STREAMING MUSEUM
Arts · Technology · World Affairs
Julie Mehretu, Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation, 2001. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 101-1/2 x 208-1/2 in. (257.2 x 529.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery © Julie Mehretu. Photo credit: Edward C. Robison III
"Welcome to Our New Era." According to Thomas L. Friedman, global affairs journalist at the New York Times, it's called the Polycene—a time defined by "the full fusion taking place between accelerating climate change and rapid transformations in technology, biology, cognition, connectivity, materials science, geopolitics and geoeconomics."
"Every system is interacting with every other system. Every problem now that needs solving is at a planetary scale—governing AI, nuclear weapons, climate—and therefore, every solution will have to be at a planetary scale."
Amsterdam-based artist Martine Stig called Friedman’s term Polycene “spot on to describe our current times”—and then expanded it into Poly(s)cene, reflecting how artists experience and express this interconnected world-scene from many perspectives. Stig's three film essays are featured here.
These entanglements are not new — history is full of them. What distinguishes this moment is speed and scale and the expanding powers of AI technologies. They are propelling an unprecedented ability for major institutions and those in positions of influence, to steer outcomes through communication platforms, and other methods, toward particular interests. Yet, designing systems and rechanneling resources that support people and their enormous potential would ultimately strengthen those very institutions as well.
Meanwhile, smartphones, cloud computing and ubiquitous connectivity give every individual (who can afford them) and every machine a voice and a lever of impact at a speed and scale never before imaginable. The world is a living network.
Yet, what this means for Friedman is that the two most powerful emotions driving human beings are humiliation and dignity and the deep quest for home, to feel anchored in the world. In times of rapid change when systems collide and identities feel unstable, these emotional forces shape politics as much as economics or technology. And certainly throughout history, for those living through war and tyranny there has been no sense of home. Today, as the International Rescue Committee (IRC) reports, millions are living amid violence, displacement, and humanitarian crisis amidst about 120 active armed conflicts worldwide.
How is it that a species that has evolved to the point where it can ponder the universe and infinity still remains preoccupied with animal instincts that no longer serve it?
- Astronaut Ron Garan
Artists feel the Poly(s)cene
The Entangled World
Julie Mehretu, Conversion (S.M. del Popolo/after C.), 2019-2020. Ink and acrylic on canvas. 96 x 120 in. (243.8 x 304.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery ©Julie Mehretu. Photo credit: Edward C. Robison III
Julie Mehretu’s monumental paintings layer architectural plans, migration routes, urban grids, political diagrams, and gestural abstraction into dense, kinetic fields. Her works often feel like cartographies of global movement—conflict zones, shifting political forces, and global systems—all colliding on a single surface. In Poly(s)cene terms, her canvases reveal a complex world where past and present, geographies, infrastructures, and human forces are in motion.
Conversion (S.M. del Popolo/after C.) (2019-20) is part of a series of large-scale paintings in which Mehretu reworked historical images through digital manipulation and abstraction. (“after C” refers to Caravaggio.). The painting draws from Caravaggio’s The Conversion of Saint Paul (c.1601) in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome. Mehretu blurs and destabilizes the Baroque image until figuration nearly disappears, then overlays gestural marks, color fields, and sweeping movements. The surface feels dense and atmospheric, as if multiple events are unfolding at once. History is not erased but submerged and reactivated within turbulent abstraction, where past and present coexist in a charged state of instability and transformation. The painting suggests a world shaped by many forces moving at once within a single field.
More on Julie Mehretu:
Marion Goodman Gallery, New York
History propelled into the future
Xin Ying, a principal dancer in the Martha Graham Dance Company, creates interdisciplinary works that explore the potential of AI and other cutting-edge technology to extend the past and present into the future. In this excerpt from Letter to Nobody, she dances a duet with archival film of Martha Graham at the Joyce Theater in NYC.
The arts bear witness to their times. The dance works and technique of Martha Graham (1894-1991) transformed the scope of dance by grounding them in the social, political, psychological, and gender realities of her era, giving them a depth and urgency that continues to resonate today.
