Blog - Lumlux Art

3 Sep 2026 Art Archive Molly Soda

A YouTube Account Becomes an Art Archive

Molly Soda has been uploading herself to the internet since before “content creator” became a normal job description. Her archive contains webcam performances, makeup videos, singing, dancing, crying, fragments lasting only seconds and projects developed explicitly as artworks. Instead of separating these categories neatly, she has largely allowed them to accumulate together.

On 28 September 2026, MoMA will turn that accumulated YouTube history into a roughly 75-minute screening. Some works are formal video performances, others resemble the everyday debris of early social media. Soda rarely deletes material from her online past, so the archive documents not only an artistic practice but successive versions of a person performing herself through changing platforms.

Her own website reinforces how strange the scale of that archive has become. Inbox Full lasts more than ten hours. That’s Me in the Corner documents an Instagram Live performance. There are Tumblr archives, zines, web series and videos whose durations range from a few seconds to half an hour.

Twenty years ago it was easy to think of an online post as disposable. Now early YouTube clips, Tumblr pages and webcam recordings can function like notebooks, photographs or Super 8 reels from an earlier generation. The difference is that these records were often made publicly, while the identity they documented was still being constructed.

The archive did not begin after the work.

The archive was happening at the same time as the life.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/11667

#MollySoda #InternetArt #VideoArt #DigitalArchive

A YouTube Account Becomes an Art Archive moma.org Molly Soda has been uploading herself to the internet since before “content creator” became a normal job description. Her archive contains webcam...

2 Sep 2026 Contemporary Art

The Video Keeps Jumping Through Time

Hito Steyerl’s The Island, currently at Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio in Milan until 30 October 2026, refuses to stay inside one period of history.

The project combines a newly produced film with installation, objects and video interviews. Its stories move from microorganisms and Neolithic time to war, contemporary technology and imagined futures. Flooding keeps returning as a connecting image.

Steyerl describes two very different experiences of time.

One is the frantic time produced by technology and capitalism: updates, interruptions, loops and information constantly replacing information.

The other is deep time.

Geological time.

Underwater time.

Time that barely notices whether a smartphone generation lasts three or five years.

I like the collision because moving image normally controls time extremely well.

Twenty-four frames.

Cut.

Jump.

Repeat.

Speed up.

Slow down.

But Steyerl uses those tools to point toward scales of time the video itself cannot really contain.

A five-minute sequence can jump thousands of years.

The screen makes that transition instantaneous.

Reality cannot.

Perhaps that is one reason moving image is so effective for thinking about our current technological culture.

The edit has taught us to expect reality to move at the speed of an edit.

The planet never agreed.

https://www.fondazioneprada.org/project/the-island-hito-steyerl/?lang=en

#HitoSteyerl #VideoArt #TheIsland #ContemporaryArt

The Video Keeps Jumping Through Time fondazioneprada.org Hito Steyerl’s The Island, currently at Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio in Milan until 30 October 2026, refuses to stay inside one period of...

2 Sep 2026 Contour Biennale

The Internet Produces Its Own Geology

Yuyan Wang’s new Boring Billion is a 2026 single-channel video made from the kind of image material digital culture produces almost without noticing.

Wang has long worked with images recycled from industrial and online image systems. She edits, repeats and recontextualises them until their original purpose becomes unstable. Boring Billion, commissioned for 2026 and now included in Contour Biennale 11 in Mechelen, pushes that approach toward geological time.

The title refers to an immense period in Earth’s history often described as comparatively stable.

That becomes an odd thing to place beside contemporary digital imagery.

Our visual culture behaves as though the opposite is true.

Refresh.

Scroll.

Generate.

Upload.

Replace.

The individual image barely has time to become old before another one arrives.

Wang’s editing makes me think about that accumulation differently. Billions of disposable images may eventually behave like sediment. One meme or advertisement is insignificant. Millions layered together begin describing a civilisation.

Video editing can therefore become something like archaeology performed in real time.

