AI art and biohacks that ponder post-humanism, CGI fever dreams that (further) distort reality, software that speaks truth to power: HOLO Readers enjoy full access to our weird and wonderful discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture. Join us and support indie publishing in the process.

“Ten Thousand Suns,” the 24th edition of the Biennale of Sydney opens at venues across the New South Wales capital. Artists including Mona Al Qadiri, Dumb Type, Özgür Kar, and Lawrence Lek are featured at the White Bay Power Station flagship exhibition, which repurposes the former coal-fired facility as a cultural hub. Excitingly, Australian cyberfeminism originators VNS Matrix present a selection of their works from the last four decades on banners, displays, and zines throughout the venue (image).

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“A default move within contemporary art over the past two decades: defunctionalized objects pulled out of usual circulation or infrastructural location appear to offer a kind of freezing and deictic insight.”
e-flux Contributing Editor Evan Calder Williams, taking aim at white cube infrastructure porn. “As if a hunk of undersea internet cable on a gallery floor confronts us with the materiality of communication,” he writes in the second part of an essay on sweeping cultural paralysis. [quote edited]

“Universal / Remote,” a show chronicling how “capital and data flow freely on a global scale,” opens at the National Art Center Tokyo (NACT). Artists including Xu Bing, Maiko Jinushi, Trevor Paglen, and Evan Roth contribute works addressing globalization and social atomization. Hito Steyerl, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, and Miloš Trakilović stage their video installation Mission Accomplished: Belanciege (2019, image), a sardonic reflection on post-Berlin Wall European culture—and the luxury brand Balenciaga.

“László Moholy-Nagy telephoned instructions to a factory in the 1920s to produce images without the need to be on-site to direct production.”
– Artist George Legrady, reaching back to the Bauhaus to locate an early precedent for AI-generated imagery. Taking stock of his ongoing experimentation with MidJourney and Stable Diffusion, Legrady explores the aesthetic and critical concerns around prompt-based art.
“We’d have kept our fossil fuel funding sponsors AND curated poetry competitions on climate change if it wasn’t for those pesky school strike kids.”
– English trip hop juggernaut Massive Attack, ‘decoding’ a Guardian op-ed on ethics and precarity in the cultural sector. The piece cites the criticism and climate activism offered by Bergen’s recent International Literary Festival as an example for why festivals matter, but fails to explore the Faustian bargain that sustains a lot of cultural infrastructure.
Serials
New Art City Virtualizes The Gallery, Abolishes Gatekeepers, and Increases Access
Burak Arikan Maps Power Structures, Financial Flows, and Networks of Influence
Total Refusal Collective Casts NPC Workers in Critique of Contemporary Labour
Akil Kumarasamy Parses Quantum Plotlines and Large Language Models
Wade Wallerstein Decodes Digital Art’s Myriad “Distant Early Warnings”
Maarten Vanden Eynde Encapsulates Human Fallibility for the Ages
Miriam Arbus Cultivates “Seed Systems” That Nurture New XR Ecologies
Martin Bricelj Baraga Builds Monuments to the Sky’s 53 Shades of Blue
Claire L. Evans Assembles Fifty Key Sci-Fi Voices to “Terraform” Futurity
Kyriaki Goni Weaves Counter-Narratives to Colonial Cosmologies and Space Expansionism
Dossiers
General
A new HOLO format, Dossiers are web-based research publications that contextualize and expand upon cultural initiatives in real-time

Dossiers are dedicated HOLO folios that augment and complement exhibitions, residencies, conferences, and educational initiatives. Realised in collaboration with artists, writers, curators, and cultural partners, they are designed to document process and disseminate knowledge through a variety of engaging formats—essays, interviews, artwork—all within a focused online magazine. If you’re interested in working with us on a Dossier, please get in touch via our Contact page.

Encounters
AI art and biohacks, CGI fever dreams, software that speaks truth to power—join us and receive full access to HOLO’s daily discoveries in critical creative practice.
$40 / $75 / $350
Questioning our problematic faith in AI, Nora N. Khan and fifteen luminaries measure the gap between machine learning hypotheticals and the mess of lived experience.
$40
An inquiry into the nature of randomness—how science explains it and how culture (and art) emerges from it
$45
Parsing emerging representational and perceptual paradigms in the wake of the Snowden revelations and nascent computer vision technologies
$75
An illustrated field guide on plastiglomerates, robot dogs, antenna trees and other hybrid creatures (and objects) of our time
$35
The first three instalments of ‘anticipatory’ designers N O R M A L S eponymous graphic novel series delineate a dark and unsettling world of hyper-mediated futures.
$65

Emerging trajectories in art, science, and technology (since 2012)

As an editorial and curatorial platform, HOLO explores disciplinary interstices and entangled knowledge as epicentres of critical creative practice, radical imagination, research, and activism

“I feel the language and concepts I’m working with don’t comfortably fit within the normal discourse about art and aesthetics. CERN’s physicists and engineers understood the tools I was using and I was able to talk about my goals. I just couldn’t have that kind of dialogue in an art context.”—sound artist Bill Fontana on his CERN residency (HOLO 2, p.206)

There is a space between a computer’s command line interface and the contemporary art museum, the legalese of Silicon Valley’s terms and conditions and the social contract, the whoosh of a particle accelerator and the romanticized “a ha” of artistic inspiration. For much of the twentieth century these gaps were chasms, separating science and engineering from the humanities and siloing them off; today, these gaps are narrowing and disciplinary interstices are the spaces to watch. Increasingly aware of how much technology governs not only entrenched fields of study but every aspect of modern life, we’ve come to realise that things are deeply intertwined.

HOLO emerged in 2012 to explore these entanglements—first with a periodical, now across an expanded platform. Set up in the grey zones between art, science, and technology, it frames scientific research and emerging technologies as being more than sites of invention and innovation—as epicentres of critical creative practice, radical imagination, and activism. The artists and designers working with related materials—algorithms and microcontrollers, meteoroids and fungi, data and archives—aren’t just updating notions of craft for the twenty-first century, they are researchers and cultural critics.

As an editorial and curatorial platform, HOLO occupies the same eccentric vantage points as these hybrid creative practices and puts them into perspective. Working across multiple avenues—print and online, events and production—HOLO collaborates with contributors and cultural partners to facilitate fruitful dialogue between domains and bring new voices into the conversation.

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