«The wager of the algorithm» just published in ARTEACTA journal, issue 13.

 
 

Driven by a twist of humor, a political annoyance, and a flight of fancy, I present this hybrid essay and artwork. Two ideas of artificial intelligence prevail today: one utopian, the other paranoid. My exposition endeavors to find a third path (artistic+political) beyond these two views by tampering with internal structural contradictions in the very logic of artificial intelligence itself.

My calculated misstep of academic prose «The Wager of the Algorithm: Towards a Performatic Gesture» was just published in the SAR performance studies journal ARTEACTA (Czech Republic), this issue #13 on AI (and) Art: The Poetics of Prompting. Allusions to computation theory, art history, philosophy, and work I’ve done with AI and code give context for the central argument. Some experimentation with the conventions and limits of academic prose should be expected.

(View on computer only for proper formatting; click link below, then Open Exposition.)

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portals/issue?issue=3799208



ABSTRACT:
The fantasy of the algorithm and, by extension, artificial intelligence imagines that each performs by executing an operational task. Yet, based on its inherent computational structure, the digital performance fails to live up to its instrumental promise. This failure foregrounds an occasion for artistic intervention. “The Wager of the Algorithm: Towards a Performatic Gesture” presents a theoretical statement (illustrated via artwork by the author) in which the overall exposition underscores a dialectic within instrumental reason itself. The “prompt” names a shorthand for the fulcrum of this problematic.

 

New Exhibition at Mudas Contemporary Art Museum (Portugal)

After four years of developments and preparations, our exhibition «Round 1.1: A Hairy Decalogue» opened the evening of May 30 at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art in Madeira, Portugal. The show, a collaboration between the Barcelona-based art collective Adversorecto (Peter Freund and Werner Thöni) and Portuguese artist and professor Vítor Magalhães, runs May 30 - Oct 11, 2025. The opening intervention, «The Right Hand Doesn’t Know What the Left Hand Is Doing», a live performance art presentation featuring the trio, was launched during the May 30 opening.

WALL TEXT:
The Question of the Curator, or Three Torsions of Retraction 

Prohibition. It will have come down to an absence. The classical exhibition of visual art begins and ends with a prohibition: Do not touch. Touch, of course, between the work on display and the observer whose reflections will have been sparked by this withdrawal from physical and intellectual possession. The same prohibition will have applied, like the flip side of a coin, to the requisite space individuating the works themselves.

Inhibition. This pervasive inhibition will have created openings and formed a placeholder for the missing element that makes possible the artistic presentation: the organizing concept, the combinatorial of objects, the pouring rain outside, the shrinking gallery space, the delay of the lost spectator, the guard's outgrown shoe, the empty elevator, the intermittent flashing of the exit sign, the janitor's bucket behind the closing of the closet door, the death of the old mason…. In the end, as in the beginning, the placeholder will have signaled the undefined prime mover: the absent curator. And yet this absence remains, at bottom, a lacuna.

Exhibition. It will have been no accident that the three words – prohibition, inhibition, and exhibition – have related histories. The invited curator ex post facto will have lofted the unexpected concept of the decalogue over a previously proposed exhibit of ten pieces like a nautical fishing net. The curator's surprise net will have in turn made prohibition into the inspiration for merging the individuated pieces into new works. The original exhibit proposal presented a «bout» between Karl and Ady: Marx and his furry companion. A beard and a dog. A forest paradise. A fashion show. A twitching neck and shoulders below an unseen beard. In the curatorial net, the dog will have turned herself inside out in order to reappear as a beard made of billiard sticks. The gallery rooms become a pool table for a match at the precise moment of initial contact. Crackk!


Quick tour of «Round 1.1: A Hairy Decalogue», an Adversorecto + Magalhães exhibition 2025 (Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art, Madeira, Portugal).

What do you mean by what I say? :: encontro em torno do livro «M [objecto]» ::

As the opening of our exhibit at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art (Madeira, Portugal) approaches, a publication from my collaboration last year with artist and professor Vitor Magalhães recently came out. The publication creatively documents an intervention that was presented at the University of Madeira in conjunction with Vitor’s Mudas 2023-24 exhibition, to which I’d contributed a fictional text for an artist book and an audio installation. For the intervention, I made a video installation. A few sample pages from the publication are below.

« ZERO (0): A LOVE STORY » : WORK IN PROGRESS


Zero (0): A Love Story is a novella written entirely with numbers. The more than 200-page hand-stenciled book recounts a tale of two characters and the serial rendezvous of their enumerative affair. 

