Gil Kuno's Early Internet Exploration Remains an Electric Testament to Online Creativity in Solo Exhibition @ panke.gallery in Berlin

Gil Kuno’s work is an intricate tapestry of sound art, installations, and video art. His current solo exhibition at Panke Gallery exhibits his earliest art creations – those created on the Internet in the 90s. 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of the first of these creations, Unsound. "Unsound.com" (1994) was a pioneering media experiment that fused sight and sound, allowing users to interactively engage with artists' works in both visual and audio formats. Through crowd-sourcing, it facilitated artistic curation by audience votes – an innovation that even captured the admiration of Timothy Leary, who subsequently endorsed the site. In 1996, Gil Kuno introduced Wiggle, the world's first Internet band. This groundbreaking endeavour leveraged the Internet's connectivity to forge musical collaborations across geographical boundaries, culminating in a band composed of members from Japan, Australia, and the United States. They achieved a major label deal and released multiple albums, all while some band members remained faceless due to their geographically dispersed nature.

Unsound: The Shape of Sound is on view through December 20th at panke.gallery, Hof V, Gerichtstraße 23, 13347 Berlin.

EJ Hauser Reclaims the Natural and Technological Aesthetics of Language in 'Song of Summer' @ Haverkampf Leistenschneider in Berlin

 
 

Most of us are so used to reading that we forget that each letter is a shape and each word is a composition. The type we read every day–in emails and books, on packaging and signs–has a significant aesthetic dimension. U.S. artist EJ Hauser has adopted graphic and typographic strategies for their philosophical purposes and works, revealing a new view of what we no longer see in everyday life among all the texts. EJ Hauser’s quasi-abstract, fabric-like paintings are composed of layers of pixels, text fragments, and chimerical figures that refer to networks both in nature and the plant world, as well as to digital systems and interconnections in our human communication world. For them, letters form a sculptural framework, a compositional structure that sometimes dissolves into pure text images, sometimes leads to text in combination with images, or sometimes is buried under successive layers of paint. Some are very explicit, others require a closer look to find the spine and curves of different letters jumbled together to dissolve the boundary between word and image, mixed with chimerical figures and totemic symbols representing the interconnectedness of life on earth. EJ Hauser is interested in the Wood Wide Web, the complex subterranean web on the planet. Plant communication takes place via the mycelium, a network of microscopic fungi beneath the forest floor, through which information is exchanged. This is not unlike the way we are connected today through our cell phones, social media, and the “invisible” Internet.

Song of Summer is on view through October 14th at Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Mommsenstraße 67, 10629 Berlin.

REALITYBYTES Warps The Virtual World @ panke.gallery in Berlin

REALITYBYTES is a web-browser plugin that substitutes images and photographs on cnn.com, thesun.co.uk and pornhub.com with AI-generated counterparts. 

The plugin blurs the boundary between AI-created and human-created images, delivering results that are both uncanny and humorous. At the same time, it provides a stark insight into the racism and biases deeply ingrained within AI, spotlighting AI's growing influence on image perception and representation. 

Next to this, a broadcast entirely authored by an artificial intelligence will be presented. The presentation not only probes the ethics and reliability of AI-generated content but also challenges us to question the integrity of the content we routinely absorb in this era where AI is omnipresent.

Lotte Louise de Jong is a media artist from the Netherlands with a background in film-making. Her work ranges from physical, digital and online installations to more traditional forms of narrative. Her practice addresses how we, as a society, view and shape our identity through mediated spaces like the digital world. The internet as a space for exploring intimacy has been the main focus of her past projects. She obtained a master’s degree in Fine Art and Design at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in 2019. In 2020 she received an emerging artist grant from the Mondriaan Fonds. 

REALITYBYTES is available for download here and will be on view through July 8th at panke.gallery, Hof V, Gerichtstraße 23, 13347 Berlin

Life's A Gasssss: Oliver Clegg Talks About His First Solo Exhibition In the US, Making Art For Sigmund Freud's Desk and The Information Age →

Click here to read the full interview.