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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
“Neither side in the debate on ‘killer robots’ has addressed the most potentially unnerving aspect of using them in battle: sooner or later, they’ll be able to communicate with each other without human intervention.”
– World security scholar and author Michael Klare, on the dangers of emergent behaviour in autonomous weaponry as DARPA expands efforts to create military AI systems capable of true swarming. “Autonomous weapons might jointly elect to adopt combat tactics none of the individual devices were programmed to perform”, warns Klare, “conceivably engaging in acts unintended and unforeseen by their human commanders.”
“Cohen developed AARON with intention. The machine and the painter grew together—inefficiently, by tech’s standards, but fruitfully, by art’s.”
– Critic Travis Diehl, celebrating the outputs of Harold Cohen’s pioneering drawing robots currently on view at The Whitney. “Compared to the visual horrors emerging from the psychedelic meatgrinder of text-to-image AI’s, AARON’s docile pictures of people feel friendly and controlled,” Diehl writes. “The Whitney show speaks to a hopeful period of tech development, when the internet’s pioneers envisioned an anarchic realm of the mind, not the boundless attention-gathering machine it became.”

Freshly acquired by the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), American artist Jordon Wolfson’s Body Sculpture (2023) debuts in its permanent Canberra home. An unsettling performance in which an industrial robotic arm wields a chain tethered to a metallic box with animatronic arms, the robot pair executes a choreography of power and control. In the foreground, the torso-box affectively gestures with humanlike precision; in the background, the industrial arm plays puppeteer and pulls the strings.

“For me, drawing is a way of being in the world. When I draw and create with my machines, this creative process allows me to engage with the technology alongside my physical instincts to form a kind of gestural relation.”
– Chinese-Canadian artist Sougwen Chung, on her robot collaborations. “I’ve come to think of my approach of learning through systems—deemed intelligent or otherwise—as a creative catalyst,” Chung writes. “There is meaning in the data, but it’s not the meaning we are given; it’s the meaning we make.”

The NGV Triennial opens at Melbourne’s NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) International, showcasing 100 works from 120 artists and designers that epitomize contemporary practice. In addition to timeless pieces by Hito Steyerl, John Gerrard, SMACK, and Julian Charrière, NGV premieres several new commissions: Dunne & Raby’s Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival (2023) imagines future multi-species gatherings through speculative artifacts, while Agnieszka Pilat’s Heterobota (2023, image) enjoy playtime.

“Sometimes I feel like Jane Goodall observing nature in the wild—and then I can just put on my engineering hat and go tinker around with their brains.”
– American ‘robot whisperer’ and ATONATON founder Madeline Gannon, on the “handcrafted algorithms” that drive her menagerie of industrial machines. “My robots are distinctively obnoxious when you’re around them,” Gannon reveals to Dezeen’s Cajsa Carlson. “And I have to imagine that’s a piece of my personality embedded within that, you know; they’re in your face.”
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“Art doesn’t play fetch with approval. It chews the slippers of convention and relishes in the surprise of its own bark.”
Mario Klingemann’s ChatGPT-powered robot dog, A.I.C.C.A. (Artificially Intelligent Critical Canine, 2023), putting the pun in pundit. Unveiled in June at Espacio Solo in Madrid, the “performative sculpture” comments on the “endless barrage of AI-created art to consume, critique, or rather, endure,” says Klingemann. It also pokes fun at the art world, “which—let’s admit it—can occasionally obsess over the art of spouting profound, if at times inscrutable, BS.”

Considering compassion and competence, “AI: Who’s Looking After Me?” opens at Science Gallery London. Co-presented with FutureEverything, invited artists including James Bridle, Wesley Goatley, Seo Hye Lee, and Mimi Ọnụọha interrogate “what it means to entrust our care to autonomous machines. ” Blast Theory’s Cat Royale (2023, image), for example, puts Ghostbuster, Pumpkin, and Clover in the custody of a computer vision system and robot arm, which monitor, tend to, and play with the three felines.

German AI artist Mario Klingemann releases A.I.C.C.A., short for Artificially Intelligent Critical Canine (2023), into the current exhibition of Madrid’s Colección SOLO. Equipped with a camera, thermal printer, and ChatGPT, the furry AI art critic on wheels is designed to roam galleries and offer analysis—from its butt. The performative sculpture pokes fun at punditry but isn’t cynical, Klingemann assures. “Art critics play a very important role. The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be ignored.”

