This Week’s Must-see Art Events: Seven on Seven or Sex Terrorists?

Every year since 1993, NYU’s “Future of New Media” class gives public presentations on how technology may affect our lives in the coming years. It’s like Black Mirror, but without the “technology will turn all of us into horrible people” part. Hear about the year 2025, and what may come to pass with panel topics devoted to the “super-semantic web,” where you can converse with the entire internet, and “post-automation culture,” where people outsource their CV to others.

A screening by Toronto director Bruce LaBruce, his films Give Piece of Ass a Chance and The Raspberry Reich feature sex terrorists and “slogans for the homosexual intifada.”

Artist Martine Syms likes TV. She’s curated a selection of short films and videos dealing with TV as a social medium, a “resource for aesthetics, values, metaphors and community.” Knowing a thing or two about some of these artists, like Dara Birnbaum and Mike Smith, the screening should be filled with humor, too.

Features work by Nicole Miller, Dara Birnbaum, Remy/Grand Central, Lex Brown, Stan Douglas, Ximena Cuevas, Michael Smith, Sondra Perry, Joan Logue, and Martine Syms

Sergio Purtell documents Brooklyn’s changing post-industrial landscapes through haunting black-and-white photography. He will be joined by Thomas Roma and Susan Kismaric (former curator of photography at MoMA) for a discussion about his work.

With Greenberg’s living sculpture, you’re under surveillance. Lenses peer out of inanimate, goopy plastic, petri dishes bubble over with a “painterly stew,” and paintings simulate oozing bubbles. It sounds like Videodrome-meets-Modernism, at a science-fair. Fun.

Come to church, stay for the art. Nicole Cohen’s eerie footage of East Harlem gives the sense of a techno-spiritual meditation on place; in her videos, she layers storefronts and facades with colorful rays of light. Sentimental, maybe. Beautiful, definitely.

Open studios! It’s that time of the semester when MFA students and artists-in-residence across the city open their doors to strangers, letting them gawk and walk around works in progress. Please, don’t step on the art. A few of the events, highlighted below.

School of Visual Arts (SVA) MFA Open Studios

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Open Studios

Triangle Arts Association Open Studios

Sharpe-Walentas Open Studios

Big names permeate this year’s Seven on Seven, an annual event pairing an artist and technologist to make “something.” For the event’s 7th edition, “Empathy & Disgust,” artist Ai Weiwei was paired with computer-security analyst (and hacker) Jacob Appelbaum; “conceptual entrepreneur” Martine Syms with ThinkUp co-founder Gina Trapani; and relational-aesthetics artist Liam Gillick with statistician Nate Silver. On Saturday (if you can nab tickets), come hear them unveil their projects.

Finish out the day of getting your tech geek on with a visit to Transfer for Rollin Leonard’s skillful photographs of seamlessly hacked, morphed, and reassembled body parts.

Call it a class reunion: the International Center for Photography-Bard MFA program has been around for 10 years. The exhibition features work by alums and newbies alike, with works by Christine Callahan, Hernease Davis, Joseph Desler Costa, Dillon DeWaters, Christian Erroi, Nona Faustine Simmons, Tatiana Kromberg, Garret Miller, Jorge Alberto Perez, Libby Pratt, Liz Sales, David Smith, Willy Somma, Daniel Temkin, Kim Weston, and Hannah Whitaker.

The show is in Jersey City, near the Journal Square PATH station, but the ICP is offering free shuttles every half hour starting at 12:30 PM from Milk Studios (450 W. 15th Street, New York, NY 10011). Sign up for a free trip to Jersey here!