The archive is no longer something we discover after the culture has disappeared.

We are producing the archaeological layer while we are still living inside it.

Yuyan Wang

#YuyanWang #VideoArt #DigitalImages #ContourBiennale

The Internet Produces Its Own Geology Contour Biennale 11 Yuyan Wang - Contour Biennale 11 For Contour Biennale 11, Yuyan Wang presents Boring Billion, a film that uses online footage to portray an overheated machine haunted by petro-industrial desire.

1 Sep 2026 Cameras Jasper Marsalis

Landscape Painting From Unsecured Cameras

Jasper Marsalis has made a contemporary landscape exhibition without travelling to photograph the landscapes himself.

In Still Life, currently at Chisenhale Gallery in London until 6 September 2026, a large screen displays live images drawn from unsecured internet-connected cameras around the world.

Lakes appear. Roads. Hills. Parking lots. Agricultural spaces. Occasionally animals or people pass through.

An algorithm changes which cameras are shown, so the sequence is never completely predetermined. Four suspended speakers simultaneously transform live FM radio signals into slowly changing sound.

I find the landscapes strange precisely because nobody seems to be composing them.

Traditional landscape painting selects a viewpoint.

Photography selects a moment.

Marsalis inherits viewpoints selected by cameras installed for completely different reasons, then allows weather, daylight and whatever happens to pass through the frame to determine the image.

Compression errors become texture.

A slow camera turns movement into jumps.

Nightfall happens according to the actual location of a camera thousands of kilometres away.

The gallery therefore contains images that are live but geographically absent.

This is almost the reverse of cinematic control.

Nothing waits for the filmmaker.

The world keeps happening and the artwork briefly tunes into it.

https://flash—art.com/2026/07/jasper-marsalis-still-life-chisenhale-gallery-london/

#JasperMarsalis #VideoArt #NetworkArt #MovingImage

Landscape Painting From Unsecured Cameras Flash Art Jasper Marsalis "Still Life" Chisenhale Gallery / London | | Flash Art Entering Chisenhale Gallery in London, a scaffolded passage opens onto a huge screen. On it a landscape scene appears, stays for thirty seconds or so, then changes to another. A lake. Hills. At night,

1 Sep 2026 Contemporary Art

An Island That Refused a Border

In 1831 an underwater volcanic eruption created a temporary island between Sicily and Tunisia. Britain, France, Spain and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies quickly became interested in claiming it. Then the island disappeared beneath the Mediterranean again.

Elisa Giardina Papa turns this strange historical episode into She Flickered In and Out of History, a new 18-minute video installation currently at London’s ICA until 6 September 2026.

The work was filmed around Mount Etna, Stromboli and the submerged slopes of Mediterranean volcanic islands. It appears on a large freestanding LED screen alongside photographs and glass sculptures. A Sicilian spoken poem and an original score by duendita move through the images.

What interests me is that the island behaves almost like an impossible political object.

A territory normally becomes valuable because it stays where maps put it.

This one appeared, attracted competing claims of ownership, and then physically removed itself from the argument.

Video seems particularly suited to that story because moving image also refuses the stability of a photograph. Land emerges, changes, flickers and disappears.

Giardina Papa does not simply reconstruct the island as a forgotten historical curiosity. She lets geological time interfere with political time.

Governments can draw borders rapidly.

A volcano has another schedule.

There is something satisfying about a landscape that briefly enters European geopolitics and then sinks before anybody can permanently possess it.

Elisa Giardina Papa: She Flickered In and Out of History

#ElisaGiardinaPapa #VideoArt #MovingImage #ContemporaryArt

An Island That Refused a Border iiclondra.esteri.it Elisa Giardina Papa: She Flickered In and Out of History 17 July – 6 September 2026 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) ICI London is proud to support She Flickered?In?and Out of History, a new video and?mixed-media?installation by interdisciplinary artist Elisa Giardina Papa (b. Italy;?lives and works in New York,?U.S.,?and?Sant’Ignazio, Sicily) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). In 1831, an underwater volcanic eruption […]

31 Aug 2026 Experimental Film

The Film Is Slowly Destroying Itself

Panu Johansson’s Wherever Street Piece begins with anonymous 16mm footage he rescued from being thrown away in the early 2000s.