“A future that de-centres the human in artistic practice to make room for other-than-human, living, and nonliving configurations also ignites the field of art itself—re-framing the artist as an engineer, designer, and system architect.”
– Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher Sougwen Chung, discussing AI and her robot collaborations ahead of “As Above, So Below,” a two-day program hosted by the Science Gallery London to celebrate Gaia theory and the life of biologist Lynn Margulis
“Semi-autonomous weapons, like loitering munitions that track and detonate themselves on targets, require a ‘human in the loop.’ They can recommend actions but require their operators to initiate them.”
– Human rights researcher James Dawes, describing how most drones deployed in the Russia-Ukraine war are still overseen by a human. Fearing that’s about to change, activists warn that imminent autonomous weapons “erode meaningful human control over what happens on the battlefield” and will inevitably kill civilians.

“The Technate,” an exhibition by Peter Behrbohm and Markus Bühler that “follows the wires” of North American internet infrastructure, opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. The show centres their eponymous research project (2023, image), a reenactment of a 1947 road trip (from California to British Columbia) promoting the technocracy movement. In it, the duo cosplay as technicians (with a robot dog), and visit technoculture hotspots including Internet Archive and Noisebridge.

“You can see that there’s a genealogy here that results in a TikTok-dancing murder robot named M3GAN. This is fundamentally some old, old stuff.”
– Choreographer Sydney Skybetter, on how the impossibly slick dance moves of horror film M3GAN’s titular dancing robot tap into deep-seated anxieties about nonhuman movement (e.g. the creepy marching of Boston Dynamics’ Spot)

London’s V&A Museum announces the acquisition of Sougwen Chung’s 2017 drawing MEMORY (D.O.U.G. 2) for its permanent collection. Part of the Chinese-Canadian artist’s body of painterly robot collaborations, the acquisition includes the RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) model that Chung trained on years of her own drawings to co-create the piece. It’s the first artifact of its kind to be acquired by a cultural institution, the V&A notes.

Swiss artist and designer Jürg Lehni celebrates the 20th anniversary of his seminal robotic drawing machine, Hektor (2002), in a commemorative Twitter thread. “Imperfect and full of character,” the hanging computer-controlled spray-paint plotter drew at transmediale, Design Museum London, and the MoMA, and remains a DIY marvel for its time: “edged circuit boards, assembly-programmed microcontrollers—we did everything by hand,” Lehni notes about making in the pre-fab era.

The first-ever solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF opens at Perrotin, New York, presenting elaborate interventions that leverage the absurdity of late-stage capitalism. Transforming the gallery into an interactive strip mall, “No More Tears, I’m Lovin’ It” showcases the group’s art as merchandize. Spot’s Revenge (2022, image), for example, trolls Boston Dynamics with a heavily armed robot dog, after the manufacturer disabled the legally purchased unit remotely.

“Cyborg cockroaches that find earthquake survivors. A ‘robofly’ that sniffs out gas leaks. Flying lightning bugs that pollinate farms in space. These aren’t just buzzy ideas, they’re becoming reality.”
– Reporter Pranshu Verma, on the state of insectoid micro-scale robotics. In his survey, Verma covers research breakthroughs at the Autonomous Insect Robotics Laboratory at the University of Washington, the MIT, and Japan’s Riken Thin-Film Device Laboratory.
“A human operator tags the ends of the intestine with drops of fluorescent glue, creating markers the robot can track.”
– Science journalist James Gaines, describing the computer vision workflow that allowed the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) prototype to recently successfully perform intestinal surgery on pig tissue
“Basha’s paintings are dominated by circles, which she creates with her feet, while her lines are created by a painting arm.”
– Critic Hrag Vartanian, describing paintings by Agnieszka Pilat’s robot dog Basha (a renamed instance of General Dynamics’ Spot). Wary of the gimmick, Vartanian writes “these machines … are ultimately not our friends, and humanizing them distracts from their use by authorities to police, control, or kill populations from a distance,”
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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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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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Parsing emerging representational and perceptual paradigms in the wake of the Snowden revelations and nascent computer vision technologies
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