On the morning of October 15, the art-world elite—all mohair and Manolos—gathered for the annual Serpentine Gallery breakfast, the event that kicks off the activity around Frieze art fair in London. Addressing the throng and leading them in a calming group hum was artist and game designer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, whose show “The Delusion”—which encourages participants to ask and answer the difficult questions facing the world in 2025—is packing them in at the gallery.

Difficult questions of a different kind faced artists and gallerists just a couple of miles across town, as they waited—during a very bearish period for the global contemporary art market—with eyes peeled for the big buyers to walk into the Frieze tent in Regent’s Park. Meanwhile, the Web3 art world was preparing for a clan gathering of a very different sort: the annual Art Blocks Marfa Weekend in Texas.

With Art Basel Paris on the horizon next week (another test of the art world temperature), Fakewhale Log rightly identified a challenge to Big Art that “the system has lost the story that once gave value its meaning.” It has been Right Click Save’s singular purpose over the past four years to fill that vacuum with the voices of the community of digital outsiders that has historically been ignored. As a platform that seeks to bring cutting-edge research straight to the public, it was heartening to be recognized by Juan Pedro Vallejo, who kindly posted that he frequently shares our articles with his art students at UNLP (Universidad Nacional de La Plata), Argentina. It was also exciting to see our conversation with Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, and Tyler Hobbs published as part of a new scholarly tome. Building on this mission, we are proud to be able to host a profound interaction in today’s newsletter between two of the leading sense-makers in media scholarship: Ramon Amaro and Hito Steyerl.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at RCS

The sociologist and theorist of digital culture Ramon Amaro shares a meditation on the artist and writer Hito Steyerl’s latest book. Steyerl’s new publication addresses the limits of art and technol­ogy and the distribution of images in the age of AI and climate change.

Tik tok. Obsolescence.

The image appears before it is taken, and the frame re-emerges as a reminder of what has passed and what is yet to arrive.

For we are all shadows before we depart, and therefore our whispers, like our discourse and our violence, precede any conscious understanding of a point of departure or our next port of arrival, an arrival at the precipices of that which we’ve seen before and will feel again. That which—in terms of data—has been and will serve as the medium or means of communication for violence.

How the artist emerges is as expected, singed by the exhaust of a heat that never expels and a time that never passes. An image that refuses to see its own shadow, and the possible impossible decision to end the rehearsal of the artist as a habitual medium in a turbulent state of brutality.

To see the end of this shadow of data is to embrace the obsolescence of the self and that which pulls us toward the valuation of life. But perhaps this tension is precisely what cools one towards a new mode of creative life that, in and of itself, renders our recurrent image of the world, and the image of ourselves, out of date.

— Ramon Amaro is Creative Director of Design Academy Eindhoven and author of The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being (2023).

With thanks to Annie Bicknell.

The second edition of BINÁLÉ, the expanded media biennial in Budapest (until October 26)—which describes itself as a “decentralized art initiative set within Eastern Europe’s culturally rich yet politically fraught context”—is curated by Viola Lukács and Júlia Neudold, on the theme of “We Art Not Alone.” The roster for the month-long event includes artists such as Sarah Friend, Carsten Nicolai, Nam June Paik, and Trevor Paglen, and featured Mitchell F. Chan and Charlotte Kent in conversation on “Games: Systems Art in a Quantified World.”

The artist William Latham, the mathematician Stephen Todd, Dylan Banarse of Google DeepMind and Goldsmiths, University of London, have joined forces in a research collaboration for “Evolution and Foundation”, a show of anatomically striking outputs created by ”Foundational Evolution”, a cutting-edge process in which the AI model Gemini works with evolutionary drawings created by Latham and Todd over three decades to create art. In the process, the artist, Goldsmiths says in a statement, hands over “aesthetic and content decisions to an AI, replacing the human artist/selector with the machine in a human-directed co-creative process.” Expect to see the visual influence of the Surrealists, William Morris, and Giuseppe Arcimboldo. (Oxo Gallery, London, until October 26, 2025.)

Ecological interconnectedness between humans, organic matter, and technologies is at the heart of the immersive digital worlds created by London-based South Korean artist and filmmaker Eunjo Lee. The artist is showing a trilogy of game-engine-powered films: The Lullaby of the Ruins, When Forgiving the Sunlight and Before the Shadow Taught the Sun at Frieze London. (At Niru Ratnam, stand F29, Frieze Focus, London, until October 19.)

