THE BUSINESS OF ART

ART NEWS, ARTIST PROFILES, INTERVIEWS AND MUCH, MUCH MORE.

EDITED BY ACCA/Helen Caddes

The Museum of Modern Art announced an innovative slate of fall 2023–winter 2024 acquisitions, exhibitions, and artist collaborations that encourage new thinking about human and machine intelligence, creativity, and the potential of art and technology to reshape our physical and digital worlds. Supported by a strong foundation of related research, commissions, publications, and exhibitions involving digital or computer-generated art—including The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968), Information (1970), Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989 (2017), New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century (2019), Philippe Parreno’s Echo (2019), Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design (2022), Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023), recent collection installations of JODI’s My%Desktop (2002) and Eduardo Kac’s Reabracadabra (1985), and more than a decade of MoMA R&D programs and the blockchain projects MoMA Memento and MoMA Postcard —these new initiatives underscore MoMA’s longstanding commitment to support artists who experiment with emerging technologies to expand their visual vocabularies and creative exploration, increase the impact of their work, and help us understand and navigate transformative change in the world.

Acquisitions of works by Refik Anadol and Ian Cheng, the presentation of a large-scale video by Leslie Thornton, and a new online exhibition organized by MoMA and Feral File—with artists including Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Yoko Ono, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and 0xDEAFBEEF—are supported by a strong foundation of related research, commissions, publications, and exhibitions involving digital or computer-generated art.

Sample data visualization, Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA, 2022. Data sculpture: custom software, generative algorithm with artificial intelligence (AI), real time digital animation on LED screen, sound. Dimensions variable. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Refik Anadol Studio

Refik Anadol. Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA. 2022

New acquisition.

This landmark acquisition, a three-part digital artwork by Refik Anadol that uses generative artificial intelligence to interpret and transform more than 200 years of art from MoMA’s collection, is made possible by the generosity of 1OF1, led by Ryan Zurrer, and the RFC Collection, led by Pablo Rodríguez-Fraile and Desiree Casoni. In Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA, Anadol has created a singular and unprecedented meditation on technology, creativity, and modern art, that continuously generates new forms on a large-scale media wall. The work responds to inputs from the environment and is tokenized on the blockchain. Unsupervised was on view in the Museum’s ground-floor Gund Lobby through October 29, 2023.

Ian Cheng. 3FACE. 2022. Digital image (generative, interactive). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Outland Art

Ian Cheng. 3FACE. 2022

New acquisition.

This groundbreaking acquisition, made possible through the generosity of Outland Art, is Ian Cheng’s most ambitious experimental artwork to date to explore blockchain technologies and the decentralization of data. 3FACE is an adaptive artwork grounded in the artist’s interest in the capacity of humans to relate to change. 3FACE analyzes the wallet data of its web3 owner’s online behavior to generate a visual portrait of the forces that compose the owner’s personality. This new acquisition joins Cheng’s trilogy Emissaries in MoMA’s collection, which was acquired in 2016 and debuted in full at MoMA PS1 in 2017, with a subsequent presentation of Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015–16) in the 2019 MoMA exhibition New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century.

Leslie Thornton. HANDMADE. 2023. 8K video (color, silent), originally conceived for two 4K monitors. 11:34 min. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, London / Piraeus. © 2023 Leslie Thornton

Leslie Thornton. HANDMADE. 2023

Presented in an exhibition opened November 4, 2023

Leslie Thornton continues to push the boundaries of film, video, and sound in her innovative body of work, which spans more than five decades. On November 4, MoMA will debut Thornton’s newest work, HANDMADE (2023), which contemplates the relationship between what the artist calls “the space of the world” and “the space of science.” The work is a diptych, juxtaposing layered footage of a storm with images of a handwoven device made by a physicist at the California Institute of Technology for use in a research project on antimatter, as well as film recordings of flow studies that Thornton uncovered while she was the first artist-in-residence at the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture in 2019.

MoMA audiences will be familiar with Thornton’s earlier work in the Museum’s collection: X-TRACTS [Titles] (1975), Jennifer, Where Are You? [Titles] (1981), Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue (1984), and Luna (2013), which was included in New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century at MoMA in 2019. HANDMADE will be presented in the Museum’s ground-floor Gund Lobby on the 24 × 24″ screen designed by and realized with thanks to Refik Anadol Studio.

MoMA and Feral File—with artists including Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Yoko Ono, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and 0xDEAFBEEF

New online exhibition opening early 2024

Building on the success of the 2021 first-of-its-kind collaboration and online exhibition Unsupervised: MoMA Seen through the Mind of a Machine by Refik Anadol, MoMA and digital art platform Feral File will launch a new project in 2024, working with contemporary artists including Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Yoko Ono, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and 0xDEAFBEEF. Each artist will explore sound, art, and technology, presenting digital artworks that will be interactive and freely viewable online. More details will be announced.