The first character embodies a succession of numbers belonging to the phi (aka Fibonacci) sequence, the traditional gold standard of aesthetic proportion. Over the course of the tale, the ordinal trajectory of this figure’s fall in love starts from a 21-digit number and proceeds in reverse, moving progressively backwards across 100 integers until eventually arriving at and continuing to descend beyond zero (0). 

The second character takes the form of corrected errors appearing in the positive expression of the first character’s integers. These visible erasures and amendments move forward in the opposite direction within the phi sequence. The book thereby begins with zero errors, then moves to one error, then one again, then two errors, then three, then five, then eight and so forth until the redressed mistakes reach the limit of digits in the numbers the first character happens to express at a given instant in the series. At this threshold, the second character reverses its restorative course back toward zero and then from zero proceeds again upward through the Fibonacci sequence. The second figure repeats this to-and-fro pattern oscillating like a breath or tide that continuously permeates the ongoing retrocession of the first figure. 

The narrative arc provides on each page a singular encounter between the two characters who advance hand in hand as if ships at every moment inseparably passing in the night. 

Zero (0): A Love Story will take the form of a physical book as well as a series of projected still images.


[ 354224848179261915075 > 0+ ]

« Address Unknown » : Work in Progress

Lead (Pb) envelope (41cm x 27cm) to be used for «Address Unknown»

«Address Unknown» (2024)

Herein lies an endeavor to transform into a sublime object a vexing compensatory gift sent from a close family relative – a personal portrait made from compiled childhood photographs. The concept of this work-in-progress, titled «Address Unknown», is realized according to the following process.

A photo-collage poster print (51cm x 41cm), the original portrait gift, is carefully cut up along the edges of its assembled individual photographs. The now-separated images are each numbered on the back based on their position in the original collage layout. The exact pattern of cutting and numbering is duplicated on a thick blank translucent acrylic sheet. The cut and numbered pieces of translucent paper are subsequently re-taped into the initial overall collage configuration so as to preserve the original gift’s compositional form, now devoid of its content.

In the next steps, the set of (19) cut photographs are enveloped, stored, and sealed inside three layers of materials. First, the photographs are placed into a 37cm x 24cm envelope made from tin foil (aluminum paper) in order to mirror the images back on themselves (not to mention, protect them against alien observation). Second, the tin foil layer containing the images is inserted and sealed inside a 41cm x 27cm envelope made from 2mm lead (Pb) paper. (Even the x-ray vision of Superman will be unable to penetrate the surface.)

Finally, the cut photographs – duly and respectfully protected by the two layers of enveloping materials – are placed inside a hardwood box constructed to match the size of the original uncut collage (51cm x 41cm). In the end, the box is to be permanently sealed with a hardwood backing. A translucent edge will be applied to the re-taped acrylic duplicate so as to make the dimensions of the numbered acrylic sheet and those of the original portrait gift correspond as precisely as possible. The box and sheet ensemble will ultimately be wall-mounted side-by-side as a single piece.

Here at rest, the gift – including its fraught, ambivalent gesture – will be transfigured.

Materials + Process
Showing the materials and process to-date

Numbered cut photos

Photos into tin foil envelope

Tin foil envelope containing cut photos (37cm x 24cm)

Tin foil envelope put into lead envelope

Sealed lead envelope (41cm x 27cm)

Empty box, without wood backing (51cm x 41cm)

Lead envelope in open box

Left: Box (51cm x 41cm). Right: Translucent composition (edges to be finished, 51cm x 41cm). (Total dim: 51cm x 100cm.)

 

New librito (booklet) from Adversorecto: « teenytension: a fairy tale »

 

Sample page from «Teenytension: A Fairy Tale» (2024)

 

The Adversorecto collective has produced another librito (booklet), «Teenytension», a pamphlet that experiments with image-text relations via an original fairy tale, images, and page layout. Available in pdf and print versions, the librito extends the concept of artistic retraction into a pre-retractive state: tension, suspension, stretching, longing. Why is Elastic Man so darned alluring?

From the librito series, two other examples by Adversorecto:
• L’Auca d’en Felix
• Crescendo Cantabile: Retracted Descriptions + Score (Partitura)


 

12th Annual International Film Festival of Archive, Memory, Ethnography

The newly renovated Batalha Centro de Cinema in the city centre of Porto, Portugal.

 

I was invited as a guest filmmaker to participate in the 12th Annual International Film Festival of Archive, Memory, Ethnography (17-21 October, Porto, Portugal). The festival presented a program of four of my experimental film shorts in addition to a master class on the work. The screenings and master class took place in the newly renovated Batalha Centro de Cinema in the city centre. [Festival website and program pdf.] I also took part in a panel of authors who contributed to a new book, entitled Aesthetic Authenticity in Cinema, a volume of essays dedicated to a nearly tabooed subject today within the field of film scholarship.

