
MC2 is a new digital-first channel dedicated to exploring the impact of AI and emerging technologies on storytelling and cultural expression. It is the result of a unique collaboration between two of the creative industries’ most dynamic and innovative media-platforms: ArtReview and Nowness.
MC2, an editorially independent channel, combines the depth and experimental narratives of ArtReview and Nowness, testing the boundaries of human experience in the age of machine intelligence.
Taking its name from Albert Einstein’s celebrated equation for energy, MC2 will showcase cutting-edge artworks in both digital and real space, produce reports and essays that map out the state of digital culture today, and serve as a critical meeting point for anyone interested in where creativity – human and nonhuman – will go next.
Moving image is one of the most dynamic mediums used by artists to engage critically with technological change, particularly the rise of AI. With MC2, ArtReview and Nowness come together to present an immersive, ongoing conversation between artists, audiences, and machines. This launch marks the beginning of an editorial experiment focused on digital mediums as canvas and catalyst at the frontier of contemporary culture.
MC2 goes live on 21 July, debuting with its summer season Alternate Realities, a collection of moving-image works interrogating the tensions of selfhood, origin, perception, and control. The season features pioneering pieces from global artists, selected by curators Kate Gu, Bunny Kinney, Irini Mirena Papadimitriou, Mark Rappolt and Marlene Wenger.
Watch MC2’s Summer Season here.

Alternate Realities invites audiences into a manifold space, with a collection of films that are part documentary, part speculative fiction, part ritual, part visual essay. The program positions AI as both mirror and disruptor, prompting existential questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? How do we live in new realities when our perceptions, movements, memories, and voices can be algorithmically reconstructed?
The participating artists include: Nouf Aljowaysir; Silvia dal Dosso; Nikita Diakur; Sam Lawton; Jonas Lund; Natasha Tontey; Kawita Vatanajyankur; Lu Yang; and Ayman Zedani.
Nouf Aljowaysir’s Ana Min Wein? (Where Am I From?) navigates diasporic lineage, her voice entwined with AI narration that reflects inherited bias, offering a poignant critique of digital colonialism. A post-human ecology emerges in Ayman Zedani’s Terrapolis, where thousands of names bloom into algorithmic flora, collapsing human labor into living, emergent systems. Lu Yang’s DOKU the Creator: Twelve Nidānas stages a ritualistic trance in digital avatar form, dissolving narrative linearity and inviting meditative rupture.
Natasha Tontey’s Of Other Tomorrows Never Known offers an ancestral, non-anthropocentric vision of AI, an ecological spirit-guide rooted in Indonesian cosmology. In The Machine Ghost in the Human Shell, Kawita Vatanajyankur and Pat Pataranutaporn foreground synthetic agency in the body, animating the performer through AI-controlled muscle stimulation. Nikita Diakur’s Backflip embraces failure and perseverance as a digital avatar repeatedly attempts to master a backflip through relentless training and fine-tuning, and Silvia Dal Dosso’s The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AF (Part 1) captures the disorienting absurdity of deepfakes and glitch aesthetics in a world where the idea of reality is perpetually destabilized.
Watch MC2’s Summer Season here. Follow MC2 on Instagram and sign up to the MC2 newsletters.