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
Month January February March April May June July August September October November December Show All
“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.”
“I struggled to finish the last works of my show because I had burnt out just having to be online all the time. I can barely open my computer screen right now.”
– Artist and composer
Sara Ludy , on her NFT exhaustion. “You have to be plugged into Discord 24/7 and juggle several other aspects of being an artist in a way that takes away from making art,” Ludy says. “It’s a breakthrough moment for laptop artists, but you have to have balance and moderation.”
Bob Bicknell-Knight ’s solo exhibition “Non-Player Character” opens at Galeria.Kollektiva, Kassel, linking NPCs in videogames and controlled existence in a hyper-capitalist, technocratic world. Expanding on the titular CGI film , a new commission and the show’s centrepiece, the British artist presents a series of hybrid paintings featuring NPC quotes from iconic games, 3D-printed sculptures of useless inventory items, and an interactive graveyard to mourn the “digital deaths” of NPC companions.
“Paired together, you’d have nearly a whole kilowatt of power being sucked up by just the processor and graphics card. Everything else will absolutely push this system over the 1000W line.”
–
TechRadar computing editor
John Loeffler , on next-gen Nvidia and AMD circuits hogging energy. “Value and efficiency seem to have been completely thrown by the wayside, and that isn’t just a mistake, it’s increasingly unethical.”
Concluding her PlatteForum residency, Raquel Meyers ’ solo exhibition “Concrete Redundancy” opens at the Denver urban art laboratory. Meyers, a Spanish artist known for her work with obsolete technologies, organizes artifacts created with typewriters, teletext, and fax machines into “techno-rubble”—a tribute to Denver7’s soon-to-be-demolished brutalist landmark . “Concrete Redundancy is a tool for the struggle,” the exhibition text states, “an Anthropocene souvenir for the future.”
DOSSIER :
“What if Vera had decided thirty years ago that her art wasn’t selling enough or being shown in the right places and had stopped creating? It would have been a tragic loss for all of us.”
– Digital artist and prolific collector
Anne Spalter , acknowledging the tenacity of generative art pioneer Vera Molnar (and other early computer artists) that toiled away in obscurity and are only
just receiving recognition
German duo Mouse on Mars (MoM) performs using ROBODYNAMIC DIFFUSION: RDD Lenbachhaus , Haus der Kunst , and Museum Brandhorst . Jointly developed by MoM’s Jan St. Werner, Michael Akstaller , Nele Jäger, and Oliver Mayer, RDD is a directional speaker bot that projects sound in a tightly focused beam, creating opportunities to induce “controlled disorientations and sensory redirections” in audiences.
“I recently mounted a section of tracking to the ceiling of my home studio so I could be hoisted out of my wheelchair to reach heights and canvas sizes I otherwise wouldn’t be able to access.”
– Painter
Robin Hodgson , on his DIY ceiling lift. A quadriplegic since his teens, creating adaptive tools (including a spray paint gun using a bicycle brake) is part of his practice. “My aim is to develop a unique painting style through new and experimental methods,” Hodgson writes, in a summary of his process.
Exploring how medicine and shamanism can begin to blur into one another, “Post-Human Narratives—In the Name of Scientific Witchery” opens in Hong Kong. Featured artists include Betty Apple , Mayumi Hosokura , and Yu Shuk Pui Bobby , with contributed works ranging from Liv Tsim ’s biomatter fabrications (2022, image) to Florence Lam ’s Zirca , an extremely witchy performance about channeling energy—applying so much of it to materials that they produce light.
“At some point, we’re amassing all this computing power at the consumer level for the sake of amassing this power because we can. Then we just go and use it to stream Netflix.”
– Tech journalist
John Loeffler , commenting on rumoured 200% performance increases in upcoming Nvidia and Intel chips. Concerned about financial accessibility and egregious power consumption he concludes “it’s okay to say, ‘you know, 60 to 70 fps at 1440p is good enough,’ because honestly, it is.”
Load More
To dive deeper into Stream, please
Log-In or become a
HOLO Reader .
Daily discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture: Get full access by becoming a HOLO Reader !
Perspective : research, long-form analysis, and critical commentaryEncounters : in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovatorsStream : a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and countingEdition : HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in printBecome a HOLO Reader
