Davide Balula

A lesson in conservation from a machine? One of the most significant work produced from that series started in 2020. My A.I. double has been suggesting ways for humans to live longer. So as requested by the machine, we got the genome of collaborators screened for bespoke health preservation counseling and life extension services. One thing that stood out in the context of this exhibition was that both the Nahmad’s and the Calder’s families have maintained art at the center of their life for multiple generations (generation of dealers, generations of artists), passing on their ancestors genes. How often do we get to acknowledge that conservation is not just a set of good material preservation practices, but that it is first and foremost tied to the living, and in particular to the people with first hand experiences with the artwork? Fabricating it, coordinating, installing it, digesting it, contextualizing it, preserving it or restoring it, circulating it.. So here’s a special appreciation, (not just to&from a machine), with much gratitude, respect and love for those who do care about the living, its preservation, those who in so many different ways support art making, from the light or the #shadows (yes you too breather), those who know art is survival. Machines need humans. Humans need life. Machines need life. Long live @kellytaxter @calderfoundation @nahmadcontemporary @libby_haney_ @ladydangfua @jakob_kudsk_steensen @analisa_ #lifeextension #ironiccomingfromamachine #syntheticart #aigeneratedart #naturallanguageprocessing #symbiotic #biodiversity

Save the date: Friday, May 29, 2026. Viseu.Us Vol03 Launch with live readings and performances by Lucas Blalock, Shannon Ebner, Emilie Louise Gossiaux & Kirby Kersels, Char Jeré, Timmy Simonds At Times 151 Lafayette st, 4th fl, New York, NY 10013 Come celebrate the new issue with us! Event is free with RSVP: [email protected] Viseu.us - Volume 03 includes: Lucas Blalock, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Louis Chude-Sokei, Zack Darsee, Carl van Ruin & Vittorio Giampietro, Shannon Ebner, Emilie Louise Gossiaux & Kirby Kersels, Char Jeré, Dorothea Lasky, Nour Mobarak, Ron Padgett, Timmy Simonds ___ @lucasblalock #meimeiberssenbrugge @zackdarsee #AlvinCurran @vittorio_giampietro #shannonebner @emilielouisegossiaux @jeredotcom @dorothealasky @adult_nour @padgett_ron @bushmagus

Trace with us the life of a cloud, from groundwater to vapor and rainfall, this Friday 5/8/26 - 6.30pm @essexflowers 19 Monroe Street, New York, NY with #kennethJimenez (double bass), #SanfordSchwartz (bassoon), and #me (tenor recorder). 30min. Free. Fun. This piece, A Cloud Is a Musical Score, will be hovering @jonathanehrenberg ‘s A Shark’s Mouth Is a Whole Aquarium. A reminder that there can be more than one truth at once. That there is often more to the sum. Special thanks to @rebekahfawn  and @lucasblalock “A [ ] Is a Musical Score” is a performance series conceived by #DavideBalula in which live musicians interpret natural phenomena in real time. Images: The first photo is from a wild stairwell in @goodweathergallery & @schlep.it building in Chicago, taken a few weeks ago. The second image is from a few days ago, and the others, well, also from the past. #forecasting

Archiving here a couple collabs with friend, legendary composer, poet and artist #AlvinCurran - Whistling Alvin Curran’s Fakebook (Answering Machine), 2025 60min recording of Alvin Curran’s greatest hits in whistling form, modified answering machine, cassette. - Alvin sending melodies over a public phone with a small harmonica - Alvin’s contraband Fakebook, musical notations of a very large selection of his compositions (including tonal & atonal, experimental & environmental works) - Alvin’s desk in his apartment in Rome, with #KarlBerger #ClarkCoolidge and a map of downtown NYC in German - Checking the current time on a page of the Orologio artist book (produced with @francesco_stocchi ) - Blowing the conch over some of my somewhat abstract and melodic guitar and voice tunes, setting in motion the - Wind Clock (Mobile, Tall Grasses and Magnetic Pop Corn), 2025 (Detail) - Two ground Clocks grasses laying down with one of Alvin’s Conch - #AlvinCurran actively listening to the whistled messages on @studioli_roma Just thinking about wind and melody.

Performers and ambient light execute the instructions generated in real time by a machine. Your [ ] on your partner’s [ ], 2014-2026 Computer, dancers and lightbulbs. With #KaraBrody #JoanneBarrett #ZachNicol On the occasion of #renben26 @rensoc curated by 🤫 @mauriziocattelan 🙏@myriambensalah 🪩 @kwlund 🧤 @joshi_radin_flores 🏝️ @wakeup_maggie_ 🧶@goodweather.llc ⛪️ @schlepit 🚐 @bellbiba 💃 @chicagoathletichotel ☀️@lulacafe 🍲 @jasonhammel 🧢 @joanaavillez ✏️ @kbrody_ 🤍@joannembarret 🩶 @zxnicl 🖤

