclusion to, his previously mischievous, sweet way of investigating our imagined relationships to our real conditions of existence.

A history of the World Meteorological Organization’s International Cloud Atlas, an amateur’s invention of cloud nomenclature, and the scientific rigor of John Constable’s cloudscapes

...contra the YBCA’s relationship to the Escuela, many institutions are still trying to have their cake and eat it too by keeping the larger frame of the institution, designed to showcase so-called autonomous art, unchanged while trying to find creative ways to incorporate practices like Arte Útil into conceptual and physical architectures that were not designed to host them.... What would Museum 3.0—one designed to embrace user-generated, user-oriented practices—look like?

The more playful narratives include science-fictional speculations and downright seductive declamations of resistance and comradeship; the artists are obviously fascinated by the effect of turning raciness into concrete poetry, with letters that change size and flit around the screen like frenetic, at times lascivious cartoon characters.

"After doing a bit more research, the similarities between the vanitas paintings and the source images I was recreating became really obvious to me. The vanitas painting style coincided with the height of Dutch Colonial Empire a period of accumulated capital largely based on slave labor. The paintings were popular with the mercantile class and are some of the first examples of images circulating outside of the church and noble classes, so in many ways they were examples of the first “social images.”