1,578 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
Year
Month
Tag
Order
Custom
Filter
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announces the decommission of the Arecibo Observatory after another snapped cable had caused further damages to its iconic radio dish. The decision was made when several independent engineering companies assessed that the telescope structure is “in danger of a catastrophic failure” and recommended controlled demolition “as soon as pragmatically possible.” Gutted by the news, scientists around the world flood social media with #WhatAreciboMeansToMe posts.
“If the surface internet is like Art Basel, then the darknet would be your artist-run space in a dirty basement in Bushwick.”
– Italian internet artist
Franco Mattes , on “Time Out of Joint,” the online exhibition he and partner Eva curated in “uncharted territory at the periphery of the Internet” as part of the 2020
Yerevan Biennial . “Can we still imagine a place with no likes, shares, comments, and recommendations? A place with only content?” Mattes asks about the darknet as a viable alternative. “It might be liberating, forcing the FOMO out of you.”
“We’ve always worked in this way where we treat sound and image as if they’re the same thing—they’re a material we work with—and bringing them together yields a very sculptural process.”
In their latest investigation, London-based research agency Forensic Architecture reconstruct the Beirut port explosion that killed more than two hundred people, wounded over 6,500, and destroyed large parts of the city on the evening of Aug 4. Using open-source information including videos, photographs, and documents provided by the independent Egyptian online newspaper Mada Masr , project lead Samaneh Moafi and team provide a meticulous, evidence-based picture of the events and “the multiple layers of state negligence” at play that day.
“GPT-3 is an extraordinary piece of technology, but as intelligent, conscious, smart, aware, perceptive, insightful, sensitive and sensible (etc.) as an old typewriter.”
Welcome to HOLO 2.5, the new digital arm of HOLO magazine! We don’t think it’s odd to be celebrating an in-between issue as HOLO is all about interstices: first between disciplines, now between mediums. Please take a look around; for more details on our new online home read the welcome note, linked below.
OUT NOW :
AGF
Extinction Stories
An extension of
Extinction Room (2019), a performative 16-channel sound installation realised together with choreographer Sergiu Matiș, ‘audio sculptress’ AGF (aka
Antye Greie ) compiles 19 collages on extinct and endangered animal species. All proceeds will go to environmental causes.
“It’s equally clear that a massive paradigm shift will be needed to combat the deep-seated belief—which has been entrenched by decades of post-World War II economic policies—that growth is ‘the equivalence of life,’ and ‘not to grow is equivalence of death.’”
– Chloe Stead, on the urgency of post-growth futures and how artists like DISNOVATION.ORG can help model them
Expanding upon
DISNOVATION.ORG ’s “Post Growth” exhibition at iMAL, Brussels, writer and critic
Chloe Stead delves into the French artist-researcher collective’s speculative work on kinship futures after fossil fuels and zombie capitalism.
“We are not promoting ‘eating ourselves’ as a realistic solution that will fix humans’ protein needs. We rather ask a question: what would be the sacrifices we need to make to be able to keep consuming meat at the pace that we are?”
“There’s no ‘healthy’ way to educate children entirely within structures of capitalist exploitation. There’s no way to entertain them safely either.”
– Artist and writer
James Bridle , on YouTube being “the perfection of a system of techniques held in common by Sesame Street, Teletubbies, and captology for the acquisition and retention of attention, stripped of all desire to do anything with that attention beyond profit from it”
The 2020 CHRONIQUES Biennale of Digital Imagination opens across Marseille’s museums and galleries, exploring the theme of “Eternity” in times of compounding crises. Nearly 50 artists, many from guest country Taiwan, present provocations that link technological progress and planetary precipice. UNBORN0X9 (2020, image) by Future Baby Production (Shu Lea Cheang and Ewen Chardronnet ), for example, integrates human reproduction into a dystopian cybernetic communication system that ‘tunes into’ artificial wombs.
OUT NOW :
Shalini Kantayya
Coded Bias
Director Shalini Kantayya’s new documentary on MIT Media Lab researcher
Joy Buolamwini ‘s work exposing algorithmic bias premieres at New York’s Metrograph cinema.
“It just goes back to, no one truly respects sex workers. All those things are pirated, and that’s supposed to be against all the rules, but because we’re having sex on camera they’re like, well, she asked for it.”
– Adult performer Leah Gotti, on her images “living forever” in machine learning datasets used for deepfake porn creation, continuing the cycle of exploitation indefinitely
OUT NOW :
Judy Chicago
Rainbow AR
Porting her polychromatic, billowing smoke into the digital age, Judy Chicago Rainbow AR allows iOS and Android users to set off one of the artist’s iconic Smoke Sculptures in their living room or backyard.
“Now, it exists in VR—complete with weathered detailing and a last-minute Trump 2020 podium. And rejoicing furries.”
– Caroline Haskins, on the
VRChat immortalization of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the now infamous Philadelphia business where Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani addressed the press. Furries led by YouTuber
CooperTom had re-created the site on the VR social platform to hold a rally of their own.
Avatar artist LaTurbo Avedon announces that the mirror emoji submitted by her, Theo Schear, and ‘emoji activist’ Jennifer 8. Lee is now official Unicode (13.0) standard. Citing anthropologist Tom Boellstorff’s writings on mirrors in Second Life , their proposal from February 21, 2019, argues for the mirror as an important “non-literal” symbol users carry over from one world to another as “we integrate ourselves more closely with the virtual.”
Collecting animations, videos, plotter drawings, digital paintings, and teletype printouts, “Computational Arts in Canada 1967–1974” opens at Western University’s McIntosh Gallery in London, Ontario. Curated by Adam Lauder and Mark Hayward, the show is the first historical survey of Canada’s contributions to early computer art and features drawings by Leslie Mezei and Roger Vilder, and Art Ex Machina , a series of silk-screen prints by international artists including Frieder Nake and Hiroshi Kawano .
Originally commissioned by the UK Space Agency as part of their art outreach initiative, Chomko & Rosier’s Relative Clocks have been (semi-)permanently installed in Bristol. The clocks measure the varying impact of speed and gravity relative to Earth’s time within four separate spacecraft, and will spend the next eight years on display at the We the Curious science museum.
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