Nobody appears to know exactly who filmed it. The material seems to have been recorded in several countries between roughly 1965 and 1975.

Johansson transferred the footage onto high-contrast Kodak 3378 sound-recording film and then treated it frame by frame with chemicals that erode the emulsion. The resulting two-channel moving-image installation was shown at Turku Art Museum in 2026.

That physical destruction interests me because archive culture usually tries to achieve the opposite.

Preserve the image.

Stabilise the film.

Remove scratches.

Recover detail.

Johansson deliberately damages the copy.

Memory becomes visible partly through information disappearing.

Digital editing makes it easy to simulate scratches, dust and chemical damage, but there is a conceptual difference when the process genuinely changes the film material.

The image cannot simply be reset.

Each intervention becomes part of that copy’s history.

Found footage already contains an absence because we do not know the people who made it.

Eroding the image adds another kind of disappearance.

We see the past while watching the material that carries it slowly refuse to preserve everything.

https://turuntaidemuseo.fi/en/nayttelyt/panu-johansson

#PanuJohansson #VideoArt #FoundFootage #ExperimentalFilm

The Film Is Slowly Destroying Itself Turun Taidemuseo Panu Johansson: Wherever Street Piece | Turku Art Museum Wherever Street Piece (2025) is a found footage work which portrays fragmented memories that cannot be directly linked to any single person’s life.

31 Aug 2026 Accessibility

Captions Become Part of the Choreography

Carolyn Lazard’s current exhibition Long Take, at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center until 13 December 2026, begins with dance but quickly moves beyond the idea that a video simply records a performance.

The central work Leans, Reverses was developed with dancer Jerron Herman and poet and artist Joselia Rebekah Hughes. The project exists through a dance performance, its recording, a choreographic score, captions and audio description. Three monitors can display black fields while text describes sounds or movements that are not necessarily visible in the conventional way.

What interests me is that accessibility is not added after the artwork is finished.

It becomes one of the materials from which the artwork is built.

Captions normally occupy the edge of moving-image culture.

We switch them on when necessary.

Lazard moves them toward the centre.

A phrase describing a movement becomes another version of that movement.

Audio description creates another performance through language.

The recorded image is no longer automatically treated as the most complete version.

That is a surprisingly radical idea for video art.

A camera does not necessarily preserve the work better than words.

Each translation loses something.

Each translation can also create something that was not visible before.

https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/carolyn-lazard-long-take

#CarolynLazard #VideoArt #MovingImage #Accessibility

Captions Become Part of the Choreography museum.stanford.edu Carolyn Lazard’s current exhibition Long Take, at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center until 13 December 2026, begins with dance but quickly moves...

31 Aug 2026 Cao Fei

A Digital City Built From Real Change

Cao Fei’s work has repeatedly used moving image, virtual worlds and digital culture to examine the speed of social change in China.

Her major current exhibition Testimonies to the Near Future opened at Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart on 28 August 2026. The museum describes it as her first solo exhibition in Switzerland and her largest retrospective in Europe to date. Videos, digital environments, photography, sculpture and immersive installations are arranged so that the museum itself begins to resemble a city.

That seems particularly appropriate for Cao Fei.

Her moving-image work rarely treats digital space as something separate from ordinary life.

Factories, cosplay, online identities, architecture and imagined cities keep crossing into one another.

What interests me is how quickly work like this changes historically.

A virtual world that once appeared futuristic can become technologically obsolete within a decade.

But the social behaviour recorded inside it may become more recognisable.

That gives contemporary video art a strange double clock.

The technology ages rapidly.

The human desire to escape, perform another identity, build communities and imagine a different city does not.

Perhaps that is why digital art does not always need to remain technologically current.

