1,182 days, 1,854 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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OUT NOW :
DeForrest Brown, Jr.
Assembling a Black Counter Culture
A critical reframing of Detroit techno as a unique (and vital) form of Black musical and cultural production
“A political candidate is giving a speech to millions of people. For every viewer, the candidate’s face has been subtly modified to resemble the viewer.”
– Rand Waltzman, adjunct senior information scientist at the
Rand Corporation , providing a plausible example of mass manipulation in the metaverse. “We are not even close to being able to defend users,” Waltzman warns. “Malicious actors will be able to take the age-old dark arts of deception and influence to new heights—or depths.”
DOSSIER :
In her latest entry to “Weaving Variations,” art historian Zsofi Valyi-Nagy examines Vera Molnar’s Portrait de ma mère , a 1988 work in which the pioneering artist translated a photograph of her late mother into ASCII-like geometric forms. “Molnar takes something intensely personal and uses abstraction to make it more universally relatable,” writes Valyi-Nagy.
“You don’t visit websites. Websites visit you: all the contents is downloaded to your computer.”
– Spanish artist and researcher
Joana Moll , discussing the interface as a “well-engineered capitalist machine” (see Moll’s
Carbolytics ) at Berlin’s panke.gallery
“Lynn has always taken a clear-eyed view of the technologies that have crashed over us. Her work lays out exactly what we have to gain and what we have to lose—and asks us to see, to understand, and to make a choice.”
– Curator
Tina Rivers Ryan , on two of
Lynn Hershman Leeson ’s early works—
See Inside (1964),
X-Ray Woman in Bathing Cap (1966)—on view at the Venice Biennale. “They confirmed my sense of the constancy of her commitment to exploring how the technologies we create, create us in turn—inside and out.”
“What would your avatar look like with dedicated artists and several weeks of iteration?” sneers Apple engineer Dimitri Diakopoulos on Twitter, after the origin of Mark Zuckerberg’s updated Horizon Worlds avatar is revealed. According to a LinkedIn post , 3D character artist Dylan Dunbar “sculpted, modelled, lit, textured, rendered” the Zuck from scratch, after an earlier version drew widespread ricidule. “We went through probably 40 iterations before landing on something we were happy with.”
“You’ll be able to buy a console with a giant AI chip and all the games will be dreams .”
– Midjourney CEO
David Holz , predicting the future of videogames. In the short term, he sees a productivity boon for the (labourious) game-production pipeline, via the widespread adoption of “AI to help bake out assets, textures, terrain, layouts, and characters.”
What Just Happened :
Claire L. Evans Assembles Fifty Key Sci-Fi Voices to “Terraform” Futurity
The Los Angeles-based writer discusses her new science fiction anthology, that she co-edited with Brian Merchant
“We’re both physicists—we quit our jobs as researchers and decided to do it.”
– Daniel Rayneau-Kirkhope and Arianna Casiragh, on feeling motivated to bike a zigzag route across 7 countries (GPS plotting a 7,250 km drawing in the process) to promote cycling as a climate crisis mitigation strategy
“We’re faced with a triple obsolescence: the death of the individual unit, the disappearance of manufacturers and suppliers, and the loss of knowledge of how they work and can be repaired.”
– CRT specialist
Jochen Saueracker , on the challenges of conserving Cathode-Ray Tube monitors. As part of the
Colorvac workshop (now part of the
ZKM ), the German artist who was once
Nam June Paik ’s video art roadie advocates for moving from ‘repair’ to ‘prepare for future use’ culture.
OUT NOW :
Merchant & Evans (Eds.)
Terraform
Brian Merchant and
Claire L. Evans’ formidable anthology compiles sci-fi short stories from 50 erudite writers
“I found myself wondering whether this ratio of governance participants to members is similar to past social institutions like bowling leagues, rotary societies, 4-H clubs, and others.”
–
Kickstarter and
Metalabel co-founder Yancey Strickler, reflecting on social DAO
Friends with Benefits ’ recent
festival . Ruminating on what is new and familiar about DAOs he asks “is this how social institutions like this have always been run, with a 10:1 worker-to-participant ratio?” [quote edited]
“We hear more of the story told from the perspective of an alligator refusing to leave the park, and an AI-resurrected Bald Cypress Tree, than the delusional architect and real estate company brokering that world.”
– CGI artist
Alice Bucknell , on the nonhuman voices in
Swamp City (2021). In her dark eco-fiction, Bucknell satirizes the “booming market of ecotourism and half-baked ecological theories that stem from neoliberal fantasies of a ‘hypernature.’”
DOSSIER :
Art historian
Zsofi Valyi-Nagy enters Vera Molnar’s “alternative exhibition spaces,” from research groups, to journals, to self-published books. By exploring ways of circulating her works and ideas outside of traditional art venues, the generative art luminary garnered an international, more open-minded audience. “I suggest we broaden this idea of showing work to
sharing work,” Valyi-Nagy writes.
“He is suspected of concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralized Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash. Multiple arrests are not ruled out.”
– Netherlands Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD), on the arrest of developer
Alexey Pertsev . A go-to transaction anonymizer used by money launderers, Tornado Cash also has benign
use cases ; the arrest and deplatforming of its developers has some
asking “is writing open source code illegal now?”
“The Fable of Net in Earth,” the 2022 ARKO Art & Tech Festival kicks off in Seoul. Inspired by decentralization (mycology, Web3), it brings together Morehshin Allahyari , SunJeong Hwang , and Young Joo Lee , and others. Featured works include Eobchaecoin (2022), Nahee Kim’s unabashedly ponzi cryptocurrency (it will be very profitable in 2082), and De Anima (2018-21, image), Clara Jo’s film probing humanity’s relationship with nature, that draws on footage from Kenya, Myanmar, and France.
“Using fear-mongering about package theft and suburban crime, a surveillance company has convinced countless homes to affix a surveillance network node. Now they want us to laugh about it all in our (ideally) Ring-surveilled homes.“
–
Motherboard staff writer
Edward Ongweso Jr , on the upcoming launch of
Ring Nation , Amazon’s new tv show featuring videos taken from Amazon Ring surveillance cameras
Dutch crypto artist Harm van den Dorpel releases the Mutant Garden Seeder desktop app to the general public. The software, previously exclusive to holders of his well-known NFT project, helps “aid the greater plan of decentralisation,” the website states. “This ‘read-only sidechain’ synchronises to Ethereum Mainnet, and lets your mutants live and grow on your own local computer.” Released in 2021, Mutant Garden Seeder
“When we look at AI images, we’re unable to match our subjectivity as viewers with the artist’s subjectivity as a creator. Instead of a particular human experience, we’re shown only averages.”
– Design strategist, curator, and writer
Kevin Buist , parsing the deluge of digital art created with AI image generators like
DALL-E . “AI is not exactly copying artists,” writes Buist. “It’s using their images to generalize visual depictions of everything language can express.”
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