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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
May 2020
“Many bands have sought to confront the relationship between mankind and technology, but they have built on Kraftwerk’s pioneering accomplishments while placing emphasis on the human interaction inherent within both society and music rather than either celebrating or accepting as a given the subordination of man to machine.”
“Blogging is akin to stand-up comedy—it’s not coherent drama, it’s a stream of wisecracks. It’s also like street art—just sort of there, stuck in the by-way, begging attention, then crumbling rapidly. A blog evaporates through bit-rot.”
Carrie Mae Weems, Christine Sun Kim, Duke Riley, Jenny Holzer, Pedro Reyes, and Xaviera Simmons are among three dozen artists producing digital billboards to thank New York City, Boston, and Chicago’s essential service workers.
Combining the talents of Araiz Mesanza (illustration) and Raquel Meyers (animation), Inattention is a short film that revels in the anxiety of our current moment. Initiated during a residency at Irudika earlier this year and completed during lockdown, the Teletext-animated short was just released on YouTube.
“Because astral stories can exist without the telescope, they are both woefully unreal and extraordinarily resilient narrative technology for institutional memory—perhaps one of the few intergenerational computers we’ve managed to construct so far.”
Given the transition that art galleries, fairs, and all manner of cultural producers have made in switching from IRL events to online content, Rhizome Artistic Director Michael Conner has begun a timely multi-part essay project cataloguing essential history and clarifying what is at stake. The first installment, on ‘performance, variability, objecthood’ is up and more are promised in the coming weeks.
“Palatnik’s device made us think about the artwork in terms of its livelihood, forcing us to consider its mortality and need for rest and repair.”
Abraham Palatnik
(1928–2020)
“It is one of the great ironies of the present situation that what may be the only exhibition in London that you can currently go and visit ‘in the flesh’ consists entirely of work meant originally to be experienced online.”
Inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure book series first popularized in the 1980s, Russian artist Dasha Ilina and screenwriter Sofia Haines launch Choose Your Own Quarantine, a browser game about navigating the uncertainties of the pandemic. “The user is presented with a scenario that initially follows the real timeline of COVID-19 development,” write the authors, “but as the game goes on, users will notice that the options become increasingly speculative and fictitious.” Which values, practices, and cultures will ultimately be enduring, and which may become outdated remnants of the pre-pandemic world?
Citing the economic upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic, Google smart city affiliate Sidewalk Labs cancels its much-maligned ‘city of tomorrow’ redevelopment plan for a neglected portion of Toronto’s waterfront.
“But, as Instagram quickly achieves primacy in the exhibition world, its functionality remains disturbingly ill-suited to the art market’s need for sustainable growth and reach.”
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