Dear ,

Would you believe it? She’s gone again! What’s a husband supposed to do during the hot summer in Rome all alone with nobody to preare food for or iron clothes of? I guess I could write her newsletter. We’re not late. We’re early! Here in Italy, things start closing down for Summer in the beginning of June and get only really up to speed in early October. This is why for an artist living in Italy, having shows in September or October is a really bad idea. And yet this is exactly what we’re doing! And this is why she’s not here.

She’s ready to die

Auriea is in New York now, or what’s left of it, actually making the work that will be in the solo exhibition at Heft gallery that opens next Wednesday, September 9th at 6pm. The show is entitled “Ready to Die”. I wonder what will happen next!

She’s been working across marble, faience, metal casting and 3d printing, many of these without any prior experience. That in and of itself is kind of an artistic statement. Next to the regular pieces, Auriea created made a bunch of small sculptures reluctantly called Amulets. They will be featured in a special installation.

And thanks the aforementioned Italian Summer customs, there will also be a finissage of the show to which will be added the two large works in Carrara marble and Bardiglio marble, sculpted the previous time she left me all alone, at the Digital Stone Project. More about that in the next newsletter!

Oh, and I made music for a video called The Dance Of Death And Time. And a very old screensaver will be in the show too. If you can find it!

A water fountain and a triumphal arch in flyover country

Finally, the project that has been two years in the making is almost ready to be unveiled. I’ve seen pictures and even in its unfinished state, it looks gorgeous! Edmonia Triumphalis at Tinworks, Bozeman, Montana is opening on October 11th. And just when you thought Auriea’s tiny sculptures were cute, the show will feature the biggest pieces she’s ever made!

And before the show opens, there’s the launch of a theatrical audio-visual tour — made by my beloved — of artifacts related to Edmonia and Sam Lewis at locations around town.

Meanwhile on the World Wide Web

WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES! WWW! is a group show commemorating 30 years of Rhizome at the New International Picture Company, NYC, and auctioning Auriea’s entropy8.com server error pages from the nineties, bundled under the title “Wrong!” The old flash .swf files and HTML pages were restored for the occasion.

Back when I had not touch her yet, I was regularly found lurking at the stream of images from the camera she had continuously pointing at her desk. Yeah, now this sound creepy. But back then, we were all very excited about sharing our day-to-day lives with people all around the world. So from captures of this webcam, grungified graphics and intimate moments she created a mini online performance whenever something was misdirected, broken or a URL was mistyped. The pages are apparently fully functional and can be installed as error messages on any server.

    wrong #302 - REDIRECT
    wrong #400 - BAD_REQUEST
    wrong #401 - AUTH_REQUIRED
    wrong #402 - INVALID_URL
    wrong #403 - FORBIDDEN
    wrong #404 - NOT_FOUND
    wrong #500 - SERVER_ERROR
    wrong #501 - NOT_IMPLEMENTED

The show also features many old friends, among whom Oxfff, Jan Robert Leegte, Damjanski, EXONEMO, Kim Asendorf, LIA, Lorna Mills, Rafaël Rozendaal, Petra Cortright, Sarah Friend, Simon Denny and Vuc Cosic.

When on the web

And you can continue the nostalgia for a creative internet at The Whitney Museum when they celebrate the 25th anniversary of artport in a show called artport: A History of Internet Art. This online collection of net art commissions includes Auriea’s recent piece SITE1, based by our L.O.C.K. from the Flower/Lock research project.

The show opens on November 21st but Auriea will not be attending because for some reason she wants to be at home.

Future Art in London

My wife has been selected a fellow with the Serpentine Galleries, one of 4 out of almost 1000 applicants. The others are Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Alice Bucknell and Reina Mun. The project is called Future Art Ecosystems and it’s some kind of research thing involving AI, which I guess has now officially replaced the Metaverse, NFTs and generative art. How quickly one feels old in a place where everything always almost happens! The good news is that my coveted wife does not need to stay the six months of the fellowship in London, which is a lot closer than New York anyway.

Major Aquisitions

Something weird and interesting happened when Auriea decided to enter the Contemporary Art World a few years ago. We had been creating all sorts of things for decades without getting much attention from museums or galleries or collectors. To be fair, we would have rejected that attention most of the time, probably, still delusional about the no-middle-men euphoria of the early web. But now that our old work is starting to break down, there’s a rush of interest in it! I’m not complaining. But it’s weird.

So, our long lost 2001 Eden.Garden project that was restored by ZKM has finally returned home and entered the collection of SFMOMA. It was comissioned by that museum in 2001 during the height of the web bubble and was all but forgotten after that, in part because it simply stopped working, of course. Because that’s what computer technology is all about.

Even more surprising was the interest in a much more obscure piece called Guernica, which was a client for Alex Galloway’s Carnivore. Well, Guernica was recently acquired for the collection of Ragnar Digital.

Both Eden.Garden and Guernica happen to be early, pre-games, realtime interactive 3D pieces. But we hear there’s an interest in other works as well. Hopefully we can talk about that soon.

Ling is doing well. Her lymphoma is uncurable. But the three-weekly chemotherapy sessions and bi-daily pills are keeping the cat alive. She’s a welcome — if sleepy — companion while I am working crazy hard on a project that only needs to be ready in March next year. But I’m enjoying the process. Which is new for me. And it might even lead to a game. Which is very new!

So yeah, wild Fall days ahead. I pray that Christmas may be peaceful.

her hidden secret, Michael.