1,369 days, 2,176 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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”New Surroundings: Approaching the Untouchable,” an exhibition organized by Molior that delves deep into the digital sublime, opens at Montreal’s Livart . Curated by Nathalie Bachand , it features artists including Caroline Gagné , Olivia McGilchrist , François Quévillon (image: MÉTÉORES Sabrina Ratté presenting works in print, installation, video, and VR that explore extreme tensions between ”modified, reorganized, and augmented” digitality and nature.
Resurfacing fabled 18th century partially-dissected wax figures used in the study of anatomy, “Cere Anatomiche” opens at Fondazione Prada Milan, presenting four anatomical venuses and 72 drawings from the La Specola collection alongside a companion film by David Cronenberg . Entitled Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection , the Canadian director’s short dwells on how the figures’ uncanny “body language and facial expressions do not display pain or agony.”
“Grids are emblematic of the array—the fundamental data structure around which all computer hardware and software is built. So, the grid is a natural visual form for computer–based digital art, and the aesthetic implications of this are far-reaching.”
– Generative artist
Tyler Hobbs , on the enduring technological relevance of (the often grid-based works of)
Agnes Martin . Reflecting on the late American painter in advance of his show “
QQL: Analogs ,” Hobbes enthuses “her work has taught me to take a closer look.”
The final instalment in a trilogy of exhibitions fixating on highrises, Jesse Colin Jackson ’s “Mackenzie Place” opens at Toronto’s Pari Nadimi Gallery. Venturing to Hay River in the Northwest Territories, the Canadian artist shot a year of time-lapse photography atop Mackenzie Place—the near arctic town’s lone skyscraper. The resulting panoramic video tracks daily and seasonal flux and is bolstered by audio of oral histories about the mining town collected by anthropologist Lindsay Bell .
Foregrounding daylight and circadian rhythms in an era of deleterious screen time, “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time” opens at EPFL Pavillions in Lausanne (CH). Featured are works both evocative and therapeutic, “to remind us of the necessity of regular light exposure for a healthy life,” from artists including Kirell Benzi , Olafur Eliasson , and Anna Ridler . Helga Schmid presents a full-on sleep pod (image: Circadian Dreams , 2022), in which visitors laze and soak up LED lighting calibrated to optimize natural body phases.
“If TurboTax is Dark UI, Tax Heaven 3000 is Pink UI, the nightcore of tax software.”
–
MSCHF co-founder Dan Greenberg, on
Tax Heaven 3000 (image, 2023), a forthcoming dating simulator that allows Americans to court Iris, “a cheerful and easygoing girl who is oddly interested in your personal finances,” while doing their taxes
“Wanna talk about ‘PC music?’ It’s one cello sample and a computer, baby.”
–
100 gecs ’ Dylan Brady and Laura Les, enthusing about the origins of the
THX deep note , the characterful chord that sounds before many motion pictures. Gushing about getting clearance to use it to kickoff their
new album , Les describes the
soundmark as “beautiful and terrifying.”
Eliot Higgins , Founder and Creative Director of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat , rattles Twitter with a series of deepfakes depicting Donald Trump’s arrest. Created using the latest version of Midjourney in anticipation of the rumoured bust, the AI-generated images show dramatic (and dramatically convincing) scenes of the former U.S. president wrangling cops and being taken in. In the real world, the Manhattan grand jury investigating Trump has yet to vote on an indictment.
“Just as quarantining helped slow the spread of the virus and prevent a sharp spike in cases that could have overwhelmed hospitals’ capacity, investing more in safety would slow the development of AI and prevent a sharp spike in progress that could overwhelm society’s capacity to adapt.”
–
Vox senior reporter
Sigal Samuel , making the case for “flattening the curve” of AI progress
Generative art NFT platform fxhash announces a new feature that “enables collectors to collaborate in the creative process.” Entitled fx(params), the functionality allows artists to designate certain parameters (e.g. colour, geometry, velocity) within their code as adjustable for primary market buyers. Instead of leaving an NFT’s appearance entirely to chance, the collector can tweak the artist’s system to their liking before minting their copy (image: fx(params) interface for 1mpo$ter’s Smash
“Thin Air,” the inaugural exhibition at The Beams London opens, featuring installations by artists 404.zero , James Clar , Robert Henke , Kimchi and Chips with Rosa Menkman , Matthew Schreiber , and S E T U P . Taking full advantage of the venue’s cavernous 5,100 square metres of high-ceilinged post-industrial space, the show presents large-scale immersive spectacle “at the boundaries of light, sound, and space” for visitors to soak up, explore, and lose themselves in (image: 404.zero 324 , 2023).
“Without novel human artworks to populate new datasets, AI systems will, over time, lose touch with a kind of ground truth. Might the next version of DALL-E be forced to cannibalize its predecessor?”
– Artist and writer
K Allado-McDowell , exploring possible side effects of the AI revolution. “To adapt, artists must imagine new approaches that subvert, advance or corrupt these new systems,” writes Allado-McDowell. “In the 21st century, art will not be the exclusive domain of humans or machines but a practice of weaving together different forms of intelligence.”
Nile Koetting ’s solo exhibition “Unattended Access” opens at Parliament Gallery in Paris, inviting viewers to consider the material internet and spectatorship inside his playground of 3D-printed miniatures of monitors, display machines, and theatres. Cherry script (2023, image), for example, imagines banal exhibition and office chatter as text chat animations on a pair of e ink displays. “Koetting presents to us the ultimate spectacle,” the gallery states. “There is no avoiding the infinite mirror here.”
“The breakneck deployment of half-baked AI, and its unthinking adoption by a load of credulous writers, means that Google—where, admittedly, I’ve found the quality of search results to be steadily deteriorating for years—is no longer a reliable starting point for research.”
Honouring his Mexican heritage and the Latinx community in San Francisco, “TECH-MECHS,” a survey of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ’s interactive installations opens at Gray Area. Featured are lyrical works like Pulse Topology bleaker perspectives on mortality and self-sovereignty, such as Sway
“MySpace had neither the edge of a New York City digital media startup. Nor the loose libertarian spirit of Silicon Valley.”
– American writer
Joanne McNeil , recalling a more innocent era of social media. In the first episode of
Main Accounts , her new podcast on the rise and fall of
MySpace in the 2000s, McNeil engages journalists
Julie Angwin and
Taylor Lorenz about the social network’s spyware-adjacent origins and its infamous 2005 sale to News Corp.
Brazilian researchers report the finding of “plastic rocks” on the remote island of Trindade , part of a volcanic archipelago about 1,100 kilometres off mainland Brazil. Chemical tests revealed the main pollutant forming these plastiglomerates to be synthetic fishing nets that wash ashore and ‘melt’ into the sediment when temperatures rise. “This is new and terrifying at the same time, because pollution has reached geology,” says Fernanda Avelar Santos, a geologist at the Federal University of Parana.
“It’s a question of permanence. What will last the longest? What will give me the strongest sense of comfort that a work will exist well beyond my lifetime?”
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