2025 Revirtualized
De-wrapped and unbundled. Looking back at all the adventures I got into this past year. Cheers to more explorations in 2026.
January 4, 2026 - I start every year by telling myself that I am going to be less-scatter-brained and all over the place. "This is the year I chill out and just write on my blog" I tell myself. But, as the year slides into gear and the projects, trips and shows catalyze, the blog is the first thing to fall by the wayside. So, this EOY wrap-up is my best last chance to full-fill my self-imposed blogging duties and report on the various adventures I got up to. 2026 will surely be my year where I stick to some sort of publishing schedule... I promise!
Artist Talk with Carly Busta for Loretta Fahrenholz's solo exhibition A Coin From Thin Air at Amant Art Foundation
January 4 - NYC - I started off the year with a bang. Loretta's show at Amant in Brooklyn was stunning and thought-provoking. It featured a photo series titled "i need to make mistakes just to learn who i am"(2023) that I had assisted in the production of by experimenting with GAN image-making. Originally created for Loretta's Trash The Musical 2023 solo at Fluentum, Berlin, this was the first time the series travelled to the states. I proposed the idea of doing a talk to extrapolate some of the ideas in the work and talk about the production process. The conversation with Carly Busta was a really generative continuation of a talk we did for the Fluentum show. The NYC art and tech scene showed up and drilled us with questions regarding culture production in the age-of-AI. The talk was published to the NEW MODELS feed as well as the Amant archive. Looking back now, I am really happy to have staked out a counter-position, pushing back against the determinism that came to color much of A.I. discourse this year.
Book Launch for "Against Platforms" by Mike Pepi at RiffRaff
January 17 - Providence, RI - Following on the heels of the Amant talk, I went right back into the trenches of technology discourse, slamming through "Against Platforms" by Mike Pepi in preparation for a launch event in Providence. This was the first in a string of talks he did with (actually well-known) tech critics and journalist such as Ali Breland. The setting was really fitting, 90s San Fran coffee shop vibe, perfect to discuss the history of the internet and the slide into monopolized platform ideology. A key example of this shift from the book details the rebrand of internet from a publicly-funded "The Information Superhighway" to a privatized "Cyberspace" and how the ethos of the Silicon Valley libertarian cowboy is tied-up in this shift. Mike's book is really sharp and biting and definitely had some sections that I challenged to my long-held beliefs (such as his send-up of "Open Source" platforms). I had an idea to recreate a call-and-response passage from the book where Mike critiques John Perry Barlow's famous 1996 ode' to digital-capitalism "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". I did my best Barlow, reading each stanza of the manifesto with gusto and Mike hit back with his scathing remarks. It was a fun bit and warmly set the tone for Mike's embodied critique of tech criticism. I have a full recording that I will hopefully find the time to edit and release someday soon.
Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art YouTube Channel Launch
January 27 - Fall River, MA - In the summer of 2024, K8 and I filmed a number of videos during the "Another Dimension" group exhibition. Brittni and Harry are doing such incredible and important work down in Fall River and we wanted to help support this effort by donating our video production expertise. Fitting in sunday afternoon editing time in-between other gigs and day jobs we managed to finally get the videos together, some six months later. We launched a new YouTube page for the museum to extend it's programming reach to a global online art audience. Since launching we have filmed and published a number of artist talks, performance and BTS-scene-report montages on the page, including documentation of a performance of an interpretation of a foundational sound art piece by Pauline Oliveros that has gained traction in cracking 1.5k views! Please please please go subscribe to @FRMoCA YouTube right now!
