Venice Biennale Collateral Shows Spotlight Digital Art's Future

At the 61st Venice Biennale, collateral exhibitions are offering nuanced perspectives on digital art, countering accusations of hypercommercialization and lack of labor. The shows, running until late November, invite visitors to explore off-the-beaten-path palazzos. Key exhibitions include 'Aghrab Idrāk: Thresholds of Perception' at Palazzo Cavanis, featuring works by VCUarts Qatar faculty, such as Boost Lab's air filtration sculpture 'Chrysalis' and xLab's light installation 'Preceding Emptiness'. The exhibition, curated by the school's dean Amir Berbić, highlights the campus's lateral structure and its integration of technology. Another show, 'RAGE BAIT' by Eva & Franco Mattes at Palazzo Franchetti, presented by the Autotelic Foundation, explores AI data scraping through a taxidermied cat and videos featuring 'Italian Brain Rot Characters'. At the Berggruen Foundation's Palazzo Diedo, 'Strange Rules' curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Adriana Rispoli, gathers over 20 digital artists, including Ken Stanley's lightboxes from his Picbreeder application, Joshua Citarella's 'Online Marketplace of Ideas' with New Models, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan's 'Waterfalls' addressing accent softening in AI. These exhibitions collectively demonstrate artists' inventive engagement with AI, both using and critiquing it, and aim to redirect the conversation towards discovery and discourse.