Panel/round table discussion of new book release (five of ten authors)

From the master class: endeavoring to talk about the superimposition of two vanishing points

Impromptu polaroid portrait

Print program page

GLIMPSES OF FESTIVAL IN GENERAL:

A video installation

Among the festival workshops

One performance work in the festival

Festival poster on exterior of Batalha Centro de Cinema

Refreshments between screenings and performances

Né Barros and Filipe Martins, Festival Directors

Featured filmmaker, Naomi Kawase, and her curator, Lucio Barisone, flanked by Né Barros and Filipe Martins, Festival Directors

Chapter contribution to new book on authenticity in cinema

 
 

Later this month, I will publish a chapter in this new volume, Aesthetic Authenticity in Cinema, edited by Filipe Martins.

Contributors include:
DAVID LAROCCA
FILIPE MARTINS
SUSANA NASCIMENTO DUARTE
PETER FREUND
PAULA RABINOWITZ
SÉRGIO DIAS BRANCO
MARIA AUGUSTA BABO
FERNANDO JOSÉ PEREIRA
HUMBERTO MARTINS
CHRISTA BLUMLINGER

The book release with coincide with the Archive, Memory, Ethnography International Film Festival in Porto, Portugal, October 17-21. This year’s festival will screen a program of some of my moving image work, Guest Artist: Peter Freund, Friday, 20 October from 16h-17h30 at the Batalha Centro de Cinema.

 

Contributions to two new books

I contributed to two recently published books by artists associated with the Faculty of Fine Arts (and the Imarte artistic research group) at the University of Barcelona. The first book, Art and Social Spaces in Controlled, Uncontrolled and Isolated Times (2022), presents and expands the proceedings from the 2021 ADD+ART Congress discussing contemporary artistic practices in the current moment of the digital age and the COVID pandemic. The second, IN>TRA 2: Reading as an artistic practice: new models of creative decodification (2023), presents the next in a series of books on experimental artistic practices with an emphasis on an expanded concept of reading.

Art and Social Spaces in Controlled, Uncontrolled and Isolated Times (2022).

IN>TRA 2: Reading as an artistic practice: new models of creative decodification (2023)

Dialogue and Libretto: «Retracted Descriptions» by Eloi Puig + Peter Freund.

Performative score imagery, «Crescendo Cantabile», by Werner Thöni. Libretto by Eloi Puig + Peter Freund. Introduction by Peter Freund.

See the November 15, 2022 blog entry on «Crescendo Cantabile: Retracted Descriptions» for a link to the full score and notated libretto (an excerpt from «Retracted Descriptions»).

Artist Book - Lost Grids, or how to explain digital media to a dead socialist

This artist book springs from a project (begun in 2018) in which variegated grids were produced by a calculated misuse of digital code. The book presents one manifestation of the project, an enclosure that contains five distinct booklets comprising the materials and results of this artistic misadventure. A sixth booklet includes the five loose grid prints in A3. The titles of the grids: <Marx’s Beard>, <Arrival of the Train>, <The House Is Black>, <Novella del Grasso>, <Portolan Orifice>. More information about the project (its process, concept, and manifestations) is available under «Lost Grids» of the «Work» section of this website.

Intervention Talk: What do you mean by what I said?

Announcement for intervention as a page from M [objecto] (Vitor Magalhães)

An intervention took place on 17 March at the University of Madeira responding to Vitor Magalhães' current exhibit «index of matters [on objects and other phantasmagorias]» now presented at the gallery of the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art in Madeira, Portugal. Participants included Márcia de Sousa, Vitor Magalhães, Ana Gandum, Peter Freund, André Ramos, Tiago Pinto, and Carlos Valente. I was invited to produce and contribute three short video works in relation to the exhibit elements and themes. The videos were introduced to punctuate the in-person intervention talks by Márcia de Sousa (Mudas Museum Director), Vitor Magalhães (artist, professor), Ana Gandum (artist, professor), and Carlos Valente (artist, professor). My contributions to the gallery exhibit include a piece of experimental fiction published in an artist book designed by Magalhães, an audio installation reciting the narrative, and a public dialogue with Vitor at the exhibit’s opening in early December 2022. (See December 20 blog entry.)

Invited video contribution for Vitor Magalhães’ March 17 intervention at the University of Madeira.

 

Research Residency at MACBA CED

 

MACBA CED Entrada

 

MACBA CED Biblioteca

 

This week I begin my current research residency with the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art Centre for Study and Documentation (MACBA CED). The residency will support my continued development of the idea of artistic «retraction» and the anachronistic writing of a tract or manifesto, entitled «Re/tract». I had a terrific experience 4+ years ago with the MACBA CED. What great support staff and resources!

