How ‘Candy Crush’ Trapped Us in the Machine Zone

The artworld's new stone age; a trip into the Fukushima Exclusion Zone; what's it like to be a biennale? |

View this email in your browser Play the Game For the tenth anniversary of mobile game Candy Crush Saga, Lewis Gordon considers how its melding of algorithm and aesthetics has lulled us into a sugary stupor for a decade – a decade, Gordon writes, 'in which we all, to greater and lesser degrees, entered the "machine zone", developing technological addictions of various severities that share similarities with those of gamblers'. Elsewhere: Eloise Hendy on the artworld's crystalline turn; Taro Nettleton enters the Fukushima Exclusion Zone; Rosanna McLaughlin wonders what giving Ana Mendieta's death the true-crime podcast treatment actually achieves; Stan Burnside and Tavares Strachan in conversation; Cassie Packard on Wolfgang Tillmans's cosmologies of images; and Adeline Chia reviews the (sentient) Singapore Biennale. En Liang Khong, Director of Digital Killer App Despite a monetisation strategy that's 'free to play', Candy Crush has racked up over $9 billion in revenue. The game, Lewis Gordon explains, is 'indicative of a decade in which we all, to greater and lesser degrees, entered the "machine zone"'. read now New Stone Age Critics have noted a 'geological turn' taking place in the artworld, with coruscating gallery spaces and fairs littered with lumps of rock. Yet, this 'turn', Eloise Hendy argues, 'has been coming for some time'. read now What's It Like To Be a Biennale? The question of non-human and possibly inaccessible subjectivities hangs over this year's Singapore Biennale. Adeline Chia wonders: can the exhibition itself have some degree of consciousness? read now Art in the Exclusion Zone Site-specific artworks in the ravaged space surrounding the compromised Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant – finally open to select visits from the public, including Taro Nettleton – highlight the shifting, even vivacious nature of the post-nuclear landscape. read now Ever-Protean To look without fear, a long-awaited survey at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, finds Wolfgang Tillmans looking both outward – to the world's constituent elements – and inward to photography itself. Cassie Packard follows him. read now "We Get To Make Meaning" Stan Burnside, a Bahamian artist and pioneering voice in Afrofuturism, speaks to his mentee and now-curator Tavares Strachan about tradition, contorted systems and paying homage – with Mark Rappolt at the helm. read now Crisis of Form What makes contemporary art's relation to 'the contemporary' more than symptomatic? J. A. Koster reads Crisis as Form by Peter Osborne, and searches for a greater understanding of contemporary art's ontology. read now Mendieta Deserves Better Death of an Artist returns to a now-well reported story – of artists Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre's doomed marriage – with a true-crime spin. For Rosanna McLaughlin, though, it cannot seem to move beyond treating the past as a theatre of trauma. read now Not subscribed yet? Sign up to ArtReview's newsletters © 2022 ArtReview Ltd. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in at www.artreview.com or the previous digital magazine website Our mailing address is: ArtReview Ltd. 1 Honduras Street London, England EC1Y 0TH United Kingdom Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.