Pittsburgh (US) – HOLO

The Generative Museum Renders ICA Pittsburgh’s Future

Alexander Scholz — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 23:30:00 +0000

● 21/10/2025

In anticipation of the 2027 opening of its new facilities, the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) Pittsburgh teamed up with KADIST and EPOCH to offer a virtual tour of what’s to come. “The Generative Museum” is a detailed rendition of the forthcoming building, featuring a promptable exhibition that draws on ICA and KADIST’s vast collections. Another highlight: four AI works by Morehshin Allahyari, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Joe Namy, and Ahmet Öğüt.

ICA Pittsburgh

Everest Pipkin Reflects on the Digital Commons

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 13:55:06 +0000

● 20/10/2025

“Even now, beset by bots and hemmed in by private equity at all sides, there are places on the internet that feel healthy and loved. They are built and maintained by people, for and with their communities, with an ecological-scaled attention.”

– American artist Everest Pipkin, celebrating community-maintained digital spaces that resist platform decay through collective care. Ahead of an upcoming Carnegie Mellon School of Art lecture, they discuss the internet as a public good and draw connections between ecological and digital sustainability.

CMU School of Art

Cory Doctorow Torches Big Tech’s “Enshittification” at PyCon US

Greg J. Smith — Thu, 22 May 2025 23:19:00 +0000

● 22/05/2025

“The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut.”

– Writer Cory Doctorow, taking aim at Big Tech in his PyCon US keynote. Speaking to Python developers in Pittsburgh, he outlines how tech platforms follow a predictable three-stage decay: first luring users with great products, then squeezing them to please business customers, and finally extracting value until only a “homeopathic residue” of utility remains.

YouTube

“Do Delivery Robots Have the Right of Way?”

Alexander Scholz — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 21:00:00 +0000

● 11/10/2021

“Hard to imagine how this could be faster or more cost-effective than humans. It just looks like a performance to scare increasingly organized gig workers.”

– Indie game developer Paolo Pedercini aka Molleindustria, on Kiwibot’s semi-autonomous delivery robots taking over his Pittsburgh neighbourhood. “It [the robot] performs well on the rough sidewalks but it randomly stationed on a curb cut for five minutes, blocking the ramp and confusing drivers—do they even have right of way?”

Twitter

Jacolby Satterwhite’s “Spirits Roaming on the Earth” Chronicles a Decade of Worldbuilding

Greg J. Smith — Sat, 14 Aug 2021 16:14:56 +0000

● 14/08/2021

“Spirits Roaming on the Earth,” the first major survey show of American artist Jacolby Satterwhite opens at Pittsburgh’s Miller ICA. Providing a chronology of the artist’s signature fusion of worldbuilding, mythology, and queer theory, and interpretations of his Mother’s drawings, in mixed-media works spanning installation to VR and CGI (image: Black Luncheon, 2020), Satterwhite “transforms existential uncertainty into a generative engine of resilience, reinvention, and celebration.”

Miller ICA

New Processing Library Merges Craft and Computation

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 13:00:00 +0000

● 17/08/2020

Developed under the direction of Golan Levin at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Lingdong Huang and Tatyana Mustakos release PEmbroider, a new library for Processing that merges craft and computation. Whereas existing embroidery software is costly and proprietary, PEmbroider offers a “free, cross-platform, open-source, lightweight Java library for generative embroidery design.”

GitHub

Indiegame Designer Restores North America’s First Interactive Film

Alexander Scholz — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 23:00:00 +0000

● 07/08/2020

Paolo Pedercini, head of radical game studio Molleindustria and the Pittsburgh game art gallery LIKELIKE, announces the online restoration of what is arguably North America’s first interactive film: I’m Your Man (1992) is a 20-minute short that was produced to showcase Loews Theatres’ interactive cinema technology. Touted as the first step toward virtual-reality cinema, the entertainment giant retrofitted select New York locations with seat-mounted controllers that let audiences vote on branching narratives. The experiment proved a failure and the equipment was removed in 1994. Thanks to TweeVee, LIKELIKE’s JavaScript engine for interactive video, the oddity can be experienced again.

Molleindustria