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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“I remember WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS the way a non-nerd might remember a vintage Mustang. You could just take that thing out and go, man. ”
– Writer and programmer
Paul Ford , making the case for reliving computing history through emulation. “You can’t understand software from screenshots any more than you can understand music from album reviews,” he writes. “Emulation reminds me to ask myself whether the computing
experience is always getting better.”
Aram Bartholl debuts This Is Fine Map
“A human operator tags the ends of the intestine with drops of fluorescent glue, creating markers the robot can track.”
– Science journalist
James Gaines , describing the computer vision workflow that allowed the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) prototype to recently successfully perform
intestinal surgery on pig tissue
Illuminating the input-output principle of computational creative practice, the AOI (Art on the Internet) co-curated NFT group exhibition “In Our Code” opens at Unit London. On view are newly created software works by 11 artists, including Sofia Crespo , Casey Reas , Emily Xie , Tyler Hobbs , Che-Yu Wu , and Zach Lieberman , and the inputs that inspired them. Reas’ Process Compendium (X-4)
Transplanting the ringing of ten iconic bells from France to Turkey, “Silent Echoes: Notre-Dame” opens. Silenced after the 2019 fire that gutted the Parisian cathedral, sound artist Bill Fontana recorded the (currently decommissioned) bells into an eponymous 10-channel mix that makes its international debut in Istanbul. The installation is accompanied by recent experimental video work that explores related soundscapes (image: Silent Echoes (Acoustic images series) , 2022).
What Just Happened :
Martin Bricelj Baraga Builds Monuments to the Sky’s 53 Shades of Blue
The Slovenian artist and curator discusses his networked environmental sculptures and the importance of data transparency in the age of climate change
“It’s not just like going out and buying a chair. There are issues of IP, of the end-user license agreements. We had to talk some producers into changing the EULA for us.”
– MoMA Senior Curator
Paola Antonelli , on the complexities of building the museum’s videogame collection that’s now on view (in its entirety!) as part of the “
Never Alone ” exhibition. “Designers want their work to be in the museum, of course,” Antonelli notes. “It’s the lawyers that stop them.”
“Dark and Perfect Memories,” a solo exhibition by Tia-Simone Gardner exploring the troubled legacy of the Mississippi River, opens in Toronto. Drawing on archival research and digital cartography, Gardner maps how the river extended the transatlantic slave trade inland, and drove economic production. Included works range from inkjet prints of salt water, to steamship models, to representations of Black geography (image: …when we had a smooth sea and moderate wind…, 2019).
“Basha’s paintings are dominated by circles, which she creates with her feet, while her lines are created by a painting arm.”
– Critic
Hrag Vartanian , describing paintings by
Agnieszka Pilat’s robot dog Basha (a renamed instance of General Dynamics’
Spot ). Wary of the gimmick, Vartanian writes “these machines … are ultimately not our friends, and humanizing them distracts from their use by authorities to police, control, or kill populations from a distance,”
“IMAGE CAPITAL,” an exhibition organized by Estelle Blaschke and Armin Linke , opens in Essen, Germany. Arguing ‘photography is information technology,’ the show (and companion website ) explores six themes: memory, access, protection, mining, imaging, and currency. Tracking the photograph across contexts including scientific imaging and archives (image: Max Planck Institute , 2018), the curators ask “when and under what circumstances did images become operational?”
Manfred Mohr ’s solo exhibition “liquid symmetry” opens at bitforms gallery, New York, presenting vibrant algorithmic compositions from the veteran’s latest phase. Started in 2020, the titular series has diagonal paths pass through 11-dimensional hyper-cubes, leaving colour traces and generating shapes. The results are shown on-screen, as inkjet prints, or laser-cut aluminum reliefs (image: P3011_3 ) and juxtapozed with several of Mohr’s historical works from the 1960s and ’70s.
“The murder of an activist sows a legacy, because the person who is buried—planted, in a manner of speaking—becomes a seed for the ongoing political and organizational processes of the community.”
– Artist
Carolina Caycedo , describing “the sowing,” a Latin America phrase used to describe the poetic return of activists killed defending territory, water, or life, to the earth.
“Common Measures,” a show featuring three installations by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer , opens at Pace Gallery in New York. Included are interactive crowd favourites Cloud on Water Pulse Topology Hormonium
DOSSIER :
“I’m interested in the tension between pure randomness and something controlling it. Vera found that tension. Her work just looks like it’s from another planet.”
– David Familian, Beall Center Artistic Director and Curator, discussing how the venue’s Vera Molnar retrospective, “Variations,” is rooted in his deep fascination with the early innovator
Delving into their (eponymous) new film (image, 2022), “Capture,” a solo exhibition by Metahaven , opens in Trondheim, Norway. In it, the artist collective explores ‘knowability’ on three fronts: a rumination on the inscrutability of bats, CERN’s hunt for the Higgs boson , and the remarkable qualities of lichens . Their displayed media, and accompanying textiles and collages contemplate consciousness in “both speculative deeply implicated ways,” writes curator Stefanie Hessler .
“As its possibilities expand, it’s important to consider the potential threats and dangers as the metaverse introduces risks related to legislation, property, control, fraud, privacy threats, ethics, and security.”
“On Breathing,” an exhibition by Nina Barnett & Jeremy Bolen that examines respiration relative to “pressure, particulate, filtration, and flow,” opens at Johannesburg’s Adler Museum of Medicine . Its lone installation, On Breathing—Iron Lung With Blue Gums (2022, image), puts a hulking iron lung in conversation with Blue Gum Trees , mine dust, extraction residue, and radioactive bricks, contrasting the deep time of resource extraction with local atmospheric conditions.
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