Stream The Week In Art, Design, And Technology
From the short shrift to the long reads, here's your weekly scoop.
Courtesy GIPHY Creative Commons.
The Rundown:
1. The art world's problematic bae, Ai Weiwei, has an immersive art installation on the perpetual and normalized state of paranoia induced by contemporary surveillance culture. Created in collaboration with Swedish architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and housed at the Park Avenue Armory, the foreboding installation is an immersion in today’s various surveillance technologies: drones, infrared cameras, etc. with a healthy dose of claustrophobia. Artsy’s Scott Indrisek has some sharp words: “What’s meant to be a cautionary tale ends up merely as a game, one that will appeal both to kids and those posting surveillance-selfies on Instagram.” But maybe that’s the point? Perhaps the audience’s apathetic (or, dare we say enthusiastic?) response to the surveillance state is telling us something. [Artsy]
2. Just in case you lost track of it all amid the soundbite Tweets and the passionate opinion pieces, here's The Verge’s nineteen-minute supercut of all things Apple WWDC 2017. . [The Verge]
3. Amazon is expanding its consumer base (again), and this time they're offering low-cost Amazon Prime subscriptions to customers on government assistance. [The Verge]
4. Here's some good news about technology’s interactions with culture: Millennials are using technology to protect their Native American heritage from the erasure of forced assimilation. A new app by Vancouver-based Lydia Prince aims to re-teach indigenous languages to those who are forgetting them. [Broadly]
5. Harvard University rescinded its admissions offer to ten incoming students over racist memes they posted to a Facebook group. As if memes weren’t political enough, this incident only highlights the blurring lines between comedy, parody, and violence. Exploring the politics of meme culture is really important in peeling back the many layers of irony and real bias/hate in internet expression. [Motherboard]
6. The attention economy is alive, thriving, and...monetized? There’s now a vending machine to buy likes and follows for your Instagram account. (If it makes you feel any better, it’s all the way out in Russia). [Complex]
Weekend Long-Reads:
7. "Art thus becomes a part of so-called terror management, a means to channel death drives." Here's an essay on political art, time, and the universe: "Cosmic Catwalk and the Production of Time." [e-flux]
8. “[The] willingness to work with new technology, paired with a critical distance from its industry, would serve today’s artists well.” This one is on the synergies of art and technology in the internet age: "An Asymmetric Equation." [Frieze Magazine]
Author: Annie Felix
Editor: Rain Embuscado