PUNCTR ART LIVE with Kay Kasparhauser for "New Decay" at Entrance Gallery
February 16 - NYC - I finally caved to the inevitable and started a podcast. So far I have only managed to release one episode, but I have 3 more in the can, I just need to find the time to edit. So look out for more Eps of "PUNCTR ART LIVE" dropping in 2026. This first ep was conversation with the enigmatic artist, Kay Kasparhauser for her intriguing solo show at Entrance Gallery in downtown NYC. She had asked me to write a text for the show titled "New Decay" and after it was released I suggested that we hold an in-person artist talk to dig into the work. It was a really nice convo that touched on a number of topics ranging from Jackass, Macbeth, spotted lantern flies and all manner of the grotesque and abject. Listen below:
Attended Anne Imhof promenade theater piece "DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE" at Park Ave Armory
March 8 - NYC - I am a huge fan of Anne Imhof's work (obviously) and so I really couldn't miss DOOM, her latest massive scope multi-layered expounding of Romeo & Juliet at Park Ave Armory. It was such an incredible experience to see ultra-contemporary performance at such grand scale. I found the whole three plus hours very revelatory. I tried to do the whole go-as-long-as-you-can-without-finding-out-who-won-the-superbowl game but for images from DOOM, which was pretty much impossible as my entire feed was DOOMified. Nevertheless, going in as blind as possible paid off as I really didn't know what to expect. My experience from Sleep No More promenade theater proved helpful as I knew that the real show was in following a performer after a big number as they walk into a side room for an intimate moment which in this formation was re-projected back onto the jumbotron at heart of the massive space. I threatened to publish a "trip report" style essay about my experience but decided to leave it in the drafts after the complete and total media dominance of DOOM. But, who knows, maybe I will revive this effort, i mean, what is more meta-ironic that dropping an essay on media spectacle a year later.
"Making Art in the Dark Forest" Artist Talk at Boston Tech Poetics
March 15 - Somerville, MA - Jame and Nicole from Boston Tech Poetics invited me to present some work and chat at their monthly meet-up. It was a very sweet and elucidating conversation, surrounded by friends. I did my best to solidify my fractured and divergent art practice into something tangible. I think the BTP group is a vital community node for the city. The Boston art scene is very silo'd into different scenes centered on the various schools and institutions. Its great to have a group that bridges these gaps and brings in interest from the domineering technology sector for off-beat and thoughtful programming around digital art and culture. Many in the group overlap with the Live Coding music / performance scene that has seen explosive attention in the past couple years. It would seem (to my outsider perspective) that in the age of A.I. assisted fluid DAWs and celebrity-DJs that people are gravitating towards the janky tactility of coding music and visuals live in front of crowd. Again, I have a full recording of this talk and hope to release it as an episode of PUNCTR ART LIVE soon.
Cover art for OST by Joe DeGeorge for "Transformers: Terminal" feature film
Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 7, 2021
March 25 - NYC - I had honor and challenge of designing LP artwork for the debut feature from extremely online team of Mile Engel-Hawbecker (writer & director) and Theresa Tomi Faison (producer & editor). The film is a fever dream of fandom, devirtualization and meta-critical media analysis. The soundtrack was written and recorded by the inimitable, Joe DeGeorge, so when Tomi asked me to help out with the artwork, I just couldn't say no. Joe is an incredible multi-instrumental experimentalist and shell-fisherman in Providence. For the artwork I used assets created by Harris Rosenblum for a 3D printed movie prop that I digitally lit and composited. Surrounding the JarJar Binks mech bust is a disclaimer text that legally absolves the films creators from any and all Hollywood copystrike actions. I attended the Providence premiere screening and OST performance by Joe as Jar Jar at AS220 in May. What a crazy wonderful project from a community of dream followers, go listen to Joe's re-imagining of the Phantom Menace theme and watch Transformers: Terminal.
"Beeldenstorm Meditation" Film created for IMAGES: A Show by Gideon Jacobs
April 18, 20, 22 - NYC - On Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Earth Day, Gideon Jacobs took the stage as Father Mary at EARTH.NYC in LES, giving a stirring sermon. The southern evangelical-tinged performance came with a twist, the (maybe) blind preacher is a second commandment fundamentalist. In Father Mary's telling, all of today's ills can be pinned on image production and resolved by destroying all images, graven or not. For my part, I worked with Gideon over the preceding two months to create a film for Act 2 of the three act show. The film was a combination of GAN-imagery, Image-to-video AI and one digicam high-speed video. The process started with Gideon's script, which was read aloud as the film played on stage. I produced video clips and went back and forth with Gideon to hone in on the right amount of abstraction and specificity to the text. I'm really happy with how it came out, it was a rush to work with such an incredible thinker and performer and make something for a play for the first time. Dive in deeper into Gideon's Images: A Show with a review in Document Journal, read Gideon's writing on contemporary images in a two part series in Las Angeles Review of Books, and listen to Gideon's multiple appearances on NEW MODELS discussing image production as power and pitfall.
