Product

HOLO 3

Mirror Stage:
Between Computability
and Its Opposite

Guest editor Nora N. Khan and fifteen luminaries question our problematic faith in and deference to AI. Exploring the limits of knowledge, prediction, language, and abstraction in computation, their collected essays and artworks measure the gap between machine learning hypotheticals and the mess of lived experience.

Editor / Research Partner

Nora N. KhanNora N. Khan is a writer, editor, and curator based in Los Angeles. She is Executive Director of Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism, which publishes X-TRA. Khan is the author of Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019) and the forthcoming The Artificial and the Real and No Context: AI Art, Machine Learning, and the Stakes for Art Criticism. Her essays have appeared in publications including Art in America, Artforum, and Flash Art.
Peli GrietzerPeli Grietzer is a writer, theorist, and philosopher based in Berlin. He received a PhD from Harvards comparative literature department under the advisorship of Hebrew University mathematician Tomer Schlank, and is currently finishing his book Big Mood: A Transcendental- Computational Essay on Art, which makes a mathy case that modernist, romantic, and avantgarde ideas about poetry, thought, and meaning might be literally true.

Contributors

Leigh AlexanderLeigh Alexander is a writer and narrative designer focused on storytelling systems, digital society, and the future. She won the 2019 award for Best Writing in a Video Game from the esteemed Writers Guild of Great Britain for Reigns: Her Majesty, and her speculative fiction has been published in Slate and the Verge.
K Allado-McDowellK Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the book Pharmako-AI (2021); co-editor, with Ben Vickers, of The Atlas of Anomalous AI (2021); and record and release music under the name Qenric. In 2016, Allado-McDowell established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI.
Thomas BrettThomas Brett is a New York-based artist working across film, animation, and videogames. Interested in the transformative capacity of physical artefacts and their conversion to virtuality or myth, he crafts worlds from objects, producing hidden narratives of character and space.
Ingrid BurringtonIngrid Burrington is a New York-based artist and writer interested in places, politics, and the weird feelings people have about both. She is the author of Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure (2016) and has written for The Atlantic, Quartz, The Nation, and the San Francisco Art Quarterly.
Ryan KuoRyan Kuo lives and works in New York City. He has used game engines, chatbots, web and UX design, and writing to produce circuitous and unresolved movements in which objects are lost and found in white escape routes. His work is distributed online at left gallery, and has appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art, bitforms gallery, and TRANSFER.
Nick LarsonNick Larson is an artist and designer based in Providence, Rhode Island. His work investigates moments of noise, static, and ambiguity in the world around him. His practice involves image processing, compression, degradation, and multimedia composition. He is currently researching the aesthetics of online misinformation, conspiracy, and extremist ideology.
Huw LemmeyHuw Lemmey is a novelist, artist, and critic living in Barcelona. He is the author of the novels Unknown Language (2020), Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell (2019), and Chubz: The Demonization of my Working Arse (2016). His essays have appeared in publications including the Guardian, Frieze, and Flash Art.
Mimi ỌnụọhaMimi Ọnụọha is a Nigerian-American artist and researcher whose work highlights the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection. Ọnụọha has been in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art & Technology, Studio XX, Data & Society Research Institute, Columbia University, and the Royal College of Art.
Sera SchwarzSera Schwarz is a writer and philosopher based in Berlin. Their work moves between the philosophy of psychology, epistemology, and ethics, and focuses on the points of contact (and conflict) between perspectives on the mental underwritten by the contemporary cognitive sciences and the humanist tradition. They are currently a graduate student at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität. They also write poetry and make sound art
Jenna SutelaJenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and living media. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances identify and react to precarious social and material moments. Sutela’s work has been presented at venues including Guggenheim Bilbao, Shanghai Biennale, and Liverpool Biennial.
Suzanne TreisterSuzanne Treister has been a pioneer in the digital and new media art fields since the 1990s, making work about emerging technologies, developing fictional worlds and international organizations. She has evolved a body of work that engages with eccentric narratives and unconventional research to reveal structures that bind power, identity, and knowledge.
Francis TsengFrancis Tseng is a software engineer and lead independent researcher at the Jain Family Institute in New York. His seasonal interests include agriculture and food, repair, thermal comfort, and simulation. In the past he was a co-publisher of The New Inquiry, where he contributed to projects including White Collar Crime Risk Zones and Bail Bloc.
Jackie WangJackie Wang is a scholar, poet, artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), a book on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the US carceral state.
Nicholas WhittakerNicholas Whittaker is a doctoral student at the City University of New York Graduate Center. They work on understanding and propagating the conditions of possibility of black abolitionism as a world-ending enterprise. Their work can be found in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The Point, and The Drift.
Elvia WilkElvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York. She is author of the novel Oval (2019) and a forthcoming collection of essays entitled Death by Landscape. A recipient of the 2019 Andy Warhol Arts Writers grant, Wilk has served as an editor for transmediale and Rhizome.

Gallery

“How might we recognize in the pool of advanced computation, not just a reflection, but the underlying logic of technology, the stories it whispers to us from beyond the surface?”

Development Diary

Learn more about the making of HOLO 3 via the development diary. It’s an instance of ‘thinking in public,’ where Guest Editor Nora N. Khan and Team HOLO documented their process from start to finish, be it excerpts of Khan’s research conversations with Peli Grietzer, erudite introductions of themes and contributors, or design mockups and schematics.