Editorials

Virtual worldbuilding artist john gerrard spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) on the occasion of his year-long LACMA project, SPIRITS as well as work appearing at Art Basel's Zero 10. The LACMA work, SPIRITS, consists of live 3D sculptures of sandals and shoes from beaches across the world. The project culminates on June 21, 2026, with a summer solstice dance at LACMA featuring Richie Hawtin. They cover gerrard's twenty-year arc from early game engine works to browser-based public art; the entanglement of petroleum, plasticity, and modern life; and why gerrard believes the game engine is the most important medium of our time.

Artist Evil Biscuit spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) before the release of card nft 2, the artist’s trading-card-game-inspired project, first appearing with SOLOS Gallery at Felix Art Fair in February 2026. They discuss the project's evolution from card nft, Biscuit's digital-to-physical process, and how the work's emphasis on destruction and rebirth is material as much as conceptual.

Luba Elliott is once again curating the Art Gallery at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference, a leading annual gathering for computer vision and deep learning research. Elliott is exhibiting two dozen works at the forefront of creativity and AI on-site at Denver's Colorado Convention Center (June 5–7, 2026) and 114 online at the CVPR 2026 Art Gallery. The curator speaks with three shortlisted artists about their creative and conceptual approaches to AI: Nick Oh & Alex Park, Avital Meshi & Dorte Bjerre Jensen, and Xia Liu.

Virtual worldbuilding artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen speaks with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about the centrality of fieldwork and process to his practice. They discuss archiving vanishing environments in virtual worlds, the play between structure and daydream in his creative process and the embodied sensibility behind Steensen’s slow, textured approach to digital worldbuilding. An exhibition of his work, Otherworlds, is on view at Phi (Montreal) through September 13, 2026.

Painter Avery Singer is exhibiting a new canvas, Vanessa (2026), at the Protocol Art show, Strange Rules, in Venice. The artist spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about her accidental path to painting and the recent integration of custom AI workflows into her practice. They discuss slop aesthetics, the dopamine blowout of contemporary image consumption, and how Baudrillard's theories of spectacle inform Singer’s long use of technology to interrogate the changing nature of image production.

Might we experience reality itself as a protocol and world in a divided brain? Peter Bauman argues protocol art and worldbuilding externalize the brain’s two halves: the protocolic urge to formalize reality into rules and the worlding urge to inhabit it as an open, living environment.