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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
“I wasn’t creating work that was about technology or about the internet or about computers, but about the humans using the computers, myself using computers, my body in front of the computer.”
– Artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey, on using digital tools to explore personal narratives, embodiment, and intimacy. “It’s a constant circularity between putting myself in and taking something out, like finding this organic way inside and outside of the screen,” she says of the net art pieces, videogames, and AR sculptures on view in her major Museum of the Moving Image survey.

“TRANSFER Download: Sea Change” opens at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), flooding a panoramic ‘video chamber’ with reflections “on the accelerating changes across climate, culture, and time.” The 9th iteration of TRANSFER’s travelling immersive format compiles works by LaTurbo Avedon, Leo Castañeda, Fabiola Larios, Cassie McQuater, Lorna Mills, Rick Silva & Nicolas Sassoon (image: Signals 4, 2023), and Rodell Warner into a playlist of “watery warnings,” rendered as generative art, animated GIFs, videogames, and CGI.

With “My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard,” New York’s Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) opens the first major survey of pioneering net artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey. Featuring more than 40 works spanning early net-based interactives, videogames (created with Michaël Samyn under the Tale of Tales moniker), mixed media and AR sculptures, curator Regina Harsanyi celebrates Harvey’s capacity to “reflect the paradoxical power of computers to enable intimacy” over nearly four decades.

“Creating a single artwork on a small website at this point is a kind of Land Art. To view it you have to leave the urban centers of the feed and go to some off-grid locale. Nobody is coming to visit, but everyone says they want to.”
– American software artist Andrew Benson, on the platform consolidation of the internet—and escaping it. “Out there you can have more freedom, the access to raw material is abundant, and it feels better to feel like you made something real,” Benson muses. “But if you aren’t posting pics [on social media], does it even matter?”

“Glitch. The Art of Interference” opens at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne, offering a comprehensive institutional survey of “one of the youngest and most unpredictable forms of art.” Curators Franziska Kunze and Katrin Bauer present works by 50 international artists that trace the interrogation of media and its malfunction from the digital era (Rosa Menkman, !Mediengruppe Bitnik & Sven König, JODI) back to glitch art’s analog roots (Nam June Paik, Peter Weibel, Pipilotti Rist, Sondra Perry).

Organized by the NFT platform Verse, American generative artist John Provencher presents two playful net.art-inspired bodies of work at Cromwell Place in London. The first, over-time (2023), pays homage to the blocky visual language of Alexei Shulgin’s Form Art (1997) via dithered animations of twisting Lissajous curves, while the second, HAHA (2023, image), sardonically “visualizes and plays on the transactional nature of NFTs” by spewing an endless stream of “generative receipts” from a thermal printer.

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Aram Bartholl bids farewell to his 2010 Google Streetview performance 15 Seconds of Fame, after the company updated its severly outdated Berlin image set. In October 2009, the German artist interrupted his coffee break on Borsigstraße to run after a passing Google Streetview car, creating the whimsical chase sequence that’s been online since the service launched in Germany in 2010. “15 Seconds of Fame turned into almost 15 years,” Bartholl jokes on Instagram. “The work is finally complete.”

Billed as their largest solo show to date, Eva & Franco Mattes’ “Fake Views” opens at Frankfurter Kunstverein (DE), illuminating platform culture, internet infrastructures, and online communities. For their new installation P2P (2022-23, image), for example, the Italian net art duo invited peers Nora Al-Badri, Simon Denny, Do Not Research, Olia Lialina, Jill Magid, and Jon Rafman to create new works to be hosted on a peer-to-peer server enclosed in a wire cage—an ‘exhibition within the exhibition.’

Dutch media artist Lotte Louise de Jong releases REALITYBYTES (2023), a web-browser plugin that substitutes images and photographs within news articles on websites like cnn.com and thesun.com with AI-generated counterparts. “The plugin blurs the boundary between AI-created and human-created images,” providing “stark insight into AI’s deeply engrained biases,” de Jong writes. REALITYBYTES is launched at Berlin’s panke.gallery within a week-long solo exhibition.

Jan Robert Leegte’s solo exhibition ”No Content: Contemplations on Software” opens at Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam, examining digital media through “the carrier and reality that holds it.” JPEG (2023), for example, is a series of algorithmic images that fully express the signature compression; Broken Images (2023) foregrounds the volatility of digital assets by minting broken links as NFTs, and Scrollbars (image)—a Leegte classic—presents obsolete interface elements as sculptural and cultural debris.

Internet artist, former Rhizome co-editor, and are.na co-founder John Michael Boling resurrects his 2007 net art piece 20 Years Ago Today along with other parts of 53 os, a collaborative mid-2000s catalogue of GIFs, videos, and quirky web experiments. Cleverly, 20 Years Ago Today moves a playing YouTube panorama sequence across the browser canvas at matching speed, resulting in what net art pioneer Olia Lialina, then, praised as “a shining example of distributed work and tactful appropriation.”

Lorna Mills’ solo exhibition “The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common Part 1” opens online at distant.gallery, populating your browser canvas with dozens of Mill’s eccentric GIFs. Hosted in collaboration with TRANSFER gallery, LA-based curator Kelani Nichole’s digital art imprint and long-time Mills representative, the show also serves as an in-browser gathering for net art enthusiasts: “COME TO THE OPENING,” the Canadian media artist tweeted to her followers. “BE A GIF. BE A FUCKING GIF.”

