Welcome to HOLO 2.5 (beta), the brand-new online edition of HOLO magazine. Here, we’ll share, collaborate, and build community—both extending out of and expanding on what we do in print.
Shapeshifting across disciplines: “Macchina Inutile” is a flexible visual system designed for HOLO 2.5 by Martin Lorenz of TwoPoints.Net

We don’t think it’s odd to be celebrating an in-between issue as HOLO is all about interstices: first between disciplines, now between mediums. Welcome to HOLO 2.5 (beta), the brand-new online edition of HOLO magazine. How this site works—what it will do—emerges out of our work in print as well as our reading of the ever-shifting landscape of internet culture and web publishing. While we relish the thought of our magazine pages yellowing and aging like fine wine, we are thrilled to open ourselves up to bit rot and join the ephemeral, online fray.

What makes us think we have something to offer the web? Well, for starters, between the straitjacket of standard-issue behaviour on corporate social platforms and the homogeneity of most web-based media outlets, we see a lot of room for anything outside those prescriptive routines. We got our bearing in the digital art and creative coding milieu online more than a decade ago, and HOLO was launched as a companion publication to complement CreativeApplications.net and foster surrounding communities; we still cherish the vital international networks that our peers at We Make Money Not Art, Prosthetic Knowledge, and Beyond the Beyond, foregrounded, and the personalities and practices they surfaced. We miss the synergies that happened across those networks during that era.

That said, one can’t subsist on blogosphere nostalgia—and there is no point in doing anything in 2020 without radical optimism. We’ve put a lot of thought into HOLO 2.5 as a platform, a major goal for its design was to fuse our collaborations with cultural producers into Dossiers, web-based research publications that run in parallel with event and exhibition programming, they happen here in real-time and are then archived for posterity (e.g. take a look at our Digital Economies Reader). We are also excited to pull Stream, our fold-out art, science, and technology news ticker out of the magazine and into infinite scroll; other sections from the magazine including our in-depth artist features (from both our archives and a slate of forthcoming new profiles) will join it online soon. By late next year, where the magazine begins and this website ends will be a little blurry.

We are excited to introduce Dossiers, web-based research publications that run in parallel with event and exhibition programming. These thematic folios are a place for experimenting with editorial formats and to archive knowledge produced during festivals and residencies and in labs.

So, what do these changes for existing or prospective HOLO readers?

Existing HOLO 3 pre-orders: You don’t have to do anything! We’ll transfer your reader account to grant you full access to this site, and you’ll get a copy of HOLO 3 when it is published next year. Keep your eyes peeled on your inbox for further details.

Everyone Else: In the coming months we’ll roll out a reader system, and signing up will pre-order the copy of our magazine and grant you access to reader-only content here on the site; It’ll renew yearly, and cost the same as ordering a copy of HOLO did in the past.

This launch is just the first step, 2021 will see us ramp up our online publishing activities—we hope you’ll bookmark us and make us part of your regular media diet.

$40 USD