1,548 days, 2,378 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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A heartwreching visualization of COVID-19’s impact, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ’s A Crack in the Hourglass (2020) debuts IRL at the Brooklyn Museum . An “anti-monument,” the installation renders portraits of pandemic victims with grains of sand, once realized the delicate images fall away. Commissioned by MUAC (Mexico City), NYC is a fitting first stop, given the city endured amongst the “highest number of pandemic-related deaths in the U.S.—and worldwide,” note the curators.
“Now, just as we’re waking up to ways Facebook has knowingly eroded our social, mental and civic well-being, Zuckerberg is back with a new offering: a way out. Instead of struggling to make sense of or peace in the real world, we can surrender.”
– Media theorist and author
Douglas Rushkoff , on the Facebook
rebrand . “Going meta is Facebook’s escape hatch,“ he writes. “Facebook is not cool with kids, it’s in trouble with the government and its growth prospects are quite limited.”
Software artists and VRAME.io collaborators Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace launch DFACE.app, “the first website that provides neural network face redaction in your web browser.” Using an “impressively small but performant 13MB face detection neural network” (source ) called YOLOV5 , DFACE allows users to easily anonymise profile pictures with a variety of effects while keeping their data private.
“No matter what Mark Zuckerberg calls it, it will remain Zuckerberg Inc. until he relinquishes some power and yields to functional corporate governance.”
– Social media researcher
Jennifer Grygiel , on Facebook renaming itself as Meta (for meta-verse) amidst waves of backlash, condemnation, and revulsion
OUT NOW :
Daragh Byrne & Dan Lockton
Spooky Technology
A compendium of interaction design research produced during a
multi-year initiative exploring the “hidden flows of data, unknown agendas, imaginary clouds, and mysterious sets of rules” that
haunt everyday technologies
“Having the icon be basically the play button was a big innovation of the friendly language of Processing. It isn’t ‘compile’—it’s ‘play.’”
–
Dan Shiffman , Associate Arts Professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, reminiscing on
Processing ’s origins with co-founders
Casey Reas and
Ben Fry . “That was intentional,” explains Reas in
Eye of Design ’s “oral history” of the creative coding language. “If you were learning computer programming at that time you were doing classes in a computer science department. You were only working with text and math.”
“Some people said, ‘Oh, don’t you think the way that the image disappears is kind of violent?’ Well, that’s exactly what a funeral is … closure.”
Trinity College Dublin announces the end of Science Gallery , stating that it no longer considers the venue for science and technology-based exhibitions and lectures to be financially viable. Opened in 2008 to encourage interest in scientific discovery and creativity and counting more than three million visitors to date, the gallery will permanently close on February 28, 2022. The current exhibition, “BIAS: BUILT THIS WAY ,” on AI and algorithmic prejudice curated by Julia Kaganskiy will be its last.
“… and when I changed to a new phone and number, all of the vegetation of two films that were in production suddenly changed, creating panic in a handful of teams for about half a day.”
–
Inigo Quilez , software engineer and creator of Pixar’s “
Wonder Moss ,” upon former colleague Jeremy Cowles
revealing that the procedural geometry generator that spawned the lush vegetation in the studio’s computer-animated feature
Brave used Quilez’ phone number as a seed
For The Calvert Journal , Jonathan Bousfield revisits the “neo-abstraction, early premonitions of op-art, and the beginnings of computer art” seen in New Tendencies , an art movement in former Yugoslavia and one of “Europe’s forgotten avant-gardes.” Between 1961–73, five landmark exhibitions (feat. Julije Knifer , Vladimir Bonačić , Francois Morellet , Victor Vasarely , and many others) brought hundreds of artists, critics, and intellectuals to the city of Zagreb and “anticipated everything from video art to bio-art and robotics.”
“I underestimated how much people already hated NFTs. All I wanted to do was create the equivalent of a flight carbon calculator. But people used it to tweet ‘Your shitty GIFs are ruining the planet.’ We don’t shame people for their carbon footprint like that in any other context.”
–
Memo Akten , on the fallout of
CryptoArt.wtf and why he took it down, eventually. “It served its purpose,” Akten tells fellow artist and Twitch streamer
Raphaël de Courville . “It sparked a conversation around the footprint of NFTs.”
The latest entry in the Whitney’s Sunset/Sunrise series of commissioned Internet artworks that mark sunset and sunrise in New York City every day, Ryan Kuo ’s Hateful Little Thing overwrites the museum’s web pages with text snippets that reflect the artist’s experiences—“frustrations”—as an Asian-American. By creating its own version of exhibition labels, Hateful Little Thing addresses the act of taking up “white space” and highlights the complexities of hate, racism, and exclusion.
Silicon Valley venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz, responsible for the phrase “software is eating the world ,” invest in the Friends with Benefits (FwB) DAO . Perhaps the most well known tokenized community, FwB is praised as the “de facto home of web3 ’s growing creative class” and for onbarding influential artists and creatives into crypto ”by putting human capital first.” The exact details of the funding remain undisclosed, but presumably the ‘get’ here is access to innovative intellectual property, and an inside view of a 2000-member DAO as it evolves from insular community into a (more) prominent cultural producer. “In addition to borderless resource assembly, DAOs enable bottom-up innovation and community building, from which new ideas can be incubated and scaled” note the VC firm’s Carra Wu and Chris Dixon.
DOSSIER :
“One might describe this moment as a pre-scientific , proto-scientific , alchemical stage where we may have not particularly scientifically rigorous explanations, but instead, have complicated, intuitive stories about how the science works.”
– Scholar
Peli Grietzer , on AI alchemy and partial ways of knowing. In their second research transcript, Grietzer and
HOLO 3 guest editor
Nora N. Khan discuss hazy methods of prediction, tarot compression, and Chomsky the mystic
OUT NOW :
Saul Griffith
Electrify
An A to Z action plan for fighting climate change, focused on creating jobs and a healthier environment
“The court jester often says things people need to hear, from angles no one else would think of. Those in power listen for amusement and crazy insight.”
– Sci-fi author
Kim Stanley Robinson , on his imagined role and capacity to speak truth to power when he attends the upcoming “combination diplomacy, trade show, and circus”
COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow
A collaboration between celebrated computer art pioneer Vera Molnar and a team of traditional Venetian glassmakers, Icône 2020 premieres at New Murano Gallery, Venice, in an eponymous exhibition. The gold-dusted glass slab—Molnar’s first use of the medium—is punctured by an ‘on brand’ parametric grid of trapezoids. Instigated in 2019 by curator and producer Francesca Franco , the collaboration aims to connect two traditions: that of making computer art and that of making glass.
“Don’t catalogue eyeballs. Don’t use biometrics for anti-fraud. In fact, don’t use biometrics for anything. The human body is not a ticket-punch.”
–
Edward Snowden , on
Tools for Humanity ’s announcement of
Worldcoin , a forthcoming proof-of-personhood digital identity system and cryptocurrency made available in return for biometric data. “This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people’s iris scans, and waves away the implications by saying ‘we deleted the scans!’” warns the famous whistleblower.
The last stop in the year-long exhibition rally “Multiverse,” Hoonida Kim ’s “Landscape being Decoded” opens at Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). The Korean artist deploys a series of mobile “environmental recognition apparatuses” called DataScape that allow the person inside to navigate the world like an autonomous car: 360° LiDAR sensors collect spatial information and translate them into sound, “because our auditory sense has the least latency.”
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