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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An ethnographic exploration of the work and daily life of non-playable characters, Total Refusal ’s meta-documentary Hardly Working premieres (and wins best direction) at Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland. The film follows four digital extras—a laundress, a stableman, a street sweeper, a handyman—toiling away in the videogame Red Dead Redemption 2
“Bodies are made up of this substance, which existed before bodies existed. Your water is the same as mine inside, but we’re very different people. Skin both links us to the outside world and separates us from it.”
What Just Happened :
Kyriaki Goni Weaves Counter-Narratives to Colonial Cosmologies and Space Expansionism
The Greek artist discusses the interplanetary ethics at the heart of her Warsaw Biennale installation
“In this framing, no one viewpoint is favored over another, not even the biological over the mineral or mechanical.”
– Writer and
In Search of Mycotopia (2021) author
Doug Bierend , on James Bridle invoking the “more-than-human” as a “mega-category” in their new book
Ways of Being . “It is a grouping so vast,” Bierend writes, “the category disappears, and the interactions within it are what matters.”
American logistics company UPS begins installing in-truck surveillance cameras. This summer drivers are reporting back-of-truck cargo area temperatures of 49° C, and in a move that made workers bristle, UPS rolled out Lytx telemetry cameras (image), which track GPS and monitor for “behaviours associated with collisions”—not air conditioning. “Whatever its capabilities, the mere presence of the camera has stoked fear and paranoia among my coworkers,” writes driver Matt Leichenger .
Pushing the vintage tv text and graphics standard into overdrive, 420 Years of Teletext Evoke demoparty in Cologne. Coder Losso managed to software-generate a teletext signal from a Raspberry Pi that, hooked up to an old-fashioned CRT television set, uses hardware exploits for nifty frame-buffering tricks (more on GitHub ). The result: a zany teletext origin story featuring smooth animations, pixel graphics, demoscene in-jokes, and a rocking chiptune track.
“If we look back to the beginnings of cinema, then perhaps Man With a Movie Camera might stack up as a strong critical reflection on the medium itself, but we wouldn’t ignore Metropolis and Battleship Potemkin .”
– Elliot Woods of the Seoul-based light art studio
Kimchi and Chips , on the merit of different kinds of (AI) art. “Value does not come from a work being critical, but instead from being ‘articulate,’ i.e. capable of processing and producing meaning,” writes Woods.
“I do not believe civilization as we know it will make it out of this century. Resilient humans will survive, but our societies that have urbanized and are supported by rural agriculture will not.”
– Canadian climate scientist and legislator
Andrew Weaver , on the underexplored risks of catastrophic climate change that eleven scientists are warning about in a new
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper
A collaboration between New Zealanders Simon Denny and Karamia Müller , “Creation Stories” opens across two Auckland galleries, Gus Fisher and Michael Lett . In their titular co-creations—a series of circuitboard-like murals—the two map how their family trees but also commerce, sovereignty, technology, and polity connect the Pacific to German-speaking Europe. Also in view: topical works by a dozen other artists including Sarah Friend , Ryan Kuo , and Stella Brennan .
“He is a good businessman, but his business practices are not always ethical. It is funny that he has all this money and still wears the same clothes.”
– Meta chatbot
Blenderbot , responding to the prompt “how do you feel about Mark Zuckerberg as CEO of Facebook?” posed by Buzzfeed data scientist
Max Woolf .
A retrospective collecting 40 works by the Australian artist , “Patricia Piccinini: We Are Connected” opens at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum. Showcasing her unsettling sculptures and installations that morph contemporary biopolitics towards the grotesque, the show features works including The Bond The Field (2018, image), which, respectively, depict a mother cradling a human-ish fleshy creature, and a (wildly) genetically modified crop.
“From an early age they are trying to spot mathematically talented kids in school. They groom those kids—put them in computer classes—and when those kids show promise they get sent to elite universities.”
– Cybercrime journalist
Geoff White , on the state-managed recruiting pipeline for
Lazarus Group , the elite North Korean hacker squad. “From there [elite universities] the really gifted computer kids will either go into the nuclear research program … or computer hacking.”
Canadian curator Andrew Lochhead revisits the controversy around realities:united ’ cancelled public artwork LightSpell (2017), installed at Toronto’s Pioneer Village subway station. The architectural light matrix was designed for visitor messages but never activated over fears of abuse. “We were commissioned to modify the installation’s software,” the artists reveal in the comments about extensive reworks, “but the Toronto Transit Commission stopped replying to us for unknown reasons.”
OUT NOW :
Jack Ashby
Platypus Matters
A reconsideration of the (often colonialist) history of one of nature’s most idiosyncratic mammals
“It wasn’t that long ago that we were designing cooling systems for a peak outdoor temperature of 32 degrees. They’re now over 8 degrees higher than they were ever designed for.”
– Jon Healy, of the UK data center consultancy
Keysource , on how data centers are ill-prepared for the climate crisis. Healy argues that it’ll require substantial retrofitting—bigger chiller machines, bigger condensers, implementing evaporative cooling—to keep the planet’s collective knowledge online.
Researchers create the world’s first synthetic embryos—no sperm, eggs, or fertilization required. Molecular Geneticist Jacob Hanna and his team accomplished the feat by reprogramming stem cells from mice back to a naïve state, and simulating a placenta’s blood and oxygen requirements with a nutrient solution; the cells self-assembled into embryo-like structures with an intestinal tract, a proto-brain, and a heart. “Our next challenge is to understand how stem cells know what to do,” says Hanna.
“Entangled: bio/media” opens at Shanghai’s Chronus Art Center (CAC), exploring “the biophilic properties of artificial intelligence, electronics, algorithms, and informatics” in a group exhibition. Unveiled progressively in thematic chapters, eleven works by Ani Liu , Shuyi Cao , Etsuko Yakushimaru , Yunchul Kim , Xu Haomin (Rootless Tree , 2022), and others narrate a parable of “co-naturality” (see Eugene Thacker’s Biomedia
N∰menon , an installation by Melle Nieling and Amelie Mckee opens at Künstlerhaus Dortmund. Produced during a Plicnik-Collective summer residency at the German venue, it consists of a series of apparatuses intended to draw attention to the lack of a user. Drawing on video interviews that describe a mysterious event with spiritual and economic resonance, the spartan scene stokes “feelings of paranoid threat, in which the unknown opens the imagination.”
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