OUT NOW:
Omar Kholeif
Internet_Art
Showcasing key works from Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Nam June Paik, Heather Phillipson, Wu Tsang, and other innovators, author and curator Omar Kholeif traces the history of internet art, from the emergence of browser-based experiments to the dawn of NFTs.
OUT NOW:
Mindy Seu
Cyberfeminism Index
From the writings of Donna Haraway, to VNS Matrix’s games and poetry, to the biohacks of Mary Maggic—the 700 entry-strong hard copy of Seu’s eponymous online archive compiles an anti-canonical guide to cyberfeminism’s long-ignored origins and expansive legacy.

Jan Robert Leegte’s solo exhibition “Document Performance | Permanence” opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. Juxtapozing the Dutch artist’s Repositions (2018) series and Window #219 from the eponymous NFT collection (2022), the show explores software as performance and, conversely, sculpture. Both series are web-based constructs made in HTML DOM. The former renders dynamic documents in your browser, the latter lives on-chain and “behaves and feels like hardware.”

A project of Wm (Bill) Perry, “LOST & FOUND Telidon art of the early ’80s,” opens at Toronto’s Cameron House. Presenting limited edition prints of videotex art made on Telidon (1978-85, Canada’s precursor to the world wide web), Perry resurfaces both an overlooked early digital art movement—predating net.art by a decade—and the burgeoning creative networks that founded Canada’s first media and electronic art-focused artist run centres (image: Robin Collyer Cameraman, 1981).

After its recent site-specific debut at Tieranatomisches Theater, Berlin, the online component of Rachel Rossin’s transmedia narrative THE MAW OF (2022) launches on Artport, the Whitney Museum’s portal for internet art. Co-commissioned by Berlin’s KW Institute, the Web and AR experience follows a ghostly female figure navigating a landscape of cyborgian codes and prosthetic symbolism that is directly inspired by Rossin’s research into brain-computer interfaces.

A collaboration between Berlin’s panke.gallery and LA’s JAUS, “Post Cinema” opens at Open Mind Art Space in Los Angeles. Exploring common themes across recent media history—from TV to VR—works by Berlin-based (Nadja Buttendorf, Esben Holk, Cornelia Sollfrank) and LA-based artists (Petra Cortright, Julie Orser, Peter Wu+) echo “dreams of global utopia,” whether broadcast over airwaves, electronic superhighways, or streamed directly from the cloud.

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Emerging trajectories in art, science, and technology (since 2012)

As an editorial and curatorial platform, HOLO explores disciplinary interstices and entangled knowledge as epicentres of critical creative practice, radical imagination, research, and activism

“I feel the language and concepts I’m working with don’t comfortably fit within the normal discourse about art and aesthetics. CERN’s physicists and engineers understood the tools I was using and I was able to talk about my goals. I just couldn’t have that kind of dialogue in an art context.”—sound artist Bill Fontana on his CERN residency (HOLO 2, p.206)

There is a space between a computer’s command line interface and the contemporary art museum, the legalese of Silicon Valley’s terms and conditions and the social contract, the whoosh of a particle accelerator and the romanticized “a ha” of artistic inspiration. For much of the twentieth century these gaps were chasms, separating science and engineering from the humanities and siloing them off; today, these gaps are narrowing and disciplinary interstices are the spaces to watch. Increasingly aware of how much technology governs not only entrenched fields of study but every aspect of modern life, we’ve come to realise that things are deeply intertwined.

HOLO emerged in 2012 to explore these entanglements—first with a periodical, now across an expanded platform. Set up in the grey zones between art, science, and technology, it frames scientific research and emerging technologies as being more than sites of invention and innovation—as epicentres of critical creative practice, radical imagination, and activism. The artists and designers working with related materials—algorithms and microcontrollers, meteoroids and fungi, data and archives—aren’t just updating notions of craft for the twenty-first century, they are researchers and cultural critics.

As an editorial and curatorial platform, HOLO occupies the same eccentric vantage points as these hybrid creative practices and puts them into perspective. Working across multiple avenues—print and online, events and production—HOLO collaborates with contributors and cultural partners to facilitate fruitful dialogue between domains and bring new voices into the conversation.

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Akil Kumarasamy Parses Quantum Plotlines and Large Language Models
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Miriam Arbus Cultivates “Seed Systems” That Nurture New XR Ecologies
Martin Bricelj Baraga Builds Monuments to the Sky’s 53 Shades of Blue
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Dossiers are dedicated HOLO folios that augment and complement exhibitions, residencies, conferences, and educational initiatives. Realised in collaboration with artists, writers, curators, and cultural partners, they are designed to document process and disseminate knowledge through a variety of engaging formats—essays, interviews, artwork—all within a focused online magazine. If you’re interested in working with us on a Dossier, please get in touch via our Contact page.

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Questioning our problematic faith in AI, Nora N. Khan and fifteen luminaries measure the gap between machine learning hypotheticals and the mess of lived experience.
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An inquiry into the nature of randomness—how science explains it and how culture (and art) emerges from it
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