Stage Visuals for Cassandra Jenkins "My Light, My Destroyer" World Tour
June 4 - Barcelona, Spain - I met Cassandra through my work on Gideon's performance. She wrote a soundtrack for the film and played live on stage as Father Mary's organist. I really gravitated to her music for its dynamism, thought-full lyrics and this sense of "vibes-maxxing" or songs that can feel different in different moments, times of the day or moods. So, when she asked me to create an abstract animation to play on stage behind her band, I jumped at the chance. With only a couple weeks before she took the stage at Primavera Music Festival in Barcelona, Spain and embarked on a tour of Europe, I had set about translating the album artwork and visual material from her latest release "My Light, My Destroyer" into a movement of textures and hues. I used early GAN-imagery tools to create a kind of lo-fi AI image that would be consistent and have a sense of rawness to it. I then blended the series of stills together to create movement and layered in additional animation textures. Since the whole thing was combined into one single video (rather than live triggered clips for each song) it needed to flow through her set without being to specific to each song in the setlist. Together we created a "color story" to shape the arch of the hour long video. It was so cool to see Cassandra take the stage at Primavera, I hope to catch a performance in 2026.
A new stopmotion film "Shapes" by K8 Howl premieres at Belly of Memory underground art show
June 13-14 - Brighton, MA - For the past three or so years (maybe its more like 2.5) K8 Howl has been working on a stopmotion music video for the band, Bong Wish. The song "Shapes" is the main inspiration. Each lyric, note and sound is represented by K8's range of different techniques. Focusing on clay-based stopmotion, she used armature puppets, under-the-camera straight-ahead and strata-cut or "time-slicing" (as it is sometimes called today) to bring the song to life. The film is really a labor of love and dedication to medium of animation. I helped with some editing and compositing for some of the digitally layered scenes (although all imagery is handmade with clay). We premiered the film at an underground art show in the basement of Pasta Planet in Brighton, the show, In The Belly of Memory was curated and organized by Catie Constas who previously mounted a group show in the same space last fall under the title The Spoils. The dark loud basement was the perfect venue to debut "Shapes", look out for more screenings and festival tour next year.
"From Dunes to DIY Rooms" New England art scene report published in Ocula Art
Left: Read the essay on Ocula - Right: deleted scenes ~ the original location of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, lower Allston's Herter Park.
June 14 - Online - In the spring, Aimee Walleston, U.S. contributing editor at Ocula Art invited me to put together a tour guide slash art scene report for a non-East Coast audience. Aimee's brief was to present a roadmap for visiting New England for art enjoyers who may be coming from different countries or traveling from NYC to vacation destinations like Provincetown or Martha's Vineyard. I had never written something like this and ended up really enjoying it. It turns out digging into regional history, niche art spaces and local lore is incredible fun. The project was also a great way to get some press for beloved art spaces in the area and hopefully spread these gems to new audiences. The piece featured FR MoCA, lower_cavity, Hammock Gallery, Anthony Greaney Gallery and Distillery Gallery among a number of local artists and institutional art shout-outs. There was a whole section about how I.C.A. Boston was originally housed in Allston inside a geoengineered island and inflatable dome, but we had to cut this for word count. Maybe I will write a follow-up New England art guide for next summer. Working with Aimee was really super, she is an encouraging editor and really gave me the space to run wild with this piece. Check out this short video I made to accompany the essay:
"Dali Boheme" photo editorial by Loretta Fahrenholz in Novembre Magazine Issue 17
July 8 - Paris, FR - This series was created in short time period earlier in the year. Usually, Loretta's projects stretch over months or years, slowly developing a conceptual approach and crafting a specific aesthetic. For Novembre Magazine, the editorial commission timeline came up quick. So, over a period of about four weeks, Loretta pulled references of early surrealist photography that she had been studying for many years (see ‘Machine’ series for Paradigm Trilogy II) and the mad dash began. Using some of the poses and compositions by Lee Miller, Man Ray and others as direct references, Loretta and her team photographed Berliners enjoying the first gorgeous days of May. There is a huge culture around Mayday and the opening up of the parks in the city. The largest and most popular, Templehofer Feld reported over 10k people partying in the former airfield on May 1st. The portraits were combined with emerging GAN-imagery in a gesture to the playful experimentation of early photography, when artists harnessed a controversial new image technology with fraught political implications. This series preceded the launch of a MET exhibition of Man Ray's photograms and a Tate showing of Lee Miller's work that both opened in the fall. It is clear that this moment from the past is ripe for reevaluation today. Selections from the series were exhibited at Side Quests For The Real in Geneva (see bottom entry). Pick up a copy of Novembre Magazine Issue 17 to see the rest of the series.
