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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
December 2022
“We were each fighting a version of ourself that looked similar but that was uncanny, twisted in a way to which we didn’t consent.”
– Cartoonist Sarah Andersen, on the similarities between troll- and AI-generated “shadow selves.” First, the alt-right hijacked Anderson’s work to spread neo-Nazi ideology, then Stable Diffusion allowed for easy imitation of her and concept artist Greg Rutkowski’s distinct styles.

Mexican-Canadian media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer commemorates the passing of Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, a post-modern giant who blended East and the West in his designs, with an anecdote. “I had the honour of meeting him twenty years ago when I staged Amodal Suspension (2003) to open YCAM in Yamaguchi,” writes Lozano-Hemmer. “He told me I could make any intervention I wanted except touch his building, so I made a switchboard of messages relayed by searchlights over it.”

“The watermark looks completely natural to those reading the text because the choice of words is mimicking the randomness of all the other words.”
– Search engine marketer Roger Montti, describing forthcoming cryptographic watermarks that will make texts generated by language models like ChatGPT instantly detectable. Summarizing research computer scientist Scott Aaronson is doing for OpenAI, Montti considers both the utility and fallibility of the security measure.

“Multispecies Clouds,” the first of a trio of exhibitions exploring the vexing question ‘who owns nature?,’ opens at the Macalline Art Center in Beijing. Participating artists include Sheryl Cheung, Wu Chi-Yu, Rice Brewing Sisters Club, and 15 others. Contributed artworks, like Chilean artist Patricia Dominguez’ video installation Matrix Vegetal (2021-2, image), engage nonhuman species and “translate them into images, poetry, and politics,” writes curator Yang Beichen.

“I watched old ladies cry and fall in the airport, and entire families with children. I was more heartbroken about the people around me.”
– Passenger Jessica Bienert, on the chaos at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport when Southwest Airlines’ antiquated scheduling software had a meltdown after an arctic storm forced 8,000 flight cancellations. As a result, tens of thousands of frustrated travellers were stranded across America.
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Titanic: Honor and Glory is a 3D recreation of the ‘unsinkable’ RMS Titanic in Unreal Engine. Currently 30% complete, the most recent demo of its photorealistic luxurious cabins and common spaces (which inevitably flood after it strikes its fated iceberg) has left videogame journalist Phil Iwaniuk rattled. Not exactly a game and more of a preservation effort, “it’s as though you’re a ghost, displaced in time,” he writes of the eerie feeling he had while exploring the uninhabited CGI model.

“It almost doesn’t matter what the market is doing … if crypto’s down—great—everything’s on sale.”
– Pseudonymous NFT collector and Waiting To Be Signed co-host Trinity, opining that as the “generative art community starts to separate itself from Web3,” the Tezos NFT ecosystem will flourish (“because it’s such a non-financialized chain”)
“As the heat builds again in 2023, it is perfectly possible that we will touch or even exceed 1.5°C for the first time.”
– Earth science scholar and writer Bill McGuire, forecasting the cataclysmic effects of the next El Niño. The recurrent Pacific climate pattern is known to boost global temperatures and predicted to return in 2023. “When it does, the extreme weather that has rampaged across our planet in 2021 and 2022 will pale into insignificance,” McGuire writes.

American software artist Ben Grosser updates his Demetricator (2017-) browser extension to hide Twitter’s newly launched view count feature. “View counts, like all of Twitter’s visible metrics, are engagement-inducing dark pattern trash,” Grosser rails against interface elements that are known to amp up polarization and thus harm. Demetricator 1.5.5 is available on Chrome and Firefox and removes all Twitter metrics from the platform.

“‘Wokeism’ is giving way to ‘bossism’—the ascension of the C-Suite taking its power back from employees.”
– Cultural strategist Linda Ong, on how the recent firings of outspoken Twitter engineers such as Sasha Solomon signals the (inflation-induced) end of the MeToo era of employee empowerment. “Elon Musk is the poster boy of this, of a doubling down on old fashioned capitalism,” Ong writes.
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“This commitment, for the first time perhaps, meaningfully positions artworks that engage with NFTs amidst the rigorous art history that preceded them.”
– Writer and curator Eileen Isagon Skyers, praising the recent “Peer to Peer” NFT exhibition on Feral File. Curated by Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator Tina Rivers Ryan, the show features new works by 13 key blockchain artists working in response to their ‘peers’—Homer, Magritte, Rothko—in the museum’s collection.

German media artist and composer Robert Henke shares previews of a new video pattern for his CBM 8032 AV (2016-) audiovisual performance project. In the piece, Henke controls five carefully restored Commodore CBM 8032 (aka Commodore PET) computers to generate sound and images live on stage. “Art = Engineering = Art,” writes Henke about assembly programming the new “Fungi” pattern that will premiere in 2023.

“Quantum computers might one day have the ability to push computational boundaries, allowing us to solve problems that have been intractable thus far, such as integer factorization, which is important for encryption.”
H.R.7535 – Quantum Computing Cybersecurity Preparedness Act, a bill passed by U.S. Congress sponsoring IT, intellectual property, and software development “that can be easily updated to support cryptographic agility” if codebreaking quantum computing becomes a reality
“When I say profit is the main driver behind this, it’s really important, because this is not necessarily how it needs to be, but it is how these systems are set up.”
– Environmental Media Lab Director Mél Hogan, describing the extractive and eugenicist tendencies underpinning the data economy. “It’s why all those Big Tech guys are telling everyone to vote Republican … [that and lobbying are] intentional political manoeuvres to maintain those hierarchies.”

“Please Mistake Me for Nobody,” a solo show by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, opens at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.). Named after the Seoul-based duo’s eponymous 2017 video-dream (image) about glorious anonymity set to off-key jazz, the show surveys their signature text narratives and desire to “exert a dictatorial stranglehold on the reader.” Curated by Arkadij Koscheew, the featured works have been translated to German for local viewers.

“This Current Between Us,” an installation and performance program, opens at the Neo Faliro Steam Power Plant in Piraeus, Greece. Artists including Nikos Alexiou, Hypercomf, and Miriam Simun contribute works exploring energy and production in response to the decommissioned site. The latter’s performance Do Not Break Out of Prior Range (image), for example, draws on a blender, lightbulb, and power cord—and Simun announcing “this isn’t just a milkshake, it’s a crucial north-south energy bridge” into a microphone.

“The only thing that Stability AI can do is algorithmic disgorgement, where they completely destroy their database and all models that have our data in it.”
Concept Art Association board member Karla Ortiz, dismissing the fact that the next version of image generating learning model Stable Diffusion will allow artists to opt-out of their artwork being used as training data
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