Gypsy Lounge Barcelona open mic, this past Saturday night, presenting a vignette from the novel in progress. Reading aloud can be like pulling a painting off the easel and holding it to a mirror. You see more in reverse. As for the program, there was a lot of variety (a mix of poetry, prose, pantomime, song) and a nice turnout. And it seems, always newcomers and regulars.
Mudas Museum Exhibit De-installation
Our (May-October 2025) exhibit at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art closed today. (For more information and photos, see June 1, 2025 blog post.) Packing boxes are out, lights off for projections (back half of main room pictured below). What a process leading up to this show. Nearly four years since the initial proposal. Along the way, many many obstacles – some absurdities – we turned to benefits. Truly «retractive», in my vocabulary. Vitor did a Portuguese TV interview on the exhibit and will be publishing an article in a very good magazine. Next on the agenda: discuss the exhibit catalogue/book.
Poetry Open Mic
Gypsy Lounge Barcelona, first time. To wobble things up a little, I went to the open mic last night. Read a few pieces of performative poetry. Program a mix of poetry, stories, and live music. Nice vibe and turnout.
Arab Experimental Film + Moving Image Festival @ Ausland, Berlin
My film short «Camp» (half in Arabic with English subtitles…the other half in Mandarin) will be featured in the Arab Experimental Film and Moving Image Festival, presented at Ausland in Berlin (October 17-19, 2025). I’m delighted to be included as the only U.S. artist in the festival. The majority are from the Middle East, as one would expect, especially Egypt and Lebanon as well as Algeria, Tunisia, and Sudan. Wish I could attend.
MACBA Museum acquires «Lost Grids»
Two years after the fact, this morning I happily discovered my project listed in the catalogue of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) as purchased for their Archive: «Lost Grids: or How to Explain Digital Media to a Dead Socialist» (see the catalogue description above). The artist book comprises a clothbound hardcover enclosure containing prints and pamphlets with image-text materials and poetic reflections for each of the five sections or «chapters»: Marx’s Beard, Arrival of the Train, Novella del Grasso, The House Is Black, and Portolan Orifice. I developed the ideas for this artist book portion of the project as the focus of my 2018-19 sabbatical residency with the MACBA Centre for Research and Documentation. A few years later, the book was completed and, in addition, other manifestations (video installations, prints, five loose-leaf books of 500+ pages each of hexadecimal code, etc). Some of these other manifestations form a key part of a current exhibition at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art in Madeira, Portugal: «Round 1.1: A Hairy Decalogue». The exhibition runs May through October 2025.
MACBA ARCHIVE Listing
MOTAVALI EXPANDED: Film Installation Show @ Villa Kuriosum, Berlin
MOTAVALI EXPANDED [4]
September 5-6, 2025
Co-curated by Room for Doubt + Parking Video Library
Villa Kuriosum
Scheffelstraße 21, 10367 Berlin
Directions: S-Bahn StorkowerStr. o. S Frankfurter Allee,
U5, M21, M13, M16
«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 URL on computer only for proper formatting. Click link here:
The Wager of the Algorithm: Towards a Performatic Gesture.]
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 25, 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!
Poetry Reading
Reading at a local bookstore. The true triumph: first time walking down stairs into a cultural venue since the busted leg and surgeries during the three months prior.
Family collecting me after the reading.
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.
new year
Sous les pavés
« 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.)