1,182 days, 1,855 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“Neurography [is] the process of framing and capturing images in latent spaces. The Neurographer controls locations, subjects and parameters.”
– German AI artist
Mario Klingemann , citing a tweet from January 2017 in which he first introduced the now more common descriptor. “I coined the term when it became obvious that latent spaces will become a new medium,” Klingemann writes, after fellow digital artist
Matt DesLauriers and others pondered its origin.
Berlin-based media artist Aram Bartholl plants a towering heart emoji, or Triangle of Sadness (2023), outside of Stadtgalerie Kiel, Germany, as part of the gallery’s “Tourismus. Let’s do it all” group exhibition. The latest in Bartholl’s series of supersized Internet iconography (Map This is Fine
“No, these renderings do not relate to reality. They relate to the totality of crap online. So that’s basically their field of reference, right? Just scrape everything online and that’s your new reality.”
Marcel Schwittlick ’s solo exhibition “Composition #84: The Long Run” opens at SP2 gallery, Berlin, juxtapozing three eponymous plotter drawings with videos documenting their creation. The pieces, each measuring 36 x 115 cm and comprising 2.5 million dots plotted over 23 hours, record the emptying of a collection of 30-year-old vintage felt tip pens, marking the “end of an era.” Eight stripes per plot, drawn with pens of the same colour, yield subtle variations that tell the “unique history of each pen,” notes Schwittlick.
A survey of artworks acquired by the Nam June Paik Art Center during its COVID-19 pandemic closure opens in Seoul. “On Collecting Time” presents Kim Heecheon , Sunmin Park , Jinah Roh , Sungsil Ryu , and 6 other artists whose collected works are thematically bound in their exploration of “human and machine time in various forms.” Unmake Lab’s Utopian Extraction
“The aim was to show how what we consider ‘art’ is not timeless but in fact socially constructed, powerfully conditioned by the conventions and normalizing practices of art institutions.”
– Art historian
Kavior Moon , discussing the institutional critique at the heart of Hans Haacke’s
Shapolsky et al ., a 1971 project documenting a NYC slumlord’s fraud. Full of rich analysis of artists including
Maria Eichhorn ,
Walid Raad , and
Hito Steyerl , Moon’s essay comprehensively answers the question ‘what is research-based art?’
“Terms of Use,” a show exploring “(re)framing of individual and collective selves, as we grapple with living simultaneously online and AFK,” opens at PHI Foundation in Montreal. Curated by Daniel Fiset and Cheryl Sim, the exhibition draws inspiration from feminists Ursula Franklin and Legacy Russell , and invites artists including Skawennati , Shanie Tomassini , Wu Tsang , Nico Williams , and Chun Hua Catherine Dong (image left: Meet Me Half Way
“In the absence of a capacity to reason from moral principles, ChatGPT was crudely restricted by its programmers from contributing anything novel to controversial—that is, important—discussions. It sacrificed creativity for a kind of amorality.”
– Linguistics and AI scholars
Noam Chomsky ,
Ian Roberts , and
Jeffrey Watumull , in an op-ed excoriating the “amorality, faux science, and linguistic incompetence” of ChatGPT. “We can only laugh or cry at the popularity of such systems,” they conclude.
Serendipitously coinciding with an economy on the brink, Isaac Julien’s multiscreen installation Playtime Great Recession , the filmmaker experiments in visualizing the flow of capital from the perspective of seven interlinked characters (a pair of hedge fund managers, a journalist, an artist, an art dealer, an auctioneer, and a maid) whose lives and ventures span Dubai, London, and Reykjavík.
“Digitization reproduces and deepens existing social inequalities in regards to access to digital services, presence and visibility on platforms as well as discrimination through algorithmic decision making.”
– Equity advocates
SUPERR Lab , contextualizing why feminist digital policy is necessary. Published in English just in time for International Women’s Day, their resource defines feminist tech policy, and provides case studies and references for further research.
OUT NOW :
Jenny Odell
Saving Time
An analysis of how our sense of time is structured by the relentless demands of capitalism, and a counterproposition arguing for “different rhythms of life.”
“Chain Reaction,” a collection of NFTs curated by Christiane Paul , is released on Feral File. Artists including Stephanie Dinkins , Sara Ludy , and Jennifer & Kevin McCoy contribute NFTs that probe the “social, aesthetic, and environmental contexts and networks in which these assets are embedded.” Ira Greenberg & Marina Zurkow’s The Dorises
“We are thrilled to announce that our campaign to gather artist opt outs has resulted in 78 million artworks being opted out of AI training.”
– AI artist-activist group
Spawning , on the success of
haveibeentrained.com , a tool that allows artists to search for their works in the Stable Diffusion training set and exclude them from further use. “This establishes a significant precedent towards realizing our vision of consenting AI,” write Spawning founders
Mat Dryhurst and
Holly Herndon .
Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich’s single-channel video installation Onset (2023) opens at Aksioma, Ljubljana. Co-commissioned by transmediale , the film draws on medieval demonology, open-source intelligence, and CGI animation to ‘haunt’ Russian air bases the duo reconstructed from satellite imagery. “The true horror of Russian colonialism becomes manifest in the process of possession,” the artists write, “the imposition of external control that gradually destroys an organism from within.”
“Signals: How Video Transformed the World” opens at New York’s MoMA, showcasing over 70 media works from the past six decades that capture how “artists have posed video as an agent of global change—from televised revolution to electronic democracy.” Highlights include Nam June Paik’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984), Ant Farm’s Media Burn (1973), Martine Syms’ Lessons I–CLXXX (2014–18), and Dara Birnbaum’s Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission (1990, image).
“What we actually saw was a preview of what future products will look like. A lot of hype, a lot of misstatements, and an exploitation of people’s lack of knowledge about what cognition is and what artificial systems can do.”
– Tech critic
Edward Ongweso Jr. , on the ChatGPT launch. “The correct analysis is
they lied . They lied about its capabilities, they rolled out what was possible, and they’re going to keep lying,” he adds, describing how OpenAI cynically overhyped a half-baked product to capture the public’s attention—and drive up their valuation.
Paul Kremer ’s solo exhibition “Spring” opens at Library Street Collective (LSC) in Detroit, featuring a new body of paintings dependent on experiments in tool-making. Inspired by the simplicity of Henri Matisse’s découpés, Houston-based Kremer turned to ChatGPT to prototype a series of composition tools he then, with the help of digital artist Leander Herzog , developed into a “suite of personalized art-making software.” The resulting Blooms (2023) resemble abstract flower forms in striking colours.
“I’m hoping we can move away from this single-minded effort to financialize everything and start trying to develop a more diverse economy that, by virtue of diversity, would be a more stable economy.”
– Science fiction author
Neil Stephenson , on how Web3 needs to outgrow speculation. Discussing the metaverse (a term he coined in his 1992 novel
Snow Crash ), he notes that in virtual spaces “sooner or later people want to do something besides talk and do little emotes,” citing Epic Games’
Fortnite as striking a good balance of socializing and activity.
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