My research lab’s group exhibition hosted a series of talks including a joint workshop by Yasmine Boudiaf and Mukul Patel. We used a combination of their discursive tools to question aspects of AI: their technical design, practical deployment, and place in the public imagination. I enjoyed the fact that those tools were paper-based … if any critique then that the workshop felt too short!

I could not attend the Topologies of the Real exhibition at ZKM or MoCAUP personally, but it seems to ask interesting questions and looks well curated by Zhang Ga, the late Peter Weibel, Siegfried Zielinski and Daria Mille. Our film installation explores the public imagination fed by the utopian promises of information technologies through the usage of archival film from the 1880ies till the 1930ies. I hope that it will serve the curiosity of visitors and highlight today’s issues around centralized networks, and defy appropriation for soft power purposes. But how can artists today evaluate the effect of their work in international exhibitions?

The conversation with colleagues of the Imagining Futures programme has started at vestibule, CSM London. Great to learn about the archival practice and specific urgency that motivated the projects by Aoife McNiece and Elizabeth Wright, and to receive their feedback for our Artefacts of Resistance project.

Commissioned by Serpentine Galleries, Minima Aesthetica acts as challenging response to D. Gonzales-Foerster’s show as well as homage to Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951), playfully weaving visual contributions into the arguments.

A year ago, the environmental contamination issue in Santa Clara County caught my attention. After Fondacion Telefonica in Madrid, I am delighted to show more works of the From matter to data series at Vienna Art Week.

No complaints about having to get up at 5am – we experienced a sunrise to die for in a multitude of shades of amber – orange on top of the ⴻⵔⴳ ⵛⴱⵉ Erg Chebbi dunes in the Maroccan Sahara, where we filmed musician Abdelillah from the Arfoud Brothers & Sisters.

I remember the day I discovered archive.org amazed by the boldness of its mission; I remember browsing the Prelinger archives in disbelieve how the wealth of ephemeral films was all in a sudden made accessible to the world. It’s such joy to work and live in the heart of the Internet Archive in its HQ at Presidio, S.F., for a couple of weeks, developing a new film script. 

For Artefacts of Resistance I am looking forward to collaborating with Mukul Patel, founder of emergence.is, Dr. Srilata Sircar, lecturer in India and Global Affairs at the King’s India Institute, and her colleagues, Raktim Ray, University College of London, and Dr Ufaque Paiker, Ashoka University, India, on an innovative online archive documenting contemporary protest movements that builds on transnational solidarity networks.

During my artist residency at Stanford University, a conversation about health implications due to pollution caught my attention. Some of the most severely polluted sites, co-called Superfund sites, are located in Santa Clara County, widely known as Silicon Valley. TCE was stored underground, and containers started leaking, polluting the ground water for decades to come. I visited the locations: light industrial buildings, campuses of tech companies, parking lots, sports grounds. The only visible sign of ongoing monitoring of the levels of TCE were these lids on the street. Watch this space – my next project will explore the notion of responsibility & contamination.

As part of my Roberta Denning Visiting Artist residency I was invited to give a public lecture at Oshman Hall – due to COVID-19 only for Stanford folks. Stanford Daily, the student-run newspaper at Stanford University, summed up my artistic practice in this article >