EN

Peter Freund is usually working on something else. He writes to avoid making art and makes art to avoid writing. He is a sometimes curator so as to avoid his own work, but usually that inspires him to write or make art. Since 2019, through individual and collaborative projects, Peter has been developing the concept of artistic «retraction» (in contrast of «expanded» practices), which mixes the algorithmic impulse of oulipo and the reductive procedures of conceptual art. «Retraction» has provided a collaborative model of non-consensus and mutual constraint that led Freund to co-found the Barcelona-based art collective Adversorecto. Mobilizing the concept of retraction, he has worked with the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design at the University of Barcelona; Xcèntric CCCB; Found Footage Magazine; A-Desk; the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften; the Archive, Memory and Ethnography International Film Festival (Porto) and the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art (Madeira). With his current residency at MACBA CED, Peter is doing research to support his writing of an art-theoretical tract, «Re/tract». 

MACBA CED Archivo

ES

Peter Freund suele estar trabajando en otras cosas. Escribe para evitar hacer arte y hace arte para evitar escribir. A veces es comisario para evitar su propio trabajo, pero generalmente eso lo inspira a escribir o hacer arte. Desde 2019, a través de proyectos individuales y colaborativos, Peter ha estado desarrollando el concepto de «retracción» artística (en contraste con las prácticas «expandidas»), que mezcla el impulso algorítmico del oulipo y los procedimientos reductivos del arte conceptual. «Retraction» ha proporcionado un modelo colaborativo de no-consenso y restricción mutua que llevó a Freund a cofundar el colectivo de arte con sede en Barcelona Adversorecto. Movilizando el concepto de retracción, ha trabajado con la Facultad de Artes Visuales y Diseño de la Universidad de Barcelona; Xcèntric CCCB; Found Footage Magazine; A-Desk, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften; el Festival Internacional de Cine Archivo, Memoria y Etnografía (Oporto) y el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Mudas (Madeira). Con su residencia actual en el MACBA CED, Peter está investigando para para apoyar su escritura de un tratado teórico-artístico, «Re/tract».











 

Index of matters [on objects and other phantasmagoria]: Vitor Magalhaes Exhibit at Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art

Main room of gallery space, Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art (Madeira, Portugal)

 

Portuguese artist Vitor Magalhães invited me to collaborate for his solo show «index of matters [on objects and other phantasmagoria]» at the gallery of the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art in Madeira, Portugal. The exhibit opened the first week of December 2022 and runs through March 2023. The collaboration was an inspiring experience with many unexpected turns. Ultimately, I contributed a piece of fiction I wrote for an artist book designed by Vitor and presented as one of the works in the show. The experimental narrative, entitled «A Door that Doesn’t Close Properly», was developed over the course of several months in relation to elements in the exhibit and general conversations about concepts with Magalhães. A voice recording of the story was installed in one of the gallery rooms so that the sound would spill throughout the exhibit. The museum flew me and my family out for the opening, where Vitor and I enjoyed a public dialogue as part of the reception events. Despite last-minute date changes and a torrential rain storm, the exhibit opening had a nice turn-out, and the discussion during the public dialogue included some terrific exchanges. See video here:

«index of matters [on objects and other phantasmagoria]» (42:30)
(Vitor Magalhães and Peter Freund)

A separate collaborative show between the Barcelona-based Adversorecto collective and Vitor Magalhaes, «Adversorecto: Round One», is scheduled to open in late 2023 at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art gallery.

 

Crescendo Cantabile: Retracted Descriptions and Partitura (Score)

 

Partitura/Score image for Crescendo Cantabile: Retracted Descriptions
Image/assemblage by Werner Thöni (of Adversorecto)

 

An oulipo-inspired collaboration between artist/professor Eloi Puig and the Adversorecto collective began as a mutually-retractive dialogue between Puig and Peter Freund (of Adversorecto) focused on interrogating three aspects of textuality: descripción/description, página/page, and texto/text. The dialogue was carried out across Spanish and English to bring out ambiguities available between the two languages. When the dialogue was completed in written form, Werner Thöni (of Adversorecto) developed for selected fragments from the text a visual partitura/score. This visual image highlights those words that will be subjected to performative intervention. The next stage in the project will be for the three collaborators to decide on the concrete recitation to be applied at the highlighted points in the partitura/score. Finally, the performance of the work will be presented in a public venue, and the full retracted desciptions text will be published in the next book of the IN>TRA series of the Imarte artistic research group from the University of Barcelona Faculty of Fine Arts.