Selections from "Dali Boheme" (2025) exhibited at Side Quests For The Real at Le Commun, Geneva, Switzerland
Jane La Onda "Fly" Music Video screened at Ciao Boston! underground art show
July 19 - Brighton - Artist, filmmaker and scene leader, Natasha Zinos organized an art salon / house show / party spectacle at Kinross Community Center (a house venue, not really a community center, but also kind of is a community center). We joined the film screening which was co-hosted by Girl Haus & JPFLix film collectives and showed "Fly" by Jane La Onda. This animated music video, featuring Kassie Carlson (Guerilla Toss front-woman) first premiered at Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2019. Ciao Boston! was a blast, complete with day drinking, pop-up tattoo parlor and a clown-drag show. It was a one-last-blow-out for Natasha as she moved to Venice Italy shortly afterwords. Give her a ring if you make it over for a biennial and keep up with her new project Tongue Magazine, exploring language and erotics.
A short recap video I cut together from handicam footage of the event
PUNCTR ART LIVE with artist & curator, Virgilijs Tilks for group show In The Shadow of The Floater at Distillery
July 24 - South Boston - Boston-based Latvian sculpture, Virgil Tilks brought together artists from different periods of their art career for a group exhibition at Distillery titled "In the Shadow of the Floater." It was such a fabulous selection of artists and works, some of which were showing in the states for the first time. I proposed the idea of doing an artist talk with Virgil at the end of the shows run as a way to document all the thoughtful energy that went into mounting the exhibition. I recorded the conversation and plan on releasing it for episode 002 of Punctr Art Live. I am still working on the edit, but don't worry, the content is evergreen and will be released eventually.
Attended Book Talk for "Acid Queen" by Susannah Cahalan
August 12 - Truro Public Library, Cape Cod - One of the most intriguing discoveries for me this year was the story of Rosemary Woodruff Leary. I first heard Susannah speak about Rosemary on Otherworld Podcast. You may know her first book, "Brain On Fire: My Month of Madness" (2013) which was a bestseller and was made into a Netflix movie. When I saw that she was giving a talk on the Cape I marked my calendar. The talk was such an insightful and sharp presentation. Susannah focused on Rosemary's time living underground as Sarah Woodruff while she was a wanted fugitive for her role in a prison break that freed her husband, the famous intellectual leader of the psychedelic movement, Timothy Leary for federal prison. Susannah detailed how her intuition led her to settle in Truro on the outer cape because of the symbolism of Tru-ro ("True-Rosemary" in her perception). She showed a picture of Rosemary outside the P-Town Kite Shop, which felt like another synchronicity as a recent interest in Kites had taken flight over the summer. To cap it off, Susannah brought out a painter who had dated Rosemary during her time living underground. He spoke about what life was like in P-Town in the 80s and how everyone was very discreet about Rosemary's mysterious background. Susannah had met him earlier in the summer at a talk on the cape and invited him to share his story at this event. I can't recommend "Acid Queen" enough, it is such a sharp and critical look at the psychedelic movement, following one of it's un-credited architects.
Visited Hammock Gallery for "I Am Myself: Bob Thompson and Friends Early Works"
August - Provincetown - After participating in a group show at Hammock in it's inaugural year (2020), the P-Town gallery closed for renovation. The sea-level structure was raised up onto stilts in order to preserve it's historic original fishing shack architecture. Four years later it has re-opened with a glorious exhibition of historic and contemporary P-Town-centric artworks. I snuck away from my family's vacation on the cape and took the free bus to the tip of the cape. I spent the day chatting with artist and gallerist, Nick Schlerf about PTown's outlaw history, the art market today and ideas for how to really shake-up the outer cape art scene. Hammock is such an idyllic location with an incredible view, it was really such an inspiration to spend time here. Look out for more on this in 2026.
