1,571 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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“Academics call it the ‘liar’s dividend.’ It means that, because there is so much falseness in the world, it becomes really easy for bad actors to call ‘deepfake!’ on everything.”
Carola Bonfili ’s solo exhibition “Second Order Reality” opens at Aksioma, Ljubljana, exploring states of magical thinking and embodied otherness in virtual worlds. Drawing on the writings of Gustave Flaubert and H.G. Wells as well as videogame metaphors, the Italian artist tells the story of primate protagonist M’ling, The Stone Monkey (2022), across CGI video, an immersive VR experience (entitled Level 1, Illusions That We Should Have, But Don’t ), and concrete sculptures.
“I like to think of the creators of the barcode as the Oppenheimers of capitalism.”
–
Atlantic editor
Saahil Desai , waxing poetic about the ubiquitous zebra-striped
data format that powers retail. “The era of big-box stores and megastores and Costcos the size of medieval European towns is only possible because of the barcode,” he concludes. [quote edited]
OUT NOW :
Kyle Chayka
Filterworld
Drawing on years of reporting,
New Yorker staff writer
Chayka broadly surveys how algorithms shape culture and perception, exploring how they are simultaneously “engineered for seamless consumption” and “a source of pervasive anxiety.”
“Rather than a tool for dominance, akin to practices like data-driven racial profiling by law enforcement, it serves as a repository for quotations from diverse voices, generating a collective feminist intelligence rooted in diversity.”
– Media scholar
Ariana Dongus , describing
#SOPHYGRAY , a feminist chatbot created by German artist
Nadja Verena Marcin . Noting how the bot “gradually reveals and challenges female stereotypes,” Dongus situates it in a broader history of erased labour and gendered computing.
“It is really disheartening to watch artists I respect run to do ordinals. Can’t help but remember the rough convos we had around energy use and carbon load of ETH.”
– Digital artist and prolific collector
Chris Coleman , on fellow creators “loading art onto the most wasteful crypto in existence,” Bitcoin, in the wake of Sotheby’s “
Natively Digital: An Ordinals Curated Sale .” Rather than following the money, Coleman reaffirms his commitment to ‘green NFTs’ (on energy-efficient proof-of-stake chains) and takes a stand: “I don’t want to judge, but no way will I buy or sell on that chain.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launches the Street Level Surveillance Hub, a resource for learning about invasive technologies used by U.S. law enforcement. The website contains accessible intros to cell-site simulators, gunshot detection systems, predictive policing, and other troubling technologies, and identifies related civil liberties concerns. “Understanding this panopticon is the first step in protecting our rights,” says EFF Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia .
Over 9,000 Moon Drawings are headed into space aboard NASA’s Peregrine Mission One . Crowdsourced in 2015 by American media artist Golan Levin and the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Moon Arts Group, the drawings (“whimsical doodles, symbols of hope, solemn wishes, eternal visual forms”) are micro-etched onto a 40mm sapphire disc—the Moon Arts Ark . Sadly, these and other included “gifts to the moon” will never reach their final destination due to a fuel leak detected shortly after launch.
“We are not moving into a 1.5C world, we are briefly passing through it in 2024. We will pass through the 2C (3.6F) world in the 2030s unless we take purposeful actions to affect the planet’s energy balance.”
– Former NASA scientist and climate authority
James Hansen , on global warming outpacing predictions fast. “The 1.5C milestone is significant because it shows that the story being told by the United Nations, with the acquiescence of its scientific advisory body, the IPCC, is a load of bullshit,” Hansen tells
The Guardian .
“Tishan Hsu evokes the twinned ways that technology both estranges and enlivens our bodies. It’s work clearly born of an era in which cyborgian devices—pacemakers, nebulizers, insulin pumps—are enabling longer lives. How miraculous, and how bizarre.”
– Critic
Emily Watlington , describing
Tishan Hsu ’s
current exhibition at Secession Vienna. The posthuman digital forms in the show are so grotesque Watlington found herself asking a disquieting question when viewing the work: “Which orifice am I looking at?”
Honouring the centenary of late digital art pioneer Vera Molnar (1924-2023) as part of this year’s Genuary , American media artist and lecturer Golan Levin shares a re-code of Molnar’s 1970 plotter work, À la Recherche de Paul Klee . Realized in p5.js and fully accessible via the p5.js online editor , Levin’s tribute and countless others were prompted by generative artists Melissa Wiederrecht and Piter Pasma , who set the Molnar theme for the online creative coding sprint on Genuary 5th .
“We found that a remarkable amount of activity—about 75%—occurs outside of public monitoring systems. These previously invisible vessels radically changed our knowledge about the scale, scope and location of fishing activity.”
– Natural resource economics scholar
Jennifer Raynor , on the true extent of industrial ocean activity. In a
new study , Raynor and
Global Fishing Watch researchers combined satellite images, vessel GPS data, and artificial intelligence to fix the blind spots of current monitoring systems.
“While politicians spent millions harnessing the power of social media to shape elections during the 2010s, generative AI effectively reduces the cost of producing empty and misleading information to zero.”
– Management scholar and
Business Bullshit (2018) author André Spicer, on the effects “
botshit ” may have on politics. “There is a danger that voters could end up living in generated online realities that are based on a toxic mixture of AI hallucinations and political expediency,” Spicer warns.
Retro computing blogger Josh Renaud reports the recovery of long-lost algorithmic music software developed by American-Israeli inventor and cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen in 1986. Magic Harp was a set of six thematic music disks to be bundled with the Commodore Amiga, each dedicated to a different genre. Found was a beta version of “baroque,” where a Bach-like “artificial personality” conducts digital organs and spinets (image). After the deal with Commodore fell through, Kirschen’s innovations were largely lost to obscurity.
“There is hope, of course, that humans may solve climate change. We have built cooperative governance before, although never like this: in a rush at a global scale.”
– University of Maine evolutionary biologist
Tim Waring , on how cultural evolution among sub-global groups works against our ability to tackle shared priorities. “To solve global collective challenges we have to swim upstream,” Waring says of his team’s
research into the links between cultural traits and environmental crises.
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