Shimmer

An eye-opening collection from contemporary artists and authors about how art and technology can reimagine humanity’s relationship with nature and society.

Shimmer—the apt name of both the highly-illustrated book and the exhibition it accompanies—offers a timely collection of essays by today’s key thinkers about art and technology. In this vital showcase that takes on some of the most salient questions of our time, authors and artists consider how a “posthuman” perspective can help inspire new ways to confront crises like climate change, species extinction, technological manipulation, and social alienation.

Here, you’ll find current thinking on interspecies entanglement, the role of dreams in imagining a post-anthropocentric world, a return to the interconnectivity found in prior (mostly Indigenous) technologies, and the power of enchantment. Examining both the advantages and dangers of twenty-first century tools, essayists explore the artistic use of quantum computing, machine learning, motion capture software, and augmented, extended, and virtual reality.

Throughout this engaging collection, the authors show that, like the Surrealists of the twentieth century, many of today’s artists tap the transformative agency of the marvelous, the uncanny, and the unpredictable, destabilizing conventional patterns of thought to open new pathways to unexplored terrain.

Artist profiles include Nancy Baker Cahill, Ian Cheng, Chalet Comellas, Anna Dumitriu and Alex May, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Libby Heaney, Marguerite Humeau, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Kite, Katja Loher, Josefa Ntjam, Rachel Rossin, Jacolby Satterwhite, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Saya Woolfalk, and Marina Zurkow.

The exhibition Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman opens September 2026 at the Frist Museum in Nashville and in 2027 travels to the Media Majlis Museum of Northwestern University in Doha and the Palmer Museum of Art, Penn State.

Mark W. Scala is Chief Curator at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. He has mounted multiple major exhibitions at the Frist, the publications for which focus on the metamorphosis of the body in global contemporary art such as Paint Made Flesh¸ Phantom Bodies, and Chaos and Awe.

Nora N. Khan is an independent critic, curator, and professor at UC-Santa Cruz. Her publications include AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism and Seeing, Naming, Knowing. She is a member of the Curatorial Collective of Counterpublic.