Sometimes outdated technology becomes the evidence showing how recently our idea of the future looked completely different.

https://www.museenbasel.ch/en/museen/kunstmuseum-basel-gegenwart/cao-fei

#CaoFei #VideoArt #DigitalArt #MovingImage

A Digital City Built From Real Change museenbasel.ch Cao Fei The Chinese artist Cao Fei (born 1978, Guangzhou) is one of the defining voices of her generation. Through videos, digital media, photograph

23 Aug 2026 Belmore’s Fountain

Projecting an Image Onto Water

Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain, created for the Canadian Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale, does something deceptively simple with video: the image is projected onto falling water rather than a conventional screen. The work moves between fire, water and blood, placing elemental imagery against an industrial North American landscape.

The physical projection surface changes everything for me. A normal screen is designed to disappear so that we concentrate on the image. Falling water refuses to disappear. It moves, breaks the projected light and reminds us that the image has a body. The medium becomes visible precisely because it cannot hold the picture perfectly still.

Belmore, an Anishinaabe artist, has repeatedly worked with land, bodies, political histories and the material presence of water. In Fountain, water is simultaneously subject, projection surface and moving sculpture. The video cannot be separated cleanly from the substance carrying it.

Digital images often feel weightless. Here light needs something unstable and physical before we can see it.

Fountain

#RebeccaBelmore #VideoArt #IndigenousArt #InstallationArt

Projecting an Image Onto Water Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain, created for the Canadian Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale, does something deceptively simple with video: the image is proje…

23 Aug 2026 Chen Chieh Jen

Returning Workers to an Empty Factory

Chen Chieh-Jen made Factory in 2003 after meeting former workers from Taiwan’s Lien Fu garment factory, which had closed in 1996 without paying workers compensation and pension claims. The women had spent years protesting. Chen invited them back into the abandoned workplace and filmed them quietly performing the labour they once carried out there.

The resulting work is deliberately slow and silent. Images of the women inside the empty factory are combined with archival propaganda footage presenting Taiwan’s earlier manufacturing prosperity. That collision interests me because nothing needs to be explained through dramatic narration. The same industrial history looks completely different depending on whether it is told through economic success or through the bodies left behind when production moves elsewhere.

Re-enacting work inside a factory that no longer employs anyone turns labour into something almost ghostlike. The machines, gestures and building still remember a system that has already abandoned them. Silence does not make the political argument weaker. It gives the workers’ presence more weight.

???

#ChenChiehJen #TaiwaneseArt #VideoArt #LabourHistory

Returning Workers to an Empty Factory Chen Chieh-Jen made Factory in 2003 after meeting former workers from Taiwan’s Lien Fu garment factory, which had closed in 1996 without paying workers com…

23 Aug 2026 ARAVARA

Time Is Not Neutral

ARAVARA at the National Gallery of Jamaica is an audiovisual exhibition built around a deceptively difficult subject: time. Curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel and developed with KADIST, it brings together ten works by ten artists and is being presented through several Caribbean locations. The exhibition considers recurrence, repetition and historical layering, asking how promises of progress made in earlier periods continue to shape present realities. At the Kingston presentation, moving image and sound become ways of looking at history without assuming that time simply moves forward in a clean line.

I like that idea because museums themselves often organise history chronologically. One year follows another, giving the impression that the past has been completed. But political ideas, social structures and unfinished promises can return in altered forms. Perhaps history behaves less like a timeline and more like an image repeatedly edited without ever deleting all the previous layers.

National Gallery of Jamaica and KADIST Present ARAVARA: June 28, 2026

#ARAVARA #CaribbeanArt #VideoArt #JamaicaArt

Time Is Not Neutral National Gallery of Jamaica National Gallery of Jamaica and KADIST Present ARAVARA: June 28, 2026 The National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ), in collaboration with KADIST, is pleased to present ARAVARA, an audiovisual exhibition curated by Dominican curator Yina Jiménez Suriel. The exhibition opens …