Data-resistant, inward experience. Think op-art vibrations, but on the tongue. Fooling the mouth’s #neuroreceptors that register winter air or cold water, this edible work (meltaway #guimauve, fluffier than a marshmallow) begins with a clean, mint-like chill before slowly melting into a growing tingle, swapping the cold 🧊 for fine electrical sparks ⚡️ along the tongue. The feeling hangs around for a couple of minutes (duration and intensity varies among individuals), or until you choose to end it with a white chocolate “off-switch”, a side treat, that wraps the receptors in fat, and smooths everything back to quiet. Edible Data Bloom (Electric Tongue), 2026 Raw honey, ginkgo*, sage*, mallow*, menthol crystals, ws23, sansho, powdered sugar, cornstarch, white chocolate. * handpicked and processed in NYC by yours truly Special thanks to @nadiaaymone @drlkellz #AlisonCoplan - Notes from last week’s Synthetic Legacies : Data Life with @noamsgl @atlas.sounds @saradeirdreokeeffe @swissinstitute in the comments:

Synthetic Legacies: Roundtable Discussion with Noam Segal, Shannon Mattern, and Sara O’ Keeffe Wednesday, January 28 at 7 PM ! As part of the Synthetic Legacies series organized in collaboration with artist Davide Balula, SI presents Data Life, a conversation on legacy custodianship across living and computational entities. Curators Noam Segal and Sara O’Keefe and scholar Shannon Mattern join Davide Balula to examine the traces that collaborations with organic, mineral, and synthetic systems leave behind, and how those traces might persist, erode, or be rewritten over time. “AI doesn’t remember the past; it fabricates the most probable versions of it. Those fabrications seep into catalogues, archives, feeds, and search results, quietly pre-editing art practices as they enter the record. Probabilistic systems move faster than we can feel. It’s easy to trust them and grow addicted to the relief of letting them make decisions. The gain is speed. But the loss is a slow erosion of our cognitive capacity to sit with uncertainty, the unresolved turbulence that gives art its power. As these systems guess their way through redrawing the picture, how do we keep embodied interpretation from slipping out of the record? Archives are metabolic systems, not repositories; they grow, they rot. In such environments, maintenance becomes a creative act. Stewardship may lie in preserving ruptures and silences, human friction, irregularity, and intervals that keep an archive from flattening into a dataset or history from sliding into automated narratives. If doubt is a productive form of knowledge, what happens when we outsource it to systems built to favor the consensus over the critical? What if history’s most consequential moments aren’t driven by probable patterns at all, but by outliers that tip the whole structure: the fault line that finally gives, the drop that breaks the surface tension? Will we trust algorithms to settle these questions with us?” – Davide Balula Please RSVP to [email protected]. A custom edible conceived by Balula will be served. #swissinstitute #davidebalula #noamsegal #saraokeeffe #shannonmattern

AI doesn’t remember the past; it fabricates the most probable versions of it. Wednesday 01/28/26 - 7pm @swissinstitute 38 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10003 SYNTHETIC LEGACIES DATA LIFE Join us in welcoming: #NoamSegal #ShannonMattern #SaraOKeeffe #PippaGarner A conversation on legacy custodianship across living and computational entities. @noamsgl @atlas.sounds @saradeirdreokeeffe @kj_abudu #AlisonCoplan @steffihessler Come and try my neurotransmitter ginkgo treat ! Thank you @nadiaaymone @drlkellz

Disturbance specialist plant, healing Plaintain. (Not the banana). Broad or narrow leaf. My go to SIDEWALK MEDIC PLANT. Chew it on the spot (where it’s clean obviously) and apply to wound, bite etc. Highly resilient. Leaves taste like spinach, seeds like nothing I’ve tasted before, in the best way possible, especially roasted. I like flambeed. It’s been called the white man’s footprint in colonial era as it revealed paths of disturbed soils created by colonizers. Think negative dirt-worn landscape desire lines.

Cecropia is a strange looking fruit. Native to the american tropics, the plant is found to help with Parkinson’s disease, heal wounds and eczema. Some variants show antidepressant-like activity. Apparently tastes delicious.

Synthetic Legacies | Analog Heart TOMORROW Wednesday, October 15 from 6–8 PM As part of the Synthetic Legacies series organized in collaboration with artist Davide Balula (@davide_balula ), SI is pleased to present Analog Heart, a CPR/First-Aid training workshop and public concert where active participants and viewing audiences alike can learn life-saving skills. While workshop participants receive their training with the aid of certified instructor Zachary Caruthers, musicians Russell E. L. Butler (@russelelbutler ) and Mali Mase (@sweater.on.polo ) will create a live ambient score, extracting inner-body growls and fluid sounds from their analog synthesizers. Rooted in the idea that legacy building is a creative endeavor, this event approaches information transference as an embodied experience, where knowledge is practiced and lived rather than data-driven. Echoing artists whose practices resist digitization and uphold archives grounded in oral and physical histories, it suggests that while art conservation focuses on physical artifacts and subsequent data points, preservation must extend to care for the work’s living custodians and companions. Although registration for the workshop is closed, people are welcome to enter, linger, and learn during the workshop’s duration. #swissinstitute #syntheticlegacies #davidbalula #zacharycaruthers #russelelbutler #malimase #cprtraining #firstaidtraining [ID: Two forearms come from the top left corner and interlock, pressing down on the chest of a CPR mannequin. Text is overlaid the image.]

Spring/Summer 2025 Collection collab with P 🐉🪳🌊 Currently on view at @studioli_roma Under Cover Painting (Jean Jacket), 2025 Acrylic paint on denim ~22x26in