1,549 days, 2,379 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
Year 2023 2022 2021 2020 Show All
Month January February March April May June July August September October November December Show All
“There’s no comfortable path to decolonizing our minds and institutions. We need to embrace discomfort in order to engage and make change.”
– Spanish curator
Maite Borjabad , on the importance of creating friction. “There is a level of self-consciousness that they need to address issues of equity, diversity and inclusion,” the
Guggenheim Bilbao Museum curator, who views herself as an institutional infiltrator, says of major art organisations. “But at the same time there is so much fear and hesitation.”
“The funniest, saddest aspect of this boom is that the digital and internet artists who had long awaited a salable moment performed a sort of due diligence, or conceptual laundering, for the nothings to come.”
– Artist and writer
Elisabeth Nicula , on watching digital artists ‘pivot to NFTs’ and lend credibility to the cryptoart scene. While critiques are plentiful, Nicula offers new insights, discussing NFTs alongside the extractive nature of land art and the idea of ‘the void.’
OUT NOW :
Anne-Katrin Weber
Television before TV
A transnational study of “new media and exhibition culture” in the late 1920s and 1930s, where television met its first audiences
“Deploying more capital—steady lads.”
– Terraform Labs CEO
Do Kwon , reassuring investors that the
stewards of the Terra cryptocurrency ecosystem are working to quell a major crash. Second only to Ethereum in
total value locked , Terra’s $40 Billion in assets are in freefall due to its central UST stablecoin ‘
depegging ’ from the U.S. Dollar.
“The Artwork as a Living System,” a retrospective of works by Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau , opens at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. Included are early A-Life works (image: Interactive Plant Growing , 1992) through the duo’s recent focus on augmented reality —14 interactive installations in total. “Few artists have shaped the transition from the moving image media phase to the living image media like Sommerer and Mignonneau,” note the curatorial team.
OUT NOW :
Hertrich & Miyazaki
Following the Elephant-Nosed Fish
A
research -driven reimagination of the human sensorium that is part theory-poetry and part theory-fiction
The culmination of the Studiotopia program, which embedded 13 artists in labs for 17 months, “Colliding Epistemes” opens at Bozar in Brussels. For their residencies, artists including Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand , Kuang-Yi Ku , and Sandra Lorenzi (image: How to read poetry to cancer cells? , 2022) were paired with quantum physicists, molecular biologists, and other niche researchers, yielding works about “the collision of disciplines, methodologies, and mindsets.”
“Crypto-toys collapse the distinction between a financial and an emotional investment—a necessary maneuver for a digital asset class ultimately backed by nothing more than flows of sentiment.”
– Writer and researcher Richard Woodall, on why some of the biggest NFT projects look like they were made for children. Juvenile aesthetics help “compensate for a lack of utility or fundamental value,” notes Woodall, “encouraging buyers to imbue them with sentimental worth.”
“Our leaders have offered few spaces for reflection, so artists have stepped in to fill the gap.” In her piece on COVID memorials, New York-based writer Jillian Steinhauer considers four exhibitions that “offer us a place to put our grief.” Featured works by Jill Magid , the Zip Code Memory Project , Rafael Lozano-Hemmer , and Coco Fusco in particular (Your Eyes Will Be An Empty Word , 2022, image) go beyond puncturing the anonymity of numbers; they “memorialize those whose stories we don’t know.”
The Processing Foundation , a champion of software literacy within the visual arts and developer of the eponymous creative coding toolkits, announces that it received a record-breaking $10 million in donations in 2021, a majority of which came from artists donating cryptocurrency. This generous support has “allowed the Foundation’s work to become sustainable for the first time,” writes Executive Director Dorothy R. Santos , citing particularly generous artists such as Joshua Davis , Monica Rizzolli , Jared Tarbell , and Lia . Santos further announces that the foundation’s board decided to suspend new Ethereum donations over environmental concerns. Support for Tezos, a more energy-efficient cryptocurrency, will continue.
Bringing together 18 immersive installations that ponder planetary co-existence, “Our Time on Earth” opens at the Barbican, London. To mitigate dread and paralysis felt in the face of compounding environmental crises, guest curators Caroline Till and Kate Franklin selected works that “carve out space to imagine a constructive way forward.” Case in point: Superflux ’ Refuge for Resurgence (2021), a interspecies dinner table “where all living beings are considered equal.”
“It is about what we pay attention to, what we understand as an emergency, and what we deem worthy of preemptive action. The siren is a portal, a metaphor to start thinking around that.”
–
Aura Satz , about her longtime research project and forthcoming feature film
Preemptive Listening , in which the London-based artist worked with collaborators to “compose new sirens” that “forge a new tentative of understanding of emergency signals”
Alice Bucknell ’s dark eco-fiction Swamp City (2021), in which the American artist and writer imagines the Florida Everglades as a near-future luxury retreat, takes over HOXTON 253, London. For this UK premiere, the gallery space is transformed into the offices of The Evergreen Group, the mock real-estate vendor behind Swamp City, complete with property listings, promotional pamphlets, 3D printed models, and slick prints “to lure in its millennial clientele and investors.”
“Enough risks were found that maybe it shouldn’t generate people or anything photorealistic.”
– AI researcher
Maarten Sap , on
OpenAI ’s latest image and natural language model
DALL-E 2 showing bias “toward generating images of white men by default, overly sexualizing images of women, and reinforcing racial stereotypes.” People with early access to DALL-E 2 were told not to share photorealistic images in public, in large part due to these issues, reports
Wired ’s
Khari Johnson .
Metaverse Petshop , a beta version of a new project by Japanese duo Exonemo debuts at NADA New York . The “playable installation inspired by the relationship between information space and real space” lets participants purchase a CGI dog, release it from its ‘cage,’ and take custody of the pup on their smartphone. The work-in-progress will be presented at an upcoming solo show, and the duo envisions future iterations of the installation will allow users to “mint NFT pedigrees.”
DOSSIER :
“Though she used only traditional artists’ tools before working with an electronic computer in 1968, Vera remembers inventing systematic methods for making art from an early age.”
– Art historian
Zsofi Valyi-Nagy , revealing rare archival material from generative art pioneer Vera Molnar’s early years in Hungary
In the first of six performances, Kerry Guinan ’s The Red Thread links six industrial sewing machines at Dublin’s The Complex with six counterparts at a garment factory in Bangalore, India. “The kinetic installation appears to be self-operating, but there are puppeteers in hiding,” the Irish artist notes about the workers over 8,000 kilometers away. By eliminating that distance, she hopes to “make visceral the extraordinary scale, and underlying humanity, of the globalised economy.”
“It seems possible that too much globality in terms of trust leads to loss of granularity and silencing of difference, and too much locality leads to a disturbing filter-bubble effect.”
–
Sarah Friend , on turning trust into data. In her essay, published as part of
Process and Protocol festival, the Canadian software artist digs into trust network taxonomies and reveals how
Circles UBI , a community-based currency that Friend co-founded, applies “trust networks and decentralization to a social problem.”
OUT NOW :
Britt Wray
Generation Dread
An analysis of mounting environment-related fears and anxieties, in the wake of the escalating climate crisis
Load More
To dive deeper into Stream, please
Log-In or become a
HOLO Reader .
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 commentaryEncounters : in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovatorsStream : a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and countingEdition : HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print
Become a HOLO Reader