1,185 days, 1,864 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“From compromised system integrity and faulty regulatory oversight, to the concentration of control in the hands of a small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated, and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”
– Lawyer and corporate restructuring specialist John Jay Ray III,
bluntly assessing bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX
“DO COMPUTERS WORRY YOU,” an exhibition of recent work by Canadian artist Matt Nish-Lapidus opens at Toronto’s Collision Gallery. Presented alongside “Greenlight: Carlaw,” a companion exhibition by Simon Fuh , Nish-Lapidus deploys assemblies of custom networks and Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) combining “industrial and domestic materials, found texts, and bespoke algorithms” into a materialized polemic for more poetic (and personal) modes of computation.
OUT NOW :
Cohen & Van Balen
Not What I Meant But Anyway
From producing sterile goldfish to choreographing an assembly line—a decade of projects from transdisciplinary
artist duo Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen
“Our land, our ocean, our culture are the most precious assets of our people and to keep them safe from harm, no matter what happens in the physical world, we will move them to the cloud.”
– Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister
Simon Kofe , announcing plans for a metaverse twin of the Pacific island nation as sea levels rise. “The idea is to continue to function as a state and beyond that to preserve our culture, our knowledge, our history in a digital space,” Kofe told
COP27 climate summit attandees.
Daniel Franke ’s CGI short Ich sitze in der Wolke (2022) premieres at the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival in Kassel, Germany. In his film, the German artist and researcher takes viewers deep into the digital cloud, a GAN -generated post-nature dreamscape where semiconductors, bitcoins, electricity, rare earth minerals, and crystals manifest to force questions about “environmental sin and digital evolution.”
“Duckweed doubles its weight in just two days, is harvested continually, and is high in protein, nutrients, antioxidants, and vitamins. Only a few essential elements are missing that could make it a reliable base source for complete human nutrition.”
– Life sciences researcher
Kim Johnsons , on how the
Lemnoideae plant subfamily (aka duckweed) is stellar space food. Bonus: human urine is acceptable plant food for duckweed.
German artist and designer Philipp Schmitt publishes Blueprints for Intelligence , a “visual history of artificial neural networks from 1943 to 2020.” Compiling 56 diagrams sourced from machine learning research papers, the web project invites visitors to trace key tendencies in AI evolution. “It draws connections between the visual representations of neural networks and the researchers’ conception of cognition,” Schmitt writes in his introduction.
“Consider how we think of AI as a black box and thus in accounting for its harms demand transparency or explainability of algorithms rather than of the institutions that create and maintain them.”
– Cultural scientist and AI researcher
Maya Indira Ganesh , contemplating the “performative force of AI imaginaries” with a thorough “metaphorology” published in
ACM Interactions and as part of Philipp Schmitt’s
Blueprints for Intelligence visual history
Probing for human qualities that escape capture in AI training datasets, Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald ’s new collaboration Unlearning Language (2022) opens at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), Japan. Both an experiential performance—“a one-act play for four,” as described by McDonald —and an interactive installation, the American artists (with support from Rhizomatiks ) conjure a “futuristic AI that tries to help us become more human.”
“DATA STREAMING,” featuring late Luxembourgish artist Michel Majerus , opens at Kunstverein in Hamburg. Lost to a 2002 plane crash , Majerus made waves in the dotcom era for playfully integrating digital images—videogames, animation, desktop publishing—into his paintings. Now, a major retrospective sees Kunstverein and 12 German museums mounting exhibitions reviewing the artist’s work “with the hindsight of artistic and technological developments of the past twenty years.”
“The hermit crab is, unlike its name suggests, a social creature. They live in groups and are probably much more comfortable in the wild than in an exhibition space.”
DAM Projects Berlin (formerly DAM Gallery) opens Mark Wilson ’s solo exhibition “Moveto Lineto,” surveying essential plotter drawings and canvas prints the American digital art veteran has produced over more than three decades. Wilson, a painter who turned to generative software in the 1980s, is known for his recognisable style of layered, densly-meshed geometries. “Indeed, it is hard to imagine creating these works with any other medium,” says Wilson.
“This foundation, which I won’t mention, sent me back a letter saying no, we do not fund computer art, we do not want to have anything to do with computer art. So I applied for grants as a painter, because that’s ultimately what my work is.”
–
Mark Wilson , on the rejection he and other digital artists faced even in the 1980s
“Timefall,” a solo exhibition by Spanish artist Karlos Gil , opens at The Hague’s 1646. Designed to evoke the archetypal image of the cave, the exhibition centres Hollow Ghost (2022, image), video depicting the vernacular of contemporary caves—data farms, seed vaults, doomsday bunkers—in all their liminal (and terminal) glory. More mythos: also featured is a Jacquard loom -woven tapestry series, each depicting the sonic frequencies of a “fantastic” animal (cyclops, mermaid, etc.).
“What Fukushima revealed is that we are also living in an age of climato-politics in which we must confront the chaos of planetary flows that trespass the borders of nation states and evade their attempts at control.”
Swiss artist and designer Jürg Lehni celebrates the 20th anniversary of his seminal robotic drawing machine, Hektor MoMA , and remains a DIY marvel for its time: “edged circuit boards, assembly-programmed microcontrollers—we did everything by hand,” Lehni notes about making in the pre-fab era.
“Moments when pop culture and politics collide are about regressive, puritanical control over women’s bodies, over culture, over challenges to the status quo or perceived progressive shifts.”
– Feminist media critic
Anita Sarkeesian , on mapping media culture wars in her new series,
That Time When , that concludes with
Gamergate , the 2014 harassment campaign she was at the center of and that is now “part of our understanding of how internet culture exists, how communities form and what they form around”
Trevor Paglen ’s solo exhibition “A Color Notation” opens at Pace’s recently expanded arts complex in Seoul. The show presents new and recent landscape photography (image: Near Bodega Bay Deep Semantic Image Segments , 2022) the American artist interpreted through custom-built computer vision systems and AI. “Through his masterful manipulation of these technologies, Paglen brings questions of perception to the fore of his image making practice,” Pace notes.
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