1,725 days, 2,676 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“What if an exhibition had an energy budget? How would it affect its design, organization, management, and activation?” With 16/2017 , Spanish artist Joana Moll forces Barcelona’s Arts Santa Mònica Center to cut its energy usage by 50% during the “Exposar · No exposar-se · Exposar-se · No exposar” exhibition. Named after a failed policy to half the region’s CO2 emissions by 2030, 16/2017 prescribes weekly meetings to monitor the energy budget and negotiate corrective measures with management, artists, and the public.
“Call me a Gen-X’er, but I’m troubled by artwashing as a means of distancing from bigger issues, like the lack of governmental regulation of consolidation, racist AI, tunnel-effects of social media, etc. I’m almost nostalgic for days when banks bought art for lobbies.”
–
Eyebeam Executive Director
Roderick Schrock , on why he turned down an invitation to participate in a Big Tech roundtable on “the role of artist communities in promoting corporate culture through creative place-making”
The most extensive installation of Rafaël Rozendaal ’s websites series and the Dutch-Brazillian artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK, “Permanent Distraction” opens at Site Gallery , Sheffield. Existing and newly produced websites are shown as twelve, floor to ceiling projections, filling the space with abstract colour, movement and gesture. The show “forces us to confront the slippage between our physical and digital realities,” writes the gallery, “bringing bodies physically into the space of the internet.”
Drawing on Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree , writer Claire L. Evans makes a case for reimagining the web’s central metaphor as a forest . Teasing out the famed Canadian ecologist’s findings gleaned from a life in forestry, Evans uses the symbiotic tendencies of ‘Mother’ trees, mycorrhizal fungi, and birch trees, to map alternate readings of the web. Big Tech has “privileged high-value crops—viral content, controversy, and clickbait—over a healthier ecosystem of people, opinions, and perspectives,” she writes, likening platform capitalism to clear cutting—short term profit at the ecosystem’s expense. While the diagnosis is grim, Evans ends optimistically, calling for “Mother nodes,” resilient sites of nurturing and collective memory.
“I wanted to see what human-generated randomness looks like,” writes Jonathan Chomko of his NFT project Proof of Work . Extending out his previous prompt-driven choreography , the Montréal artist created software for collecting random values from “small-scale“ gestures: typing random characters on a keyboard. Experiments with scale and colour yielded a pixellated visual language and, post-NFT drop , he notes the labourious process “records a minimum viable artwork, the hand of the artist visible in the digital image.”
“Far from being triumphantly automated, an autotelic system lays bare its vulnerable workings through fragments of machines left to care for nomadic organs.”
–
Ingrid Luquet-Gad , on Lithuanian artist duo
Pakui Hardware ’s recent body of sculptural works that delves into remote healthcare technologies and services “with an almost uncannily timely relevance.” The art critic and writer notes that “as ambiguous as a process without a subject intrinsically is, robotic and digitalized care is similarly so in its outcomes for humanity.”
OUT NOW :
Paradigm #1
Coming in hot from the world of fashion and trendspotting, Paradigm is a new short-run periodical about aesthetics and culture
In her first institutional solo show “The Notebook Simulations,” on view at Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Berlin-based artist Agnes Scherer supersizes the laptop, rendering its mythos in paint (not pixels). Nine monumental laptops evoke “contemporary folklore” with error messages from Microsoft Windows and endlessly multiplying program windows. Recalling “megalithic stone formations and ancient temple sites,” Scherer’s notebooks resemble archaic ruins of an era in the process of drifting away into the past.
DOSSIER :
“How have we ‘half-known’ and ‘half-understood’ the appearance of new intelligence, human-like or not, throughout history? What ways of partial knowing do we exercise all the time?”
– Guest editor
Nora N. Khan , on the questions driving the first chapter of
HOLO 3 , featuring contributions by Huw Lemmey, Elvia Wilk, Nicholas Whittaker, and Thomas Brett
“Time Holds All the Answers,” a survey of Postcommodity ’s work opens at Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Canada. Duo Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist have long “injected Indigenous knowledge systems into the museum,” challenging its hermeticism and, here, Let Us Pray For the Water Between Us (2020, image) transforms an 8,300 L hazmat storage container into a drum with a motorized mallet sounding interior rhythms, reverberating calls for “respect, accountability, and transparency” in water stewardship.
“The lifespan of bitcoin mining devices remains limited to just 1.29 years. As a result, we estimate that the whole bitcoin network currently cycles through 30.7 metric kilotons of equipment per year.”
A survey of the Argentinian artist’s inquiries into breath, spirit, and regeneration, Tomás Saraceno ’s solo exhibition “We Do Not All Breathe the Same Air” opens at neugerriemschneider in Berlin. A highlight is Saraceno’s newest installation, Particular Matter(s) , that illuminates microscopic air particles “like millions of suspended galaxies” with a beam of light. Noteworthy: the exhibition is powered by renewables and opening hours shift with daylight to conserve energy.
“I couldn’t meet any students for almost three semesters. However, it would have been no problem for me as a director to shoot commercials or reality TV. How is system relevance defined here? Not to mention culture?”
– Artist, filmmaker, and educator
Hito Steyerl , declining one of Germany’s most prestigious civilian honours, the Federal Cross of Merit. In a
letter published in the German weekly
Die Zeit , Steyerl decried the government’s’ uneven response to the pandemic, which she cast as confusing, “half-baked and unendless.”
Seoul-based light art studio Kimchi and Chips launches Another Moon into the skies over Zeche Zollverein , a former coal mine turned World Heritage Site in Essen, Germany. Premiering as part of NEW NOW festival in celebration of the end of fossil fuels, the installation’s ring of 40 solar-powered laser projectors captures sunlight during the day to cast it back into the sky at night. Where the beams meet, a 3D sphere—another moon—appears.
“Yet function is rarely an obvious impediment in wearable tech. Wristwatches only tell time, and sunglasses only tell the world you’re awesome. In some ways not doing too much was the point of Glass.”
– Opinion columnist
Farhad Manjoo , reminiscing about the simplicity of
Google Glass in a hyperbolic (but amusing) rumination on the looming age of VR, AR, and “face computing”
Curated by Karie Liao, “Geofenced” opens at (and around) Toronto’s InterAccess . Presented on the artist-run centre’s steps, at a local parkette, microbrewery , and other sites, the show features AR works by Cat Bluemke & Jonathan Carroll, Scott Benesiinaabandan , Jenn E Norton , and Adrienne Matheuszik . The latter’s Proxima-B (2021, image) superimposes scenes from an “extraplanetary resort … free from the troubles of the earth” in the InterAccess gallery, at a nearby parking pad, and on a billboard.
OUT NOW :
Stanislaw Lem
The Truth and Other Stories
A collection of twelve short stories from the late Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem, nine of which have never been published in English before
Twitter user and Blockchain sleuth Zuwu shares an incriminating paper trail revealing a senior employee of the NFT platform OpenSea has been engaging in insider trading. In a Twitter thread they list a number of suspicious transactions from wallets connected to OpenSea Head of Product Nate Chastain—indicating purchases of NFT projects right before they were featured on the site’s homepage, and then corresponding sales when the price spiked. While unscrupulous NFT collectors engage in a range of dubious practices including scalping, bribing miners, and gas wars, this is the first instances of a major NFT platform employee being caught red-handed.
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