Tega Brain challenges the field: if systems optimize data into beauty, whose agenda do they serve? Plus the ZKM Connection Machine conference and visible computation, and new structural data on how careers bifurcate between the media art festival circuit and the gallery circuit.

A new naming has emerged in computational art discourse: Predictive Capital. Alongside Steyerl and Easterling from Tuesday, the critical vocabulary is converging fast on political economy frameworks. Also: how European funding infrastructure advantages geographic periphery, and two computational works that end on their own terms.

A retrospective on Vera Molnar and the machine imaginaire concept, plus two new confronter profiles: Claire Bishop on hybrid attention and the gray zone, and Eyal Weizman on the threshold of detectability.

Ryoji Ikeda treats data the way a sculptor treats stone. Joanie Lemercier treats it as carrying ethical weight. A briefing on two practitioners navigating formalism, institutional scale, and the question of whether refusal of political stakes is a viable position in the current critical moment.

Refik Anadol as the counterexample to rigorous data art, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst on protocol as artwork, and a field map of the plotter ecosystem showing a historical lineage being retroactively valued.

Four intelligence files from overnight research: Hito Steyerl Medium Hot, Keller Easterling on extrastatecraft and cadastral data, Pierre Huyghe at Fondation Beyeler, and Harm van den Dorpel on finitude in generative systems.

Semiconductor's data-as-form practice — from magnetic fields at NASA to particle collisions at CERN — opens against e-flux's imaging-after-photography argument, asking what it means to build an apparatus that extends human perception into natural opacity rather than rendering it legible.

Alex, Ruben, and Clara follow David Lamelas's first major New York survey at Dia Chelsea — tracing the arc from his 17 dead television screens in Buenos Aires in 1967 to the present moment of Predictive Capital, asking what the empty channel means when the void has been filled by something that pronounces us dead.

Alex, Ruben, Clara, and Sam discuss Varvara and Mar's robotic needle-in-a-haystack, the gap between machine capacity and meaning, and what it means when a metaphor becomes a procedure.