frieze issue 161 out now
Frieze Video – online now
Issue 161 of frieze looks at Big Data: how do state surveillance and quantification culture affect our behaviour and artistic production?
Co-editor Jörg Heiser leads a survey in which seven artists, writers and academics reflect on this question. With contributions from Mercedes Bunz, Jordan Ellenberg, Sarah Hromack, Trevor Paglen, Laura Poitras, Martha Rosler and Shoshana Zuboff.
‘Those of us who are interested in visual literacy will need to spend some time learning and thinking about how machines see images through unhuman eyes, and train ourselves to see like them.’
–Trevor Paglen
Plus, Dan Fox looks at useful mistakes, ikebana and messy cultural assumptions in the work of Camille Henrot; and Pablo Larios reflects on memes, copies and collective agency in the work of Austrian artist Oliver Laric, who created this issue’s specially commissioned cover.
Elsewhere in the issue: John Menick discovers gothic fantasies for the information age in his survey of supercomputers in film; while Mark Fisher offers a glimpse of Chile’s Cybersyn system, the socialist government’s vision for the digital era, curtailed by General Pinochet’s military coup of the early 1970s.
Oscar van den Boogaard goes in search of reclusive legend Stanley Brouwn; Markus Weisbeck considers graphic-design pioneer Muriel Cooper, who anticipated the digital revolution; and Andrew Hultkrans asks whether renowned science-fiction author Philip K. Dick‘s dystopian fictions have come true.
More highlights
Music: Geeta Dayal on eavesdropping, Muzak and the sound of Bitcoin.
Books: Sam Thorne talks to the poet Tan Lin about reading as information control?
Technology: Robin van den Akker looks at social networks and the new urban experience in the confluence between digital and physical worlds.
Reviews: 32 reviews from 27 cities in 17 countries, including Chris Burden at the New Museum, New York; Gego & Eva Hesse at Kunsthalle Hamburg; and Beatriz Milhazes at Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro. Plus reviews from Antwerp, Athens, Beirut, Berlin, Cairo, Cape Town, Delme, Derry-Londonderry, Dusseldorf, Glasgow, Helsinki, Leipzig, Lisbon, Lofoten Islands, London, Melbourne, Mumbai, New York, Nicosia, Oxford, Portland, Singapore and Toronto.
Online now
frieze video: Award-winning filmmaker John Akomfrah discusses the origins of Black Audio Film Collective, his recent Stuart Hall Project and the ‘pariah space’ of the film-essay.
On the frieze Blog: Jonathan P. Watts writes on Derek Jarman and Jordan Wolfson; Amy Sherlock goes in search of sirens in the Bay of Naples; and Agnieszka Gratza writes from Leipzig on the final installment of Joanna Warsza’s ‘Performative Democracy’ series.
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