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“If TurboTax is Dark UI, Tax Heaven 3000 is Pink UI, the nightcore of tax software.”

The Posthumanist 2
Rhythms / Rhythmen

“Just as quarantining helped slow the spread of the virus and prevent a sharp spike in cases that could have overwhelmed hospitals’ capacity, investing more in safety would slow the development of AI and prevent a sharp spike in progress that could overwhelm society’s capacity to adapt.”
Generative art NFT platform fxhash announces a new feature that “enables collectors to collaborate in the creative process.” Entitled fx(params), the functionality allows artists to designate certain parameters (e.g. colour, geometry, velocity) within their code as adjustable for primary market buyers. Instead of leaving an NFT’s appearance entirely to chance, the collector can tweak the artist’s system to their liking before minting their copy (image: fx(params) interface for 1mpo$ter’s Smash, 2023).

“Without novel human artworks to populate new datasets, AI systems will, over time, lose touch with a kind of ground truth. Might the next version of DALL-E be forced to cannibalize its predecessor?”
Honouring his Mexican heritage and the Latinx community in San Francisco, “TECH-MECHS,” a survey of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive installations opens at Gray Area. Featured are lyrical works like Pulse Topology (2021, image), in which 3000 dangling LEDs blink the varying rhythms of visitors’ recorded heartbeats, as well as bleaker perspectives on mortality and self-sovereignty, such as Sway (2016), an upside-down noose that moves from side to side “every time ICE arrests a person, like a metronome.”

“MySpace had neither the edge of a New York City digital media startup. Nor the loose libertarian spirit of Silicon Valley.”
Brazilian researchers report the finding of “plastic rocks” on the remote island of Trindade, part of a volcanic archipelago about 1,100 kilometres off mainland Brazil. Chemical tests revealed the main pollutant forming these plastiglomerates to be synthetic fishing nets that wash ashore and ‘melt’ into the sediment when temperatures rise. “This is new and terrifying at the same time, because pollution has reached geology,” says Fernanda Avelar Santos, a geologist at the Federal University of Parana.

“It’s a question of permanence. What will last the longest? What will give me the strongest sense of comfort that a work will exist well beyond my lifetime?”
Internet artist, former Rhizome co-editor, and are.na co-founder John Michael Boling resurrects his 2007 net art piece 20 Years Ago Today along with other parts of 53 os, a collaborative mid-2000s catalogue of GIFs, videos, and quirky web experiments. Cleverly, 20 Years Ago Today moves a playing YouTube panorama sequence across the browser canvas at matching speed, resulting in what net art pioneer Olia Lialina, then, praised as “a shining example of distributed work and tactful appropriation.”

Meredith Broussard
More than a Glitch

“The very existence, even the idea of artificial intelligence, is a doorway to acknowledging multiple forms of intelligence and infinite kinds of intelligence, and therefore a radical decentering of the human, which has always accompanied our ideas about AI — but mostly incredibly fearfully.”
Lorna Mills’ solo exhibition “The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common Part 1” opens online at distant.gallery, populating your browser canvas with dozens of Mill’s eccentric GIFs. Hosted in collaboration with TRANSFER gallery, LA-based curator Kelani Nichole’s digital art imprint and long-time Mills representative, the show also serves as an in-browser gathering for net art enthusiasts: “COME TO THE OPENING,” the Canadian media artist tweeted to her followers. “BE A GIF. BE A FUCKING GIF.”

“Congratulations to everyone who wanted to be bankless, you got what you wanted.”
London-based light and media art collective United Visual Artists (UVA) celebrates the 20th anniversary of their studio genesis: Tasked with the (now iconic) stage design of Massive Attack’s 100th Window world tour (2003-4), UVA founders Chris Bird, Matt Clark, and Ash Nehru developed LED typographic displays for politically charged, location-specific real-time data feeds. “At the time, our way of working together was unique,” they write on Instagram. “It went on to inform our practice and studio culture.”

“Neurography [is] the process of framing and capturing images in latent spaces. The Neurographer controls locations, subjects and parameters.”
Berlin-based media artist Aram Bartholl plants a towering heart emoji, or Triangle of Sadness (2023), outside of Stadtgalerie Kiel, Germany, as part of the gallery’s “Tourismus. Let’s do it all” group exhibition. The latest in Bartholl’s series of supersized Internet iconography (Map, 2006-19, This is Fine, 2022) deals with the performative aspects of travel in age of platform capitalism and calls attention to the social cost of algorithmically driven content production and consumption cycles.

“No, these renderings do not relate to reality. They relate to the totality of crap online. So that’s basically their field of reference, right? Just scrape everything online and that’s your new reality.”
A survey of artworks acquired by the Nam June Paik Art Center during its COVID-19 pandemic closure opens in Seoul. “On Collecting Time” presents Kim Heecheon, Sunmin Park, Jinah Roh, Sungsil Ryu, and 6 other artists whose collected works are thematically bound in their exploration of “human and machine time in various forms.” Unmake Lab’s Utopian Extraction (2020, image), for example, pairs video demonstrating janky real-time object detection and documentation of slowly evolving landscapes.

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