A more detailed description of the project is presented in the following pdf, which also includes the partitura/score and dialogue fragments. Crescendo Cantabile: Retracted Descriptions.

 

Family Film Project: International Film Festival on Archive, Memory, Ethnography (Porto, October 22 special session)

A bad rain storm notwithstanding, we had a quite decent turn-out for the masterclass followed by screening of the Retracted Cinema session at the 11th annual Family Film Project: International Film Festival on Archive, Memory, Ethnography. There was a lively and wide-ranging audience discussion after the screening. [Download/View: FFP 2022 Program pdf]

 
Embed Block
Add an embed URL or code. Learn more
 
 
 

Retracted Cinema in Oporto: CINEMA TRINDADE (22 October 2022)

 
 

Retracted Cinema (Redux)
October 22, 2022; 3:20
Cinema Trindade; Porto, Portugal

This one-hour program presents fifteen experimental shorts that focus on recontextualizing found or archival footage via algorithmic intervention. The works presented in the Retracted Cinema program use the appropriated film material itself as the site and means of auto-recontextualisation. Inspired by tendencies within conceptual art and Oulipo, the results are achieved by applying a set of rules or constraints (an algorithm) that governs a repeatable (iterative) array of transformations. In this way, the program forges a bridge linking the algorithmic impulses within the traditions of avant-garde cinema, literature, and visual art.

Filmmakers include: Gregg Biermann (Happy Again, 2006), Blanca Rego (Psycho 60/98, 2016), Albert Alcoz (Home Movie Holes, 2009), Keith Sanborn (Energy of Delusion, 2010-22), Vitor Magalhães (Naturalezas Mortas: Em Seis Movimentos, 2020), Gonzalo Egurza (17-17, 2017), Taller Estampa (¿Qué es lo que ves, YOLO9000?, 2017-18), Eugenio Tisselli (Media Trash, 2002), Eloi Puig (Torvix: Pate Risxas, 2020), Barbara Lattanzi (De-dramatization Engine, 2006), Peter Freund (Floating Point, 2020), and E.P. (1.618 Things I Know About Her, 2020). 

The program is presented as a special session within the 11th annual Family Film Project festival, Saturday, October 22, 2022 at 3:20 in Cinema Trindade, Oporto, Portugal. Masterclass by curator Peter Freund precedes screening at 2:30. 

 

Suñol Foundation Performance: Eloi Puig, Raquel Muñoz, & Peter Freund

 
 

I was invited to participate this Saturday as a performer in Eloi Puig’s Tilottama-Kptekan Alignment at the Barcelona Suñol Foundation. May 7th is the finissage and final day to visit the exhbit of IN> TRA exhibition. Artistic practice as a model of experience. The artists Eloi Puig, Raquel Muñoz and Peter Freund will do a performance in relation to Puig’s work, Tilottama-Kptekan Alignment (2018-2019), which is part of the exhibition.

For more information about the performance, please visit the Suñol Foundation website.

 

35 Sentences (After Sol LeWitt) - Declamatori Collective Performance

 
 

I participated as a guest performer in this Oulipo-inspired performative recitation of 35 Sentences at Tecla Sala Art Center (Llobregat, Barcelona) in early April 2022. Video of performance link.

ENG
The Declamatori collective, with Eugènia Agustí, Montse Carreño, Jo Milne, Laia Moretó, Raquel Muñoz, Cristina Pastó, Mercedes Pimiento, Eloi Puig and Martí Ruiz, is part of the IN>TRA2 research team and has written a score specific for the performative reading from the proposal of Antònia Vilà, curator of the exhibition, accompanied by artist's books on conceptual poetics, produced by the Tecla Sala Art Center in 2021. Guest performers: Peter Freund with Marc Anglès.

CAT
El col·lectiu Declamatori, amb Eugènia Agustí, Montse Carreño, Jo Milne, Laia Moretó, Raquel Muñoz, Cristina Pastó, Mercedes Pimiento, Eloi Puig i Martí Ruiz, forma part de l’equip de recerca IN>TRA2 i ha escrit una partitura específica per a la lectura de l’acció a partir de la proposta d’Antònia Vilà, comissària de l’exposició. El llibre com a present continu. Llibres d’artista al voltant de les poètiques conceptuals, produïda pel Centre d’Art Tecla Sala l’any 2021. Intèrprets convidats: Peter Freund amb Marc Anglès.

 

Martí Ruiz

Eloi Puig introducing the program with Eugènia Agustí (right); ensemble behind.

Eloi Puig introducing the ensemble.

Performance of 35 Sentences.