In progress is a documentary film about Ying's life devoted to Graham's legacy and innovative, choreography, activism, and motherhood.
Discover more about her acclaimed work here.
Stories featured at Streaming Museum: L-R: Richard Mosse, Incoming #96 (2016), still from Incoming series on mass migration and human displacement unfolding across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa; Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston, August 25, 2021 from Doomscrolling series, captures social unrest conveying the conflicts of ideologies and physical violence; James Nachtwey, Struggle to Live--the fight against TB (early 2000s) one of world’s greatest photojournalists covers the most critical social problems; Oscar Howe, Wounded Knee Massacre (1960), modernist interpretations of Native American history; Tivadar Domaniczky, Basetrack media project covering the Afghanistan war with Teru Kuwayama and Balazs Gardi (2010-11); Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes (c.1620) depicts heroic sisterhood and power against tyranny.
Considering the capabilities of quantum computing to harness the atomic forces that created the universe—
can it, together with AI and diverse expertise, uncover solutions to the world's environmental, social, and geopolitical challenges that have been beyond human capability? But even if it can, will those in power allow those solutions to happen?
Woman and Child (2008) Palizi village, Arunachal Pradesh, NE corner of India. Photograph by Chris Rainier.
As the arts—expressing the human condition across history—are drawn into and processed in AI’s datasets, they influence what flows back into society. Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI" and 2024 Nobel laureate in Physics, proposes embedding “maternal instincts” into AI systems—so they truly care for people. He insists it’s the only path to a safe future otherwise, super-intelligent AI may replace humanity.
Quantum computing, the creative process of artists, and dreaming share fascinating similarities with the Poly(s)cene.. Quantum concepts like superposition and entanglement, and the way dreams can blend different realities and ideas at once, closely mirror an artist’s creative flow. Similarly, quantum tunneling, where particles pass through barriers, reflects how dreamers and artists move between ideas or scenes without a clear path, exploring unexpected realms. Creative solutions and ideas emerge from this realm of free flowing thought.
Overlapping realities
superposition (2014) by Ryoji Ikeda is a project about how we understand the reality of nature on an atomic scale and is inspired by the mathematical principles of quantum mechanics. Performers appear on stage as operator / conductor / observer / examiners. All the components on stage exist in a state of superposition—sound, visuals, physical phenomena, mathematical concepts, human behavior, and randomness—that are constantly orchestrated and de-orchestrated simultaneously within a single performance piece. superposition reflects a world of overlapping realities, where multiple forces entangle, interact, and unfold simultaneously.
Ikeda’s test pattern [times square] captures the abstract digital language of the data-driven world, placed into one of the most media-saturated public spaces in the world. Streaming Museum filmed the experience of it's month-long exhibition in the Times Square Arts Midnight Moment program.
confluxes [+] [x] corner portals (excerpt) by Janis Garancs, RIXC Gallery, Riga (2026)
Jānis Garančs' presents his views about the Polycene in relation to his immersive installation, confluxes [+] [x] corner portals (2026).
What resonated for me in Thomas Friedman’s New York Times essay describing The New Era, is his framing of our moment as a “poly‑epoch,” where multiple technological, ecological, and geopolitical transformations unfold simultaneously and at incompatible speeds. He argues that we are living inside overlapping systems whose interactions are increasingly difficult to perceive, let alone narrate.
That tension is very close to what I explore in confluxus [+][×] corner portals. The installation grew out of my experiments with spatial metaphors for data streams—how flows of information, financial signals, and algorithmic processes can be staged not as a single coherent picture, but as intersecting temporalities and geometries that the viewer must navigate. In that sense, the work tries to give a perceptual form to the same condition Friedman describes: a world where structures collide, slip, or briefly align, and where our interpretive position is always shifting.
Some of this comes from the topics in my recent research: where I look at “narrative economics” and the rise of "Affectivism" and growing role of what sociologist Phil Zuckerman call "aweism" (secular, nonreligious approach to finding meaning). The idea that aesthetic and design choices matter when representing complexity, but that they should support understanding rather than collapse into pure spectacle. The challenge is to create immersive experiences that help people sense the dynamics of contemporary systems—without pretending to simplify them into a single storyline.
