Active Ingredient brings together 22 artists working across a variety of media and disciplines to explore art’s tendency towards transformation, be it material, perceptual, or institutional. Taken from the language and practices of modern pharmacology, in which natural substances are decomposed to isolate useful properties that are then labeled and regulated once synthesized and mass-produced, Active Ingredient tests the conditions of artistic performativity, what it is that makes the work work. Insisting that spatial and institutional arrangements are at the heart of artistic meaning, artist and curator Alex Fleming takes his cue from Adrian Piper’s concept of catalysis, the insight ...

Dark Data presents the work of six artists who explore pervasive forms of data collection, mass-surveillance, and hypervisibility visited upon Black life through technologies of predictive policing, data-mining, algorithmic violence, and artificial intelligence. The project situates these emergent data technologies within a broader lineage of anti-Black surveillance and quantification. Dark Data highlights a host of artistic and social tactics exercised by Black practitioners to actively respond to these conditions through experimental archival strategies, inventive modes of technological encryption, and gestures of digital worldmaking. The term “dark data” refers to information assets that are collected and stored by corporations and governments but ...

Hannah Black’s review of The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside curated by Diedrich Diedrichsen and Anselm Franke considers the legacy of the counterculture-cyberculture that largely shaped my childhood in Northern California. Black reminds us that the “Y” in DIY was not directed at everyone: “For Brand and those like him, the blue planet and, later, the exponential development of IT, meant that otherness and its attendant forms of suffering were just failures to get with the holistic, progressive programme.” This notion of us and them, rich and poor, prepped and not prepped, is the core value ...