Decode: Digital Design Sensations, London
Once written off as a tech nerd's paradise, digital art and design has become a central part of modern life. But, as this extensive exhibition of digital culture reveals, we don't know the half of it. No show of this kind would be complete without the medium's original whiz-kid, John Maeda, whose film, Nature, explores inorganic metamorphoses through computer animation. Projects by his scions include flowers grown from computer code, set to blossom as digital wallpaper. Meanwhile, boffins digging around in the data traces left by communication technology have realised emotions bared by bloggers worldwide as colourful floating spheres. A few of the works are more of the physical world, like a mechanical eye that mimics the optic movements of those who stare at it, and a "responsive sculpture", which creates a mirror image of viewers on 768 motorised planes.
Victoria & Albert Museum, SW7, to 11 Apr
Skye Sherwin
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Leeds
The Scottish painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham found her artistic voice on settling in Cornwall in 1940 and joining the flourishing St Ives Group of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. While she remained in the area off and on until her death in 2004, she never gained the international renown of her peers. Yet the best of her drawings, as shown here, display an intimate passion for nature largely missing from the St Ives Group's modernist agenda. Indeed there's something quite touching in her modesty of approach, the almost tentative graphic sensitivity with which she traces the outlines of wave rhythms and hillside horizons. It's convincing enough as one person's honest celebration of a love of the landscape.
The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, to 26 Feb
Robert Clark
All Things Said, Cambridge
Off the usual art circuit and away from the pockets of big city collectors, three Cambridge painters take very different approaches to the natural world in this artist-organised show. In Miranda Boulton's images, rooms become stage sets for a cast of nudes and forest creatures, where painted walls melt into landscapes in a dreamy haze of faded blues and greens. There's an erotic eruption of flowers and psychedelic drips and swirls recalling Japanese prints and graffiti, realised in oil and spray paint by Alice Hill. Clare Moggridge's smudgy paintings offer a surreal monochrome vision of the goings-on in a beauty salon, with hair and skin being pulled and primed by intrusive hands.
The Shop, to 20 Dec
Skye Sherwin
Susanne Bürner, London
It's the horror movie's high point – that nerve-jangling build-up before we see the monster – that Susanne Bürner exploits in her eerie art films. In the German artist's earlier works, things have a tendency to disappear, as if spirited away by the mise-en-scène. Whether it's a white plastic bag camouflaged against a wintry landscape, or actors who vanish behind curtains, Bürner leaves us waiting for something to happen, feeling menaced while filling in the rest of the story. Leaves, her new video, features just a meadow surrounded by trees. Yet with a spine-tingling soundtrack created with ex-Fall bassist Steve Trafford and Eliav Brand, this rural idyll seems the setting for impending disaster.
South London Gallery, SE5, to 18 Dec
Skye Sherwin
Janek Schaefer, Liverpool
Janek Schaefer originally studied architecture and it shows in his constantly inventive audio-visual manipulations of space. This welcome first retrospective includes his 1995 Recorded Delivery, a "sound art" piece playing back the sporadic and fragmented noises recorded by a Dictaphone travelling overnight through the postal system. The work elicited a rare tribute from sound art guru Brian Eno, whose father was a postman: "It is elegant, economical and clever, and makes me wish I'd thought of it first." Schaefer samples and composes sounds with the physical waywardness of an assemblage sculptor, disorientating and reorientating sounds, and adding audio surprises. Bluecoat Gallery, to 17 Jan
Robert Clark
Raymond Pettibon, London
Prolific, angsty draughtsman and cult figure, Raymond Pettibon turned a comic strip style into art. In the late-70s he started doing fanzines and album artwork for bands such as Black Flag and Sonic Youth. He's seemingly gone non-stop ever since, and his oeuvre has changed little. His drawings are a rapacious chronicle of art history, religious imagery and degraded American dreams featuring everyone from the Silver Surfer to Ronald Reagan and Charles Manson. Dashed out with what looks like manic urgency, they come with literary quotations, pulp soundbites and eloquent satirical observations. Alongside key drawings from the 1980s, a show of new works is as wildly disorienting as ever.
Sadie Coles, W1, to 9 Jan
Skye Sherwin
Ellsworth Kelly, Middlesbrough
In 1954 Ellsworth Kelly returned to New York after six formative years in Paris, where he fell under the prevailing abstract spell of Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi and Alexander Calder. Now 86 years old, the artist has selected some 25 drawings created during his breakthrough period of 1954–1962. Constructed from layerings of graphite, ink, oils and collage, these are abstractions of remarkable lyrical presence. Kelly's works from this period demonstrate the mysterious magnetism of great abstract painting: its ability to transfix the eye with a presence of something almost maddeningly indefinable, its air of being painstakingly distilled from a long process of observation of real-life phenomena despite its deceptive simplicity.
Middlesbrough Institute Of Modern Art, to 21 Feb
Robert Clark
Beyond Pattern, Newtown
Through the decades of 20th-century modernist western art, certain visual characteristics became outlawed: storytelling, illustration, decoration. Any aspect of patterning was anathema to the formalist rigour of modernism and frowned upon as an indulgence of craftwork. But in our post-postmodernist age, not a few artists will embrace pattern with wholehearted if somewhat perverse enthusiasm. Steve Messam was commissioned for this show to clad a building in the black and white fleeces of Welsh Mountain and Kerry Hill sheep (over 300 in total). Other artists, including Nisha Duggal (work pictured), Leo Fitzmaurice and Michael Brennand-Wood, use pattern to enchant, intrigue and disturb.
Oriel Davies Gallery, to 27 Jan
Robert Clark