Interview with Eugene published on Do Not Research
Do Not Research
Sept 29 - Online - After months of back and forth over email, taking time off to focus on health and getting the energy to finish, my close friend Eugene and I managed to complete an interview for online art collective, Do Not Research. Eugene and I are among the original cast of characters to that built DNR in 2020 and grew it into what it is today: a sprawling octopus network of art writing, political research, critical discourse and digital culture. The interview was an effort to canonize a central pillar of the community: the shitposting meme-page. Eugene was a chief admin of the series of IG accounts that blew-up, were banned and sprung up again. The conversation was a rare look into the process and motivations behind actually-funny posting and it is one of my favorite pieces of writing to date. Tragically, Eugene passed away a couple months after this piece was published, I am still struggling to find the words for how the whole experience has impacted me. Eugene was loved and will be remembered for his wit, kindness and honesty in the face of our chaotic world. Rest In Peace <3
Film "Beeldenstorm Meditation" with Gideon Jacobs is published on DIS
Oct 8 - Online - The film Gideon and I created for his stage show found a home for online viewing through art & essay film collection, DIS.art. "Beeldenstorm Meditation" is my second film to have the honor of becoming embedded within this prestigious and aesthetically-unhinged streaming site. The first is "Spooky Castle" which debuted in 2023. "BeelMed" is the perfect fit for a DIS film as it is equal parts fine-art critique, essay film and new media fever dream. I joined DIS producer, Ada O'Higgins and Gideon for an IG Reels chat to promote the launch of the film. The conversations was really elucidating, we chatted about iconoclast periods in art history, I floated Nate Sloan's theory of NYC's Vessel as demonic resonator and Ada hit me with a gotchya questions: Do you believe in God?
Exhibition edit of "Chassé" for Michella Bredahl opens at Huis Marseille
Oct 18 - Amsterdam, NL - I met Michella through a collaboration for Paradigm Trilogy III. After this experience I started following her photography work closely. Her eye towards intimate portraits in personal settings demonstrates the trust she builds up with her subjects. Her film "Chassé" (2019) was created as a thesis project at National Film School of Denmark. We discussed each and every shot, and decided if it should be included in the edit for exhibition projection loop. The goal was to maintain the essence of the film while shortening it a bit and meshing with the rest of the work in the show. Although the whole project was rather quick, it was incredibly moving to assist in the production of this powerful exhibition. If you are in Amsterdam area, don't miss Rooms We Made Safe at Huis Marseille, up through February 8th, 2026.
Installation piece "Spooky Action At A Distance" opens at Side Quests For The Real in Switzerland
Dec 2 - Geneva, CH - The curating team, For The Win, first approached me in March and we began a series of zoom calls discussing a contribution to the second edition of the "Art, Games & Society" biennial in Geneva. The first edition in 2023 was titled The Seashore of Endless Worlds and centered around board games, card cards and modes of simulation. Geneva is part of the Swiss-French region of the country and the French phrase for board game is jeux de société, which holds a certain poetic potential for thinking about gaming as a political metaphor, à la Guy Debord. Needless to say, I was hooked. This year's edition, Side Quests For The Real, focused on LARP (Live Action Role Play) as an anchoring device for the show and invited a number of artists to craft LARP performances for the exhibition space. Over the next 7 months I researched, created, produced, cut, transported and installed a site-specific installation titled "Spooky Action At A Distance." The two floors of the exhibition space, Le Commun, were activated with magic circles and columns emanating upwards. The whole experience was challenging and fruitful. I had never created a site-specific work for a space remotely and I had never worked in a wallpaper print before. (ok the Spooky Castle install was remote, but it was an existing work that was adapted, so a little different). All-in-all, I am thrilled with how it came out. Traveling to Switzerland was a real treat. I have lot more to share from my travels soon, so look out for that, along with a full essay unlocking all the research and references from John Dee to CERN that went into my installation.
Scenes from the opening and installation details of Side Quests For The Real, Dec 2-21, 2025
That's all for 2025, it was an exhilarating, perspective-shifting year. I still can't believe I did all the things I did. 2026 is going to be much much more chill. I am excited to get to all the things still left unfinished from this crazy year. Thank you to everyone who engaged with my work, your interest makes this all worth it. ~~Cheers to what the future holds! - Jak