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
Year 2023 2022 2021 2020 Show All
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Taipei’s Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB) opens “The Unrestricted Society,” a group show probing the freedoms brought about by modern technology. Curator Chuang Wei-Tzu gathers works by Memo Akten , Paolo Cirio , Cheng Hsien-Yu , Theresa Schubert , Chang Yung-Ta and others that investigate agency in the age of mass surveillance. Kyriaki Goni ’s CGI narrative Not Allowed for Algorithmic Audiences (2021, image), for example, features a smart assistant bent on reconciling humans and machines.
“You don’t break into someone’s house to show them you can break into their house. You shouldn’t do it unless they ask you to.”
– Suresh Venkatasubramanian, former White House tech adviser and Brown University professor, on Dries Depoorter’s “subversive” art project
The Follower (2022). The new work juxtapozes Instagram photos with public webcam footage that shows the process of taking them—without the recorded people’s permission. “If one person can do this, what can a government do?” the Belgian artist counters.
“Refined Vision,” an exhibition in which Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadir draws parallels between Texas Gulf Coast and Persian Gulf region petro-cultures, opens at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston. Featured works include Crude Eye (2022, image), a new single-channel video piece on landscapes and infrastructures of extraction, and Spectrum
“If you look at TikTok your body is literally animated by the algorithm—it tells you how to move yourself—and you end up dancing for this abstract formulation of capital and algorithmic recommendation.”
– Online subculture researcher
Joshua Citarella , describing the diminishing agency of internet content creators. In his assessment, “people were able to make targeted critical interventions … shape it [media] with intent,” a decade ago—now users “are instrumentalized by the algorithim itself.”
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Duke University researchers develop a novel method of encrypting text, harnessing the chaos of computer simulated bacterial growth. Expanding on their recent article in data science journal Patterns , the team summarizes their use of machine learning frame-by-frame analysis of organic reaction–diffusion system animations to en- and decode text strings. “These patterns in essence constitutes a new, digitally generated coding scheme, which we call Emorfi,” they write .
“There’s money involved, there are systems and governments involved to make it. It’s a misdirect from the real history of that place, and the meaning and kinships that people have built there over millennia.”
– Assiniboine Native American art historian Alicia Harris, on the problematic politics—erasure of Indigenous culture—enacted by Michael Heizer’s
City (2022), and other land art (by settler artists) sited in the American Southwest
What Just Happened :
Miriam Arbus Cultivates “Seed Systems” That Nurture New XR Ecologies
The Canadian curator discusses interfaces, immersion, the metaverse, and prototyping new forms of human-nature relations in digital space
“This type of work I call ‘attention fracking,’ where a pool of valuable attention is gathered around an issue and then mined by opportunists who know that the public just needs a painkiller on the issue.”
– Artist and
Kimchi and Chips co-founder Elliot Woods, on the shallowness of
Sustainable Locks , a kinetic sculpture
Breakfast created for Tiffany’s Manhatten flagship store. “The artwork does nothing to talk about or acknowledge sustainability despite desperately wanting to,” fumes Woods.
Sarah Friend ’s solo exhibition “Terraforming” opens at Nagel Draxler’s Crypto Kiosk, Berlin, with a series of new works that “turn to the protocol layer of blockchains and the physical reality of the internet as subject matter.” Using text, video, code, and waste from a local data center, the Canadian software artist foregrounds “internet infrastructure, its stories, shape, materials” and the false “dichotomy between competition and cooperation.”
“It’s been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won’t be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art.”
– Polish fantasy illustrator
Greg Rutkowski , on being drowned out by AI derivatives. According to
Lexica , Rutkowski’s name has been used as an image-generator prompt 93,000 times on Stability.AI’s
Stable Diffusion platform—a total that eclipses Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci by an order of magnitude.
Eva & Franco Mattes ’ solo exhibition “Most to Least Viewed” opens at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (FMAV) in Modena, Italy. Focused on duo’s central themes of data, power, and identity, curator Nadim Samman presents seven algorithmically selected works, laid out in sequence of most to least viewed. The display includes The Bots Untitled (Yellow Tray) P2P
Sissel Tolaas ’ touring retrospective “RE_________” opens at Philadelphia’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), marking the show ’s U.S. premiere. Foregrounding issues including climate change, geopolitics, and anthropology through 20 interactive stations that deploy the Norwegian artist and researcher’s primary medium—scent—the exhibition invites visitors to smell, experience, and contemplate Tolaas’ provocative claim: “nothing stinks, only thinking makes it so.”
“Blood and Breath, Skin and Dust,” a solo show that zooms in on Kim Morgan’s eight years working with scanning electron microscopes , opens in Halifax. Featuring work across digital images, installation, and intervention (image: Blood Galaxy
“This is in fact a security exploit proof-of-concept; untrusted user input is being treated as instruction. Sound familiar? That’s SQL injection in a nutshell.”
– Tech writer
Donald Papp , on how text-based AI interfaces like
GPT-3 are vulnerable to “prompt injection attacks”—just like SQL databases. Contextualizing experiments by
Simon Wilkinson and
Riley Goodside , Papp explains how hackers are duping natural language processing systems with sneaky prompts (e.g. GPT-3 made to
claim responsibility for the 1986 space shuttle
Challenger disaster).
“And we finalized! Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today.”
– Ethereum co-founder
Vitalik Buterin , celebrating the cryptocurrency’s
transition to a
proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. The shift of the leading smart contract blockchain to 99% less energy consumption is good news for crypto boosters, who have endured a downslide, platform implosions, and countless exploits since the 2021 boom.
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