1,570 days, 2,407 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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Total Refusal ’s newest videogame exploit Kinderfilm (2023) premieres at Locarno Film Festival (CH) in the prestigious international competition. Set and shot entirely in Rockstar’s action adventure Grand Theft Auto V (2013), the Austrian machinima collective tells the story of Edgar, an NPC, who grapples with existence when he learns of his suspended future. Undoing the safety measures that control his algorithmic reality, Edgar “discovers a beautiful yet nightmarish world” beyond the game.
“Scanning the irises of individuals in the Global South, who genuinely need the money and are unaware of potential risks, is a contemporary form of colonialism.”
– New York-based artist
Burak Arikan , on the recent launch of
Worldcoin . Sam Altman’s biometric cryptocurrency project that aspires to be “the world’s largest identity and financial public network” rolled out with an aggressive recruitment campaign including in the Global South. Luring people with a sign-up bonus of 25 WLD—about $50 USD—Worldcoin booths in Nairobi, Bengaluru, and Hong Kong, for example,
drew massive crowds .
Generative art NFT platform fxhash announces a $5 million seed raise with venture capital firms and angel investors including Tezos Foundation , PunkVenturesDAO , Casey Reas , and thefunnyguys (Le Random ). The funds will be used to hire more team members, support development of a 2.0 release (integrating Ethereum) and tools for art institutions, and bolster the platform’s mission of “empowering anyone, anywhere, to artistically express themselves with code,” they tweet (image: Zancan Garden, Monoliths , 2021).
“In his feud with Zuckerberg, Musk is essentially playing Ric Flair without the charisma.”
– Tech reporter and
Platformer founder
Casey Newton , parsing the drama around the proposed cage fight between the two Silicon Valley giants in show sports terms. “As a connoisseur of pro wrestling, I’m quite familiar with the character Musk is playing here: the big talker who can’t back it up in the ring,” writes Newton. “Wrestling promoters have made a lot of money with cowardly heel champions [like
Flair ] who go to great lengths to avoid having to face their adversaries in combat.” In the real world, the Musk vs Zuck feud moves markets and, Newton argues, deserves a lot more skepticism.
OUT NOW :
Kris De Decker
How To Build A Low-Tech Internet?
Compiled from the
Low-Tech Magazine archives, De Decker questions our obsession with bandwidth, proposes low-tech and solar-powered alternative infrastructures, and pushes back against planned obsolescence.
“It’s the future of finance! Except when the SEC comes knocking, then it’s just a harmless little toy, Your Honor.”
– Crypto pundit
Molly White , on Coinbase’s argument that crypto trading is a form of speculation. In a
motion to dismiss the recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charge of operating an
unregistered securities exchange , the American crypto vendor notes that there’s “no investment of money with a promise of future delivery of anything.” Rather than offering security, a crypto asset is no different than “an American Girl Doll, or a Beanie Baby, or a baseball card.”
Melbourne’s Science Gallery opens “Dark Matters,” an exhibition exploring cosmic mysteries “unseen, unknown, and unspoken.” Co-curated by Arts at CERN ’s Mónica Bello, the gallery’s Tilly Boleyn, and young Melbourners, the show presents transdisciplinary works by a dozen artists including Jon Butt , Julijonas Urbonas , Semiconductor , Suzanne Treister , and Yunchul Kim. Centre-stage takes Kim’s 2022 Venice Biennale serpent, Chroma V , a kinetic sculpture made up of iridescent ‘cells’ activated by subatomic particles.
“It’s easier to build LK-99 at home than it is to write a good internet regulation.”
– Tech journalist and
Platformer founder
Casey Newton , concluding a
Hard Fork episode on the “folk science” surrounding the
LK-99 room-temperature superconductor Korean researchers claim to have discovered—a potentially transformative technology that people are now trying to recreate themselves—and the tight rope between empowerment and censorship that the U.S. congress attempts to walk with the
Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)
Showcasing work spanning video and print, Zach Lieberman ’s solo exhibition “Studies in Color, Light and Geometry” opens at Cromwell Place in London. Organized by the Verse NFT platform alongside several digital editions, it presents a selection of the American artist’s polychromatic horizontal banding and reflection studies. Nodding to precedents László Moholy-Nagy and Abraham Palatnik , it encapsulates the “geometry, animation, gesture, and graphic forms” at play in Lieberman’s steady stream of daily code sketches .
In the wake of its new After AI issue, the Australian art magazine Artlink revisits its special issues on digital media art practice, beginning with Art & Technology (image), published in 1987 in collaboration with the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) and Apple. Writer Julianne Pierce attributes this “prescient commitment” to founding editor Stephanie Britton’s exposure to holographics, digital animation, and computer-generated video in Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation (EAF).
“I think markets are fundamentally a better source of truth than media or narratives.”
– 1confirmation founder
Nick Tomaino , anticipating prediction markets (
e.g. ) will become a go-to source of ‘truth’ as faith in legacy media and government erodes. “People with skin in the game that are speculating on outcomes—I think that can bring a lot more truth to the world,” says the Peter Thiel-backed venture capitalist unironically of his wretched casino-like future.
“By 2025, unless a radical rethink takes place in how we develop AI systems to better account for their environmental impact, the energy consumption of AI tools will be greater than that of the entire human workforce.”
– British journalist
Chris Stokel-Walker , citing a
2022 Garner study in his tally of AI’s exploding ecological costs. To mitigate, he suggests to treat AI more like a cryptocurrency: “with an increased awareness of its harmful environmental impacts, alongside awe at its seemingly magical powers of deduction.”
Indian artist Rohini Devasher publishes a reflection on her recent CERN residency , outlining efforts to move beyond the standard model of fundamental forces in particle physics—and in her practice. Devasher draws a connection between the “multiplication, magnification, distortion” that black holes rip in space-time with video feedback and shares drawings that map the implications of the “new modes and methodologies of research and practice” she was exposed to in Geneva (image: Beyond the Standard Model , 2023).
Pari Nadimi (1952-2023)
Canadian gallerist Pari Nadimi dies after a freak accident. Born in Iran, Nadimi opened her namesake imprint in 1998 and built-up a multigenerational roster of Toronto artists that included
Jeremy Bailey ,
Tori Foster ,
Jesse Colin Jackson ,
David Rokeby , and
Xuan Ye —long before other Canadian commercial galleries paid attention to new media art.
In her review of Oceans (2023), a new Whitechapel Gallery anthology of sea-centric artworks and texts gathered by Pandora Syperek and Sarah Wade , critic Régine Debatty highlights favourites. Picks include Shimabuku ’s octopus diaries, Saskia Olde Wolbers ’ 2017 film Pfui – Pish, Pshaw/Prr , and an interview with Brian Jungen , whose “large sculptures of whale skeletons, made of mass-produced plastic garden furniture, allude to the threat of uncontrollable pollution.” (image: Cetology , 2002)
“This is an unprecedented escalation by a social media company against independent researchers. Musk has just declared open war. If he succeeds in silencing us other researchers will be next in line.”
–
Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) Founder and CEO Imran Ahmed, in response to X, formerly Twitter, threatening legal action over the nonprofit’s research into content moderation. The organization had critized Musk’s leadership for the increase in anti-LGBTQ hate speech and climate misinformation.
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