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Theta’s World (2023, image), an experimental videogame created by Lawrence Lek in the X Virtual incubator program, launches online. Commissioned by Beijing’s X Museum, the self-described simulation artist and sinofuturist is true to form here, presenting an imagined smart city—SimBeijing—that can be navigated in-browser. Between the floating architectural forms, urban geometries, and scattered text fragments, the experience presents “whispering stories that shift and morph with every journey undertaken.”
“The obsolescence regime is a world where it’s very hard to have any power if you were to refuse to listen to AI systems and insist on doing everything with just human intelligence.”
– AI researcher
Ajeya Cotra , on a “potential future end point with AI systems” outlined in her and Kelsey Piper’s blog
Planned Obsolescence . “If you are a military general in a hot war you’ll have to listen to your AI advisor; if you’re an engineer you’ll have to make use of AI scientists,” explains Cotra. “It’s a world where it’s impossible to compete without AI.”
Formafantasma ’s solo exhibition “Oltre Terra. Why Wool Matters” opens at Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, offering insight into the Italian design studio’s ongoing research “on the history, ecology, and global dynamics of the production of wool.” Curated by Hanne Eide and presented in six sections featuring objects, paintings, textiles, photographs, and videos, the show unravels the complexities of co-domestication that, Formafantasma argue, “have transformed humans as much as humans have transformed sheep.”
Julius von Bismarck ’s solo exhibition “When Platitudes Become Form” opens at Berlinische Galerie, examining simplistic clichés of “how nature is seen and history is written.” For the sculptural piece I like the flowers (2017, image), for example, the German artist pressed dried plants of non-European origin into two dimensions. Bismarck’s critique of extractivist colonial world views also includes his own family history: A suspended 9 x 12 meter cloth, Landscape Painting (2022), invokes the moving waters of the Bismarck Sea .
“We’ve been fixing the airplane while flying it for twenty years now—we’re really trying to make it more sustainable for the people involved.”
Festivals are vital nodes in the cultural nervous system. But running them is a constant struggle. How can festival makers simultaneously build resilience, expand accessibility and inclusion, while minimizing the environmental cost of cultural production? A MUTEK-led think tank is trying to find out.
“The goals his work sets out to achieve assume profits for emerging capitalists are an unalloyed good, while anything that would interrupt these is an obstacle to be eliminated.”
– AI researcher
Meredith Whittaker , on the ideology and motivations of computer pioneer
Charles Babbage . A critical intervention into his legacy, Whittaker draws connections between Babbage’s machines, his perspective on ‘free’ labour, and the brutal efficiency of colonial plantations.
In anticipation of the UN plastics treaty talks in Paris, Australian researchers at the Minderoo Foundation release the fist-ever plastics pollution weather forecast: Up to 48 kilograms of nylon, polyester, and car tire particles are estimated to blanket greater Paris every 24 hours. Based on 2015 studies rather than real-time data, the actual numbers are likely much higher, the researchers warn. Still, the forecast app “should sharpen the focus of negotiators,” hopes Minderoo’s Marcus Gover.
“History is not on rails—it’s got a steering wheel. And we can grab it, and we can yank it.”
– Writer
Cory Doctorow , praising sci-fi that shows “human agency matters,” and the march of progress does
not lead to pre-ordained outcomes. In conversation with the hosts of
This Machine Kills , the Canadian thinker explains how scams and cryptography intersect in
Red Team Blues (2023), his first novel in a new series about a legendary forensic accountant.
British composer and vintage computer music connoisseur Paulee Alex Bow takes to his Magical Synth Adventure! YouTube channel to revisit obscure software instruments on the Commodore Amiga , a 16bit home computer platform launched in 1985. Introducing viewers to the unique capabilities of the system’s 4-channel sound chip, Paula, Bow demoes a variety of early real-time soft synths including Aegis SONIX (1986, image), Sonic Arranger (1992), and OctaMED (1989-97, “my happy place”) that enthusiasts experiment with to this day.
OUT NOW :
Antony Loewenstein
The Palestine Laboratory
Journalist
Loewenstein follows the money, demonstrating how occupied Palestine is an ‘R&D lab’ for surveillance and weaponry products exported globally by the Israeli military-industrial complex.
“Projects such as Aadhaar propose a distinction between ‘identity and identification’—the former an amalgamation of social relations and historical processes, and the latter touted as a neutral act of correlating one piece of information to another.”
– Indian writer
Arushi Vats , framing the
Aadhaar biometric ID system. Drawing from her biography and critical theory, Vats ruminates on
living with and
resisting the 12-digit unique identity number assigned to every Indian citizen.
Lawrence Lek ’s solo exhibition “Black Cloud Highway” opens at Sadie Coles HQ, London, expanding the world of his 2021 CGI film into a ‘site-specific simulation.’ Black Cloud tells the story of a lone traffic surveillance AI in an abandoned smart city. At Sadie Coles HQ, the film’s highways become a cinematic landscape: Spanning two floors, Lek creates a “unified spatial environment of media and architecture” that incorporates sculptural elements—suspended car parts—and a new text-based role-playing game.
Australian architect and filmmaker Liam Young premieres a new docu-fiction installation, The Great Endeavor (2023), at this year’s Venice Biennale. The piece offers glimpses of a longer forthcoming film that approaches planetary-scale carbon sequestration with radical optimism. Young and consulting scientist Holly Jean Buck turn humanity’s largest engineering project into an infrastructural imaginary, “chronicling the coordinated action to decolonise the atmosphere in our last great act of planetary transformation.”
“The artificial robin may sound like a robin to even the keenest human—and AI—ears. But does it sound like a robin to a robin?”
– British and South African artist
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg , on questions of value that are at the heart of her Toledo Museum of Art solo show. “
Machine Auguries: Toledo ” comprises an immersive sound installation wherein a natural dawn chorus gradually gives way to one filled with AI-generated calls, set against a backdrop of an artificial sky.
Carla Gannis ’ solo exhibition “wwwunderkammer” opens at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (HICA) in Charleston (US), aiming to decolonize the wunderkammer and, by extension, the museum. A real-world manifestation of her ongoing social VR project (2019–), the show invites visitors to explore a series of ‘chambers,’ each focusing on a different aspect of life in the internet age. In line with the American transmedia artist’s penchant for illusionism, the gallery uses AR to obfuscate what’s real and what’s not.
Faith Holland ’s solo exhibition “Death Drive” opens at Microscope, New York, featuring new sculptures, videos, and digital prints that examine technological decay. In the series Death Doula (2023, image), for example, broken laptops, tablets, and smartphones become mycelium habitats that the New York-based artist, in the feminist tradition of the studio kitchen, cultivated in her home refrigerator. Over time, the molds will grow, shape colour, and, Holland muses, may help deteriorate hardware that takes eons to decompose.
“ChatGPT is an advertisement for Microsoft. It’s an advertisement for studio heads, the military, and others who might want to actually license this technology via Microsoft’s cloud services.”
– Signal Foundation president and AI Now Institute co-founder
Meredith Whittaker , on the strategy behind releasing generative AI to the public. “It costs billions of dollars to create and maintain these systems head-to-tail,” Whittaker says. “There isn’t a business model in simply making ChatGPT available for everyone equally. The technology is going to follow the current matrix of inequality.”
“It underscores the idea of the private space sector as a plaything for the ultra-rich.”
–
Art in America Associate Editor
Emily Watlington , critiquing Jeff Koons’
Moon Phases (2023, image), which will send 125 sculptures by the American artist to the Moon on a SpaceX rocket
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