On April 9th 2025, Marina Zurkow, ITP adjunct professor, opened a new exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Parting Worlds brings together a selection of software-based works on view in the 5th floor Kaufman Gallery and on the adjacent terrace. 

From Zurkow:

"The title ‘Parting Worlds’ is an apt descriptor for worlds split in two (above/underwater), torn asunder, leaving the frame (so to speak).  It also speaks to loss and leaving, as environments change and disappear due to human intervention, time, and evolution."

The River is a Circle (2025) is presented as the Hyundai Terrace Commission. This site-specific work engages with the ecologies of the Hudson River and considers the past, present, and possible futures of the Whitney’s surrounding neighborhood, the Meatpacking District.

You can download the glossary Zurkow created for The River is a Circle here. It’s an expansive collection of research and fun facts—from fishes to futures—about the 400 agents who appear in the animated work.

The animations The Earth Eaters (2025) and Mesocosm (Wink, TX) (2012) explore complex social and ecological systems that emerge from the ongoing extraction of raw materials. Each work serves as an algorithmic dreamscape, where recursive loops unfold across various time scales. The Earth Eaters draws from 16th-century manuscripts: Georgius Agricola’s De Re Metallica and Conrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium. These authors are regarded as the "fathers" of mineralogy and zoology, respectively (with thanks to Alexander Klose for his guidance on Agricola).