1,570 days, 2,407 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“If you’re driving under the influence you can have your license revoked. These are the kinds of measures we need to see.”
– Space lawyer
Michelle Hanlon , endorsing the $150,000 USD
fine levied against American TV provider
DISH by the Federal Communications Commission for failing to move one of its satellites into a safe orbit. Hanlon and other experts herald the first ‘space junk’ fine as encouraging, given the dangerous mass of (2,000 and counting) dead satellites orbiting Earth.
“Market Makers,” the largest IRL exhibition curated by the JPG curatorial collective yet, opens at Studio Knecht/Wendelin in Berlin. A sub-exhibition within a bigger Berliner Volksbank initiative, the show assembles 30 digital artists working in the NFT space, including Mitchell F. Chan , Simon Denny , Sarah Friend , Jan-Robert Leegte , and Harm van den Dorpel to “surface and educate about the lore, history, and contemporary tensions between cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance.”
“The mirroring technique used by the editor is integrated with the use of silver ink and foil text on the front and back cover. It’s almost like the text is asking us to reflect on how much of ourselves we project into the machine.”
–
Neural editors, discussing
HOLO ’s third periodical,
Mirror Stage: Between Computability and Its Opposite (2022), in issue 72. Edited by writer and curator
Nora N. Khan ,
HOLO 3 “moves away from an obsession with the state of the art” and “reflects on the most pressing questions surrounding AI” and how they’re being discussed.
“Historically, civilizations can’t bear a 50% GDP loss. The stakes? Our very existence. This isn’t a drill—it’s a clarion call for our age. The real threat of civilizational collapse is closer than we think. Act now, or our future might be history.”
“ABORT, RETRY, FAIL,” Farah Al Qasimi ’s first London solo show, opens at the Delfina Foundation. Taking inspiration from Al Qasimi’s 1990s family computer, a major thread in the exhibition is works playfully exploring the “autonomy and disembodiment” of gaming and the early internet. In Anood Playing Sims (2023, image), for example, the UAE-born photographer depicts the self-referential loop of a vibrantly attired young woman with her attention fixed on a CGI desktop—much like her own.
“During the workshop, interesting ideas emerged. Like a pair of decolonial sandals. In this imaginary, wherever you walk in the sandals, you (re)connect with the ancestral practices of that territory.”
Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko ’s permanent installation Voices of Memory (2023, image) opens in the Hall of Remembrance at Warsaw Insurgents Cemetery. A memorial to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising , in which 150,000 civilians and 18,000 insurgents died during a revolt against occupying German forces, it “expresses opposition to all armed conflicts.” In the piece, Wodiczko presents audio of survivors’ testimonials and syncs their traumatic recollections with projections of flickering flames.
“Chaos. What was solid is now fluid. Diamantine shards scatter into the darkness. Many icy fragments tumble close to Saturn, remain there and dance around the gas giant in unison, ultimately forging the heavyweight body’s exquisite discs.”
– Science journalist
Robin George Andrews , evocatively describing
recent research simulating how Saturn’s fabled rings could have been formed through the cataclysmic collision of two moons hundreds of millions of years ago.
For MIT Technology Review . Cassandra Willyard surveys the state of rapidly advancing artificial womb research. As a promising prototype nears readiness for trials with human embryos, researchers and bioethicists are weighing potential implications on child-rearing. “The most challenging question to answer is how much unknown is acceptable,” says FDA neonatologist An Massaro to Willyard, of concerns that include gauging risk for premature infants and shifting discourse about a woman’s right to choose.
“When we interact with neural media, we interact with an entire network at once, making meaning through stacked, high-dimensional layers and conversational turn-taking.”
– Writer and AI researcher
K Allado McDowell , pondering human-AI interaction. In the first of a three-part essay series commissioned as part of Gropius Bau’s “
Ether’s Bloom ” program, McDowell calls for AI literacy and “a concerted effort to design neural media that produce subjects and outcomes capable of addressing the crises at hand.”
“The structure is so complex and expensive that no single nation would be able to afford them or conceive them, but if we make a decision not to go extinct we need to start building these machines.”
– LA-based filmmaker and speculative architect
Liam Young , on the radical decarbonization infrastructure imagined in his new film
The Great Endeavor , currently on view at the
National Gallery Victoria , Melbourne. “It envisions the scale of global collaboration that’s necessary,” Young explains. “We need to use the same language that we used around the moon landing to rally the entire generation around this idea.”
OUT NOW :
Brian Merchant
Blood in the Machine
On the heels of ‘hot labour summer,’
Los Angeles Times tech columnist
Merchant reframes the 19th century
Luddite rebellion that set the standard for workers organizing against profiteering, deskilling, and unchecked automation.
“Perhaps the limits of our energy are not dismal markers of failure but important demarcations for where we want to focus, prioritize, and sustain our collective power.”
– Curator and
InterAccess program manager
Belinda Kwan , ruminating on the limits of capacity in the arts (and life). Sharing her work developing an educational program for Black, Indigenous, and disability justice communities, and her experience with chronic pain and depression, Kwan reflects on how the best intentions around ‘opening up access’ can be stymied by antiquated policies and protocols.
“Pangea Ultima will limit and ultimately end terrestrial mammalian habitability on Earth by exceeding their warm thermal tolerances, billions of years earlier than previously hypothesized.”
– Bristol University meteorologist and paleoclimate modeller
Alexander Farnsworth , forecasting the ultimate mass extinction. In their paper, Farnsworth and team present research showing that the next supercontinent, predicted to form over the equator in ~250 million years, will see climate extremes no mammal can withstand.
New Media Gallery in New Westminster (BC/CA) opens “Measure,” a group exhibition that reflects on the “interconnections of time, light, colour, season, and cosmological cycles” with works by Matthew Biederman , Annette S. Lee , Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves , James Nizam , Alan Storey , and Semiconductor . Nizam’s site-specific celestial tracker Earth Spin Moon Orbit (2023, image), for example, traces the movement of our planet’s natural satellite in real-time.
“I thought that the way I had structured it was enough of an extrapolation that I wouldn’t have to deal with precisely the question you’re asking. And that has been obliterated in the last few years. That, to me, is terrifying.”
– Egyptian-Canadian novelist
Omar El Akkad , when pressed on whether his climate dystopia
American War (2017) is starting to come true. Set in 2074, the “all-too-realistic cautionary tale” (
Writer’s Digest ) imagines wide-spread civil unrest set off by a ban on fossil fuels, after Florida has vanished and Louisiana is half-underwater.
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