So the thematic connection, for me, lies in this shared question: how do we make sense of multi‑layered, algorithmically mediated realities? Friedman approaches it through global analysis; I approach it through spatialized, perceptual experiments. But both are concerned with how we navigate a world where the flows shaping our lives are increasingly abstract, intertwined, and difficult to grasp from any one vantage point. — Jānis Garančs
The art of practical invention
Michael Najjar, fusion power II, 2025. From the cool earth series (2021-ongoing). 79.5 x 52 in and 40.2 x 26.3 in, edition of 6. Archival pigment print, aludibond, diasec, custom-made frame
fusion power II, 2025 by Michael Najjar translates the complexity of fusion research into powerful imagery that, rather than explaining innovation, feels like the future of energy. As climate realities and technological ambition unfold together, the work bridges scientific vision and public imagination, capable of inspiring the desire for sustainable transformation and new possibilities.
fusion power II portrays ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in southern France—the world’s largest fusion research facility currently under construction. The project marks a major step toward harnessing the same process that powers the sun, with the potential to transform how energy is generated and used on Earth. Designed to demonstrate both the technological feasibility and economic viability of fusion, ITER aims to advance a sustainable, secure energy source capable of meeting growing global demands without environmental harm.
More on Michael Najjar
fusion power II and cool earth series
How artists and machines might improvise together
DREAM FACTORY by the Posthuman Cinema Collective explores how artists and machines might improvise together—composing atmospheres, voices, and bodies that neither could make alone. The result is speculative and sensorial, at once fiction, documentary, expanded cinema, and prescient work of contemporary art.
This 30-minute film work, released in 2026, unfolds across five movements, beginning with the literal making of AI models as they imagine themselves into embodied existence and culminating in these entities becoming jaded Superstars speaking directly to viewers.
Drawing from a rich lineage that spans Lynn Hershman Leeson's cyborgian explorations of artificial identity, and the dream-logic of Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch, and American underground filmmakers like Carolee Schneemann and Stan Brakhage, the collective fuses poetic language and polyvalent montage techniques to conjure a previously unimagined art form, one that redefines how stories can be told in the age of AI.
Discover more about
DREAM FACTORY and Posthuman Cinema Collective
Ten artworks created with AI and Quantum
This collection of ten artworks shows how artists are integrating AI and revealing the quantum world through sculpture, music, dance, robotics, and historic and sci-fi stories. It begins with The Energy+Art Garden (TEAG)—an artful and practical sustainable infrastructure design by artist Raphael Shirley and Streaming Museum founder Nina Colosi,
AI and Quantum systems have become both creative instruments and collaborators. Art from across history, absorbed into their training systems, provides vast cultural memory—a voice of the world with which artists can communicate and improvise. At the same time, these technologies function as powerful creative tools, expanding possibility much as a film director works with a team of specialists to realize a vision.
This newly entangled human–machine co-influence is similar to artists’ creative process throughout history. In the 20th century, Pablo Picasso reshaped modern painting after studying Paul Cézanne’s structural compositions, Martha Graham revolutionized modern dance by transforming Isadora Duncan’s expressive freedom. Composer Philip Glass, known for his minimalist, hypnotic repeating structures, credits Johann Sebastian Bach as foundational. Artistic evolution has always moved through such influences.
Contemporary artists continue that lineage. Julie Mehretu, acknowledges early abstraction—Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Paul Klee—while redirecting it toward systems, migration, and power structures. Ryoji Ikeda has cited John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen as formative influences in his immersive sound and data environments.
Tools have always shaped the creative engine. The piano expanded Beethoven’s harmonic architecture. Portable paint tubes allowed Monet to paint outdoors and capture changing light in real time.. The camera liberated painting from strict realism. Synthesizers and tape loops transformed musical structure. Digital audio workstations allow composers to sculpt, layer, and spatialize sound with orchestral scale from a single studio. Each technological shift altered not only how art was made, but what could be imagined.
In this era of entangled global systems and powerful emerging technologies, new and influential forms of creation and wisdom emerge through the arts.
The arts reach across cultures and national borders
