1,180 days, 1,848 entries ...

Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
“If TurboTax is Dark UI, Tax Heaven 3000 is Pink UI, the nightcore of tax software.”
MSCHF co-founder Dan Greenberg, on Tax Heaven 3000 (image, 2023), a forthcoming dating simulator that allows Americans to court Iris, “a cheerful and easygoing girl who is oddly interested in your personal finances,” while doing their taxes
OUT NOW:
The Posthumanist 2
Rhythms / Rhythmen
The sophomore issue of the English and German periodical of more-than-human perspectives, featuring art, poetry, and essays from contributors including Delal Seker Bulut, Gertrude Gibbons, Eryk Salvaggio, Helene Schulze, and Elvia Wilk.
“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.”
Vox senior reporter Sigal Samuel, making the case for “flattening the curve” of AI progress

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?”
– Artist and writer K Allado-McDowell, exploring possible side effects of the AI revolution. “To adapt, artists must imagine new approaches that subvert, advance or corrupt these new systems,” writes Allado-McDowell. “In the 21st century, art will not be the exclusive domain of humans or machines but a practice of weaving together different forms of intelligence.”

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.”

V
“MySpace had neither the edge of a New York City digital media startup. Nor the loose libertarian spirit of Silicon Valley.”
– American writer Joanne McNeil, recalling a more innocent era of social media. In the first episode of Main Accounts, her new podcast on the rise and fall of MySpace in the 2000s, McNeil engages journalists Julie Angwin and Taylor Lorenz about the social network’s spyware-adjacent origins and its infamous 2005 sale to News Corp.

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?”
– Software artist Sarah Ridgley, musing about how the code for her generative piece Nymph, in Thy Orisons (2023) is hosted on the decentralized Arweave protocol for posterity. In a Twitter Space with curator Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, and “Code Chronicles” artists including Maya Man and Lia Something, Ridgley and company delve into the details of their ongoing show at Bitforms.

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.”

OUT NOW:
Meredith Broussard
More than a Glitch
Interpreting glitches as a “signal that we need to redesign our systems,” data journalist Broussard highlights algorithmic biases against race, gender, and ability across the tech sector—and suggests a path forward to a more equitable future.
“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.”
Ways of Being (2022) author James Bridle, linking AI with nonhuman (rather than synthetic) intelligence, in conversation with Claire L. Evans

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.”
– American artist Addie Wagenknecht, subtweeting crypto enthusiasts as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank wreaks havoc across the financial and the DeFi sector. On March 10, the California tech lender was shut down by regulators “after a stunning 48 hours in which a bank run and a capital crisis led to the second-largest failure of a financial institution in US history,” as CNN reports.

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.”
– German AI artist Mario Klingemann, citing a tweet from January 2017 in which he first introduced the now more common descriptor. “I coined the term when it became obvious that latent spaces will become a new medium,” Klingemann writes, after fellow digital artist Matt DesLauriers and others pondered its origin.

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.”
– German media artist Hito Steyerl, when asked how connected images—“statistical renderings” in her parlance—generated by AI platforms like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are with 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.

To dive deeper into Stream, please or become a .

Daily discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture: Get full access by becoming a HOLO Reader!
  • Perspective: research, long-form analysis, and critical commentary
  • Encounters: in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovators
  • Stream: a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and counting
  • Edition: HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print
$40 USD