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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The “Unleashed” edition of panke.gallery’s recent AR group exhibition, “Animal()City ,” pops up at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37c3) in Hamburg (DE), releasing CGI creatures by Joachim Blank (image: The restless lion/ess , 2023), Eva Davidova , Meredith Drum , exonemo , Jonas Lund , Sahej Rahal , and Ingeborg Wie Henriksen. The show, curated by panke’s Sakrowski, draws inspiration from the ghostly presence of urban critters that, like people being siloed by online platforms and AI, seem to live in parallel worlds.
“Your own sense of reality becomes increasingly specific to you and your synthetic friends, but this isn’t happening on a neutral plane. Your friends work for giant corporations and are designed to extract as much value from you as possible.”
The third edition of Japan’s Osaka Kansai International Art Festival ponders urban futures with a group exhibition that asks “STREET 3.0: Where Is The Street?” Curators Miwa Kutsuna and Yutaro Midorikawa present works by international artists that hack the city with technology (Aram Bartholl , Simon Weckert , AQV-EIKKKM), calligraphy, or olfactory. Bartholl’s over 1,400 node-strong network of Dead Drops (2010-, image), for example, inserts USB flash drives into the urban landscape for offline data sharing.
“The deluge of automation will amplify whatever it is pointed at. If we continue to value engagement above all else it will excel at facilitating 24-hour content avatars, sophistry, and distracting novelty.”
– American artist and composer
Holly Herndon , on how prompt-based AI music generators like
Suno AI will further homogenize culture. “AI may thrive in satisfying [middle-of-the-road] preferences but that does not answer the question of how to revive everything else.”
Martina Menegon ’s interactive self-portrait I’m sorry I made you feel that way (2023) opens at discotec, Vienna, exploring new forms of care for our hybrid selves. Menegon’s blobby CGI avatar, generated with AI and personal biometric data, will show signs of deterioration the more the artist’s physical needs are neglected. When stressed, for example, the virtual portrait will refuse interaction and, eventually, dissolve into glitched abstraction. An AR extension adds a sculptural layer, spilling Menegon’s failing frame into the gallery.
“Still, I couldn’t stop tracking. My spreadsheet was the only thing I could control in a life I no longer recognized.”
– Brooklyn-based data artist and information designer
Giorgia Lupi , on logging her life with long Covid. In an interactive essay for
The New York Times , Lupi, who first contracted Covid in March 2020, recounts recording symptoms, doctors appointments, emergency room visits, medical procedures and costs with paint. “Every day is filled to the brim with appointments, meds, needles, bills and pain,” she writes of her ongoing battle. “The brushstrokes of my illness are suffocating.”
Trevor Paglen ’s audiovisual installation, Behold These Glorious Times! (2017), opens at Matadero Madrid as the second arc of “Synthetic Imaginaries,” a series of exhibitions curated by Julia Kaganskiy that examines non-human agency, intelligence, and complex systems. The piece, augmented with synthetic sounds and voices by composer Holly Herndon , confronts viewers with hundreds of thousands of AI training images in transition: from legible to machine-readable and, effectively, “invisible.”
“Like Bartleby, we would all ’prefer not to.’ Maybe it’s fatigue-induced, seeking relief from the incessant demands of 24/7 capitalism, careening towards meltdown. Terminally online, we ‘can’t even.’”
– American writer and
Spike editor
Adina Glickstein , contemplating exhaustion and melancholia in a terminally online, crisis-ridden world. Existential inertia can engender a productive refusal, Glickstein writes in her final (deeply personal) “User Error” column: “a wildcat strike of the soul, against a world where all manner of activity is increasingly apt to be flattened into work.”
“Due to the high plasticity and adaptability of organoids, Brainoware has the flexibility to change and reorganize in response to electrical stimulation, highlighting its ability for adaptive reservoir computing.”
– Indiana University Bloomington engineers, on the AI potential of (lab-grown) human brain cells on a chip. In their research, published in Nature Electronics , the team trained brain organoids connected to an array of high-density microelectrodes to master tasks like speech recognition and nonlinear equation prediction.
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.
Total Refusal ’s solo exhibition “Every Strike Hits Dead Center” opens at Taipei’s Digital Art Center (DAC), presenting new and recent videogame appropriations that explore the representation of labour and leisure. Whereas Club Stahlbad (2022, image), for example, tunes into the frenetic escapism of NPC clubbers in Cyberpunk 2077 , the Austrian machinima collective’s new piece, Loop Labor (2023), highlights—and liberates—Latin American field workers in Grand Theft Auto V .
“Our technological culture keeps casting these artificial intelligences either as mothers, catering and caring, or as female demons that consume men, succubus-like, luring them to half-deaths, to a constant state of orgasm—a hijacked limbic system suspended in pleasure.”
– American author, filmmaker, and sex worker
Liara Roux , on the “sublimated patriarchal anxieties and revenge fantasies” AI femmes like Siri reveal about their creators: “Dark Enlightenment, PayPal Mafia, CEO types.”
“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.”
OUT NOW :
Branch #7
Gentle Dismantlings
Branch and
DING editors
Kit Braybrooke ,
Julia Kloiber , and
Michelle Thorne teamed up for inviting Gayatri Ganesh, Padmini Ray Murray, Georgina Voss, Eva Verhoeven, Iryna Zamuruieva and others to report on kinship, worlding, and more-than-human feminisms around the globe
“We do not live in a simulation—a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews—but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic.”
The third act in curators Dominique Moulon , Alain Thibault , and Cathernine Bédard’s exhibition series, “Endless Variation,” opens at the Canadian Cultural Centre , Paris, as part of the 2023 Némo Biennial. Works by ten artists including Nicolas Baier , Salomé Chatriot (image: Idol (Hydra 4) , 2023), Nicolas Sassoon , Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, and Timothy Thomasson explore nascent generative processes and the transition from artist studio to computer interface.
“For every charge that immersive events are diluting our experience of artistry, there’s a counterpoint to be made that it’s opening that experience out to people who might not normally gravitate towards it.”
– Writer
Róisín Lanigan , weighing in on the post-pandemic rise of immersive media spaces like
Frameless ,
Outernet (both London), and
Sphere (Las Vegas). They empower creators, offer communal experiences, and yes, “they’re geared towards the gram—the number of views can attest to that,” Lanigan notes.
“The interdisciplinary art practice is your biggest project. Finding your people to nurture and grow together this idea of the practice being the project is what I’m thinking about right now.”
– Australian sci-fi artist and body architect
Lucy McRae , reminding
SCI-Arc students to prioritize hybridity and collaboration as they develop their art-research practices
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