“The Turn”, curated by Shakthi Shrima, brings together ritual-inflected painting, votive taxidermy, body-based performance, generative poetics, and carnivalesque mythmaking. Featured artists include Janine Antoni, Anne Brigman, Rameshwar Broota, Monster Chetwynd, Leonardo Devito, Cordula Ditz, Leif Holmstrand, Henry Krokatsis, Marcel Mariën, Polly Morgan, John Robinson, Benjamin Spiers, Juan Sorrentino, Cajsa von Zeipel, Christian Rex van Minnen, aurèce vettier, Unskilled Worker, and Laura Xinyue Zhou. (1 Poultry, City of London, until November 1.)

In a packed Paris Art Week, centred on the Art Basel Paris fair, practitioners working at the junction of art and technology are to the fore. Works by contemporary artists Gretchen Andrew, Hermine Bourdin, Saeko Ehara, and Jake Elwes will be on view at FEMGEN Paris at Artverse on October 21 and on sale at Fellowship. Curated by Micol Apruzzese and Right Click Save’s own Editor-in-Chief Alex Estorick, the show juxtaposes the new generation with four pioneers—Nancy Burson, Analivia Cordeiro, Copper Giloth, and Vera Molnar—in the collection of Le Random, who are sponsoring the event.

The Los Angeles-based artist ThankYouX is also on view at Fellowship: “[The show]‘Harmony >< Tension’ is basically me asking: if everything ends up digital anyway, why act like they’re separate worlds?” (Inquire here to attend the physical-digital exhibition in Paris, October 21-25.). Meanwhile, the collaborative duo LoVid will be showing 486 Shorts—a 2006 video work created shorting the circuitry of an i486 PC graphics card—at the fourth edition of OFFSCREEN at La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière (October 21-26).

The Paris-based artist William Mapan has a full week. For the Art Basel Paris 2025 poster series, Mapan has created Superpositions—250 works that live on-chain and on paper. “Superpositions is a body of work that seeks imaginary landscapes through shape overlaps, computation and repetition using natural pigment colors,” Mapan says in a launch statement. His work is also featured in the group show “Code+Matter” (with Florian Zumbrunn, Julien Espagnon, and Alexis André at 17 rue Chapon, October 21-26). To read more on both Mapan and ThankYouX’s latest work, see Natalie Stone’s contribution immediately below.

I’ve been revisiting Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Way of Tarot (2004) and the practice of tarot more generally. Jodorowsky treats the tarot deck as a system for making meaning versus mysticism—a process for finding the cards that speak. Classification and typology hold our world together as we try to comprehend the floodgates of life. Artist or not, each of us is a curator (ie a meaning-maker) in our own right, sorting through seas of symbols to find what makes sense.

Generative artists use the same process: running iterations until certain forms stand out from the noise. One of my favorite practitioners and collaborators, William Mapan works this way: pattern emerges through repetition, thousands of potential outcomes distilled into the handful worth keeping. Suddenly, infinite possibility finds coherence. What wants to be seen here? What’s trying to form? You can see William’s answer for yourself at his Paris group exhibition “Code+Matter”.

In Paris this summer, I saw David Hockney's iPad drawings printed large, versus presented digitally. They felt still, flat. Every mark was there, but the potency had dimmed. Conversely, I felt the opposite at the exhibition “Infinite Images” at the Toledo Museum of Art. The prints of generative masters (presented in gridded dialogue with each other) were a wonderful translation, not a loss; so why did one context work but not the other? I’ve been thinking about this paradox: what does it mean to show digital-native art in new ways?

Ultimately, the white-walled gallery (along with its signifiers and what it signified) is a modern construction, built to meet the art of its time. And for the art of our time? Take my client ThankYouX. The hybrid works and digital diptychs from his latest body of work exist in a liminal mediation between both spaces, both economies. They’re inseparable, and yet exhibition design on some level requires precisely that: separation.

—Natalie Stone is a strategist and executive producer who recently launched the consultancy StoneWork. With a focus on legacy, Stone helps artists and cultural organizations create greater meaning. Fore more than 15 years, she has steered CryptoPunks into Centre Pompidou and LACMA, created immersive experiences with Childish Gambino and LCD Soundsystem, and led a performing arts initiative to raise $10 billion in federal funding for independent venues.