Escape the slop
A lively conversation around AI emerged in our Forum this week. Primavera De Filippi asked a simple question: when was the last time you were surprised by AI? In his response, the artist Mario Klingemann noted that any attempt to escape from the slop-filled center of the Gaussian curve invariably leads one back to mediocrity. By the time you’ve beaten the average, you’ve created a new one.
Ed Fornieles’s discussion of how young men fashion themselves online in his conversation with Anika Meier prompts a similar question: what happens to the self, or a style, when it is assembled from parts already in circulation?
Anna Ridler has been addressing such questions for over a decade, building her own datasets by hand while treating labor and process as the subject of her work, not simply the method. Her new Oxford commission, “A Perfect Language of Images”, revisits the 17th-century scholar John Wilkins’s failed attempt to classify the world, and what that failure reveals about AI’s own totalizing logic. Read the full piece in the Magazine.
Maybe that’s this week’s common thread—forms of resistance to normalization…
— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save
The Forum
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The Index
Our Index is a knowledge bank drawn from across the magazine’s editorial coverage. It shows how people, artworks, events, organizations, and ideas connect in our archive of more than 420 articles. Rather than a comprehensive biography or dictionary definition, each page surfaces the salient elements from throughout our ecosystem.
Today, we search for artist “Mario Klingemann”, who joined a thread on AI in this week’s Forum, with our Index shedding light on the artist and creator of Botto. It is a journey from word to image, and to an artist’s voice and intentions—all found in a deep well of five years of Right Click Save Magazine.
The Magazine
An Interview with Anna Ridler | The challenges of classification—and the value of attention—in the age of AI
Anna Ridler with An Infinity of Lists (2026), one of three works that make up “A Perfect Language of Images”, one of the first arts program commissions for the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, Oxford University. The work was created in collaboration with William Poole of the university’s English Faculty. Courtesy of the artist and the Schwarzman Centre. Photography by David Levene
Ed Fornieles, Installation view of Mii Friends, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa gallery
Massimiliano Gioni. Photography by Brigitte Lacombe
Happening
Damjanski was inspired to create the remix app by the year-long closure of the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Courtesy of the artist
Steve Pikelny, MoMI Upgrade Activation, 2026. One of the “Site Interruption” commissions on the Museum of the Moving Image website. Courtesy of the artist and MoMI.
Whisper from United Geekdom, created through collective practice at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar Institute for Creative Research, and presented at “Aghrab Idrāk: Thresholds of Perception”, is a series of video portraits celebrating Qatar’s “geek” communities. Courtesy of VCUArts Qatar
Joan Truckenbrod, Shaped Charge, 2025. The group show “Interweave” also features the work of Bea Bonafini, LoVid, and Adam de Boer. Courtesy of the artist and Gazelli Art House
Fyerool Darma, XO, 2026. Courtesy of the artist. “Islands in the Net” is curated by Kathleen Ditzig, Ryan Ho, and Joshua Comaroff, and also includes work by Heman Chong, Ho Rui An, Wei Wei Hsu, Grace Quek, Bussy Temple, Ryan Ho with Emotional Technologies Lab, and MIT’s Cyborg Psychology research group and the Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) research program at the MIT Media Lab
Installation view of Zayd Menk, “Scar Tissue”, at Ginny on Frederick, London, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Ginny on Frederick
Reading
MiroMiro on Orhan Pamuk’s Memories of Distant Mountains: “So captivating … Pamuk the novelist and Pamuk the visual artist in the same notebook”
