Hello,

Welcome newcomers. I write to you now from the ICE 1052 en route to Cologne. I am hauling a suitcase, two tote bags and a backpack, and all but the backpack are full of artworks, nuts, bolts, tools, and spare parts for things I already shipped just in case I miscounted when I packed them the first time^*. It’s a rare sunny day in Germany in Nov and I’ve been awake since 6:15 am.

Last night at about 6 pm I finally finished prepping for the trip and decided to walk over to the Pop Mart at Alexa Center and seek a blessing. I looked for 20 or 30 minutes at all the packages and ended up getting a Pin for Love N-Z (for those who don’t know, this is the smaller version of the classic Labubu figurine, where each toy has a letter). I got the “Q” and when I asked Chat what “Q” would be in terms of divinatory meanings, it said:

I love the blindbox format. As an occasional game designer, I love how the blindbox compresses a whole plot into a few layers of packaging. The simplest possible narrative: What’s in the box? Each part of the object, without needing any external explanation, teaches you how to play. And of course the ironic twist: The thing you destroy — the box itself — turns out to be the product. You don’t actually want the thing inside. You want the moment of opening.

Blindboxes remind me of the part at the very end of Addison Rae’s Money is Everything where, no longer singing, she screams, “Money loves me, I’m the richest girl in the world”. Or maybe that part in Lil Peep’s Save that Shit where he groans, “Nothin’ like those other motherfuckers / I can make you rich.” It takes real genius to write a lyric like that. It’s so ugly and honest. It names barefaced the fantasy beneath so many trad wife baking videos. You have to be willing to be a little ugly to speak about desire, because desire itself is ugly. This is something I’ve been trying to bring into my work recently: things that can’t be understood fully through language — like desire itself. Things that become like a pop star singing about money when said plainly. Naming the fantasy is opening the box.

Anyway, I’m burying the lede. I’ve made a Blindbox. I’m releasing it Nov 6, in a solo booth at Art Cologne as part of New Positions with Galerie Nagel Draxler. Each one contains a tarot card/screenshot of my AI self. The images are “outtakes” from the original Prompt Baby. A few (nine) collectors “defected”, meaning they submitted a prompt but then resold the corresponding token on the secondary market before I had finished uploading the results – thereby breaking the contract. But of course, I’d already made the images. So what to do with them?

If we don’t sell out at the fair, I will make these available online and update you about how to get one. The exhibition also features the images printed as Dakimakura, which you may also know as “Waifu pillows”.

As well as a few cable sculptures, this one is called “Eye”.

And a few other things, more quickly:

• While doing all of this, I also worked on a collaborative commission with Arkadiy Kukarkin to celebrate Internet Archive’s 1 Trillion Web Pages Archived. The piece is a browser-based generative video where the onscreen voices read Foucault’s The Lives of Infamous Men, using clips from Archive’s automated TV captures. And when I say I worked on it, I should be clear and say that I did a bit of web development and art direction, whereas Arkadiy has spent hours learning the forbidden arts of video. It's a work in progress, try viewing in Firefox if you notice audio sync issues.

• Brian Droitcour wrote this fun and thoughtful review of his favourite digital art that includes my pieces at SculptureCenter and the performance of Artist’s Model at Onassis ONX. It’s behind a paywall unfo, but I put some screencaps on ig

• Next week at HEK Basel, I’ll be teaching a workshop called Coding for Curators and Co. with Julia Schicker. This came out of her observation that there are tons of “Intro to coding” classes for artists, but none aimed specifically at other kinds of art workers. Join us if you’ll be in Basel!

• Opening Nov 20 at Britta Rettberg, will be doing another small solo show called Equilibria. This accompanies an exhibition by Tatjana Vall in the main gallery space. Here’s a little preview of what we’ll be showing

I like to close these emails with something informal and unexpected, but I’m a little rushed writing this one, so please enjoy this photo of my dog

^*Note: despite all efforts, I did in fact still forget 3 M5 30mm bolts, and a USB C charge block