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“We discussed the idea of the ghost in the machine, Deux ex machina, and the spirituality that emanates from unknown entities. Then we asked: what if that could be trans? What if there was a way to trans that?”
The auction for “Keith Haring: Pixel Pioneer” concludes, bringing in $1.6M in sales across five lots. Undeterred by faltering NFT sales, several astute collectors swooped in to acquire the late artist’s trove of Commodore Amiga drawings. Created in the winter and spring of 1987, they showcase Haring’s signature exhuberent figures and vivid colour palettes, as shaped by the limited graphic capabilities (640 x 200 resolution, 16 colours) of the Amiga (image: Untitled #2 (April 16, 1987)).

Kashmir Hill
Your Face Belongs to Us

“The original Luddites did not hate technology. What they objected to were the specific ways that tech was being used to undermine their status, upend their communities and destroy their livelihoods.”
“If a human–pig chimera were brought to term, should we treat it like a pig, like a human, or like something else altogether?”
Julia Sher
R.S.I.

Anicka Yi’s solo exhibition “A Shimmer Through The Quantum Foam” opens at Esther Schipper, Berlin, evolving the Korean-American artist’s notion of the “biologized machine” with new works. Visitors enter a hybrid ecosystem of fleshy landscapes created with machine learning models and suspended luminescent pods resembling Radiolaria. As the soft glow of an aqueous ooze—indicative of life’s marine origins—sprawls across the gallery floor, a custom-made scent by perfumer Barnabé Fillion fills the air.

David Golumbia
(1963-2023)

Combining video, dance, and a flute quartet, Marianna Simnett’s opera GORGON premieres at Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) in Berlin. Director Simnett’s narrative weighs “distresses and transformations” brought on by AI (tech writ large) by teaming up its namesake wailing mythic creature with a bored doughnut store employee. Technologist Moisés Horta Valenzuela puts the live flautists in conversation with AI-generated sound, and Holly Herndon’s voice model Holly+ also makes a cameo.

“Neither communities or rivers need AI ‘to speak for them.’ This promotes ‘ecological AI’ by theoretically-informed sleight of hand, gesturing to the more-than-human while materially relying on Large Language Models.”
Sanela Jahić
Under the Calculative Gaze

“As U.S. et al. v. Google goes to trial, the echoes of the landmark federal suit against Microsoft, a quarter-century ago, are unmistakable.”
Berlin’s Office Impart opens “Sandbox Mode,” a group exhibition that draws parallels between free-form gameplay and digital art. Impart teamed up with JPG’s María Paula Fernández and curator Stina Gustafsson to bring together new and recent code-based works by Mitchell F. Chan, Stine Deja, Andreas Gysin, Sara Ludy, and others that emerged from radical experimentation. Ludy’s new AI video series Metamimics (2023), for example, conjures crazed carnival scenes from deep within the machine.

“The institution is drawn toward those who can leverage their racial identity into a curatorial practice, which the institution can then leverage (or co-opt) into its brand.”
“GEN/GEN: Generative Generations,” a generative art survey linking practitioners past and present, opens at Gazelli Art House London. Artists including Sougwen Chung, Licia He, Tyler Hobbs, Rhea Myers, Piter Pasma, Melissa Wiederrecht, and Stephen Willats contribute prints, plots, screen-based works, and NFTs. Multi-generational, visitors can take in 1980s paintings by Harold Cohen’s prescient AARON program in one glance and Brendan Dawes’ sculpture You, Me And The Machine (2022), the next.

“If the last-ever California tiger salamander shuffles off this mortal coil, the odds are decent that it will happen on rain-slick blacktop one damp spring night.”
“What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI” opens at New York’s Ford Foundation Gallery. Curators Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan enlist 16 artists including Algorithmic Justice League, Morehshin Allahyari, Kite, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mimi Ọnụọha, and Caroline Sinders to counter pervasive “algorithmic worldmaking” models with “feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI.” Allahyari’s series Moon-faced (2022, image), for example, hallucinates genderless Qajar dynasty portraits.

“Alexandra Asanova Elbakyan has strived to shatter academic publishing’s monopoly-like mechanisms in which publishers charge high prices even though authors of articles in academic journals receive no payment.”
The Hole’s yearly thematic group show, “Fembot,” opens at the New York gallery’s Bowery location, celebrating technology and the female form. “Representations of the female body are as vast as the internet, from futuristic robots to porous, sweaty flesh,” writes gallerist Kathy Grayson about the works of Salomé Chatrior, Auriea Harvey, Jordan Homstad, Faith Holland, Nicole Ruggiero, and others that range from “cyborg goddesses” to post-human grotesques. Case in point: CGI artist Emma Stern’s 3d-printed ‘amphemme’ Brooke (2023, image).

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