1,549 days, 2,381 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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Singapore Art Museum (SAM) launches “Open Systems,” an online exhibition exploring how virtual space is “for rehearsing alternative and novel modes of social, political, and spatial organization.” Cat Bluemke , Total Refusal , and 20 other artists will present works in the coming months, while Alice Bucknell and Lawrence Lek share video essays at launch; the latter’s Pyramid Schemes (2018), repurposes the parkour gameplay of the Assassin’s Creed series to illustrate a polemic about architectural aesthetics.
“There is something legitimately demonic in networked culture’s pervasive reduction of everything to data—words like ‘connection’ robbed of meaning; conviviality flattened into frictionless exchange.”
–
Spike editor and columnist
Adina Glickstein , contemplating the “cosmic exoskeleton of communications technology” in the wake of two recent Paris exhibitions. Both Nile Koetting’s “
Unattended Access ” at Parliament Gallery and the group show “
Au delà ” at Lafayette Anticipations conjure “data’s limitations in the face of the divine,” she writes.
London’s Lisson Gallery opens “Matter as Actor,” a group exhibition of 12 artists including Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen , Otobong Nkanga , Lucy Raven , and Zhan Wang that explore “mutable forms of matter as active agents in a more-than-human world.” Cohen Van Balen’s B/NdAlTaAu (2015), for example, reverses hard drives into precious metals, whereas Wang’s Match Openings (2023, image) reconfigures rock to “stimulate philosophical slippage between the natural and manmade worlds.”
“The New Yorker once hailed Marc Andreessen as ‘tomorrow’s advance man.’ The question now is whether his vision of the future might be history.”
The public mint for Social Contracts , an Ethereum wallet network visualization by Turkish artist Burak Arikan closes. In all, 899 editions were minted by NFT collectors who were curious to see what their purchase history reveals about their nearest neighbours on the blockchain. Built by Arikan using his Graph Commons platform, the token visualizes connections between the owner and other collectors, predicts future NFT acquisitions, and evolves with each purchase and transfer of ownership.
“People should know that it isn’t just Meta—at every social media firm there are workers who have been brutalized and exploited. But today I feel bold, seeing so many of us resolve to make change. The companies should listen—but if they won’t, we’ll make them.”
– TikTok moderator turned labour organizer James Oyange, heralding the newly-formed African Content Moderators Union. Spurned by widespread PTSD and wages as low as $1.50 USD an hour, Oyange promises to challenge ByteDance, Meta, OpenAI, and other tech companies that offshore content moderation to Africa.
OUT NOW :
Danny Franzreb
Proof of Work
German photographer
Danny Franzreb captures crypto’s material reality—GPU farms, miners, energy infrastructure—in stunning images he shot around the world during the bull run of 2021 and 2022. Franzreb’s photos are accompanied by essays of UCCA curator
Holly Roussell and NFT booster Anika Meier.
Foregrounding human-machine tensions, Sophia Oppel ’s solo show “On either side of a surface” opens at Arsenale Contemporary Art Toronto. Featured are silicone gel works and laser-cut wall-hangings by the Canadian artist, as well as the central video piece I’m sorry, I’m having trouble with the connection, please try again in a moment (2023, image), in which an introspective AI assistant named Claudia reflects on her subjugated status as “a machine, a servant, and a product.”
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg ’s “Machine Auguries: Toledo” opens at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA), Ohio, marking the British and South African artist’s first US solo show and largest indoor installation yet. Ginsberg’s immersive environment simulates the natural dawn chorus of regional birds, but slowly shifts from natural calls to AI-generated ones. Drawing on tens of thousands of field recordings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for AI training, Ginsberg problematizes progress in times of ecological disruption.
“Duotopia,” a survey of works by Chinese artist Cao Fei focused on “the metaverse, virtual reality, and the interactions between human and machine consciousness” opens at Sprüth Magers Berlin. The show presents a selection of works, some depicting virtuality, like Oz (2022, image), where an androgynous avatar floats idyllically, while others, like Meta-mentary (2022), discuss it, via video interviews with everyday people about “their thoughts on the metaverse and the distant future.”
“At a table with 14 stools, plates and ceremonial cutlery were laid for a fox, rat, wasp, pigeon, cow, human adults and child, wild boar, snake, beaver, wolf, raven and mushroom. Outside a ‘window’ was a rewilded city built upon the sediments of plural histories, representative of ecological resurgence.”
– Superflux’s
Anab Jain , citing her studio’s 2021 Venice Biennale installation
Refuge for Resurgence as an example of design that reflects ecological entanglements
OUT NOW :
Cory Doctorow
Red Team Blues
Prolific Canadian sci-fi writer and tech pundit
Doctorow kicks off a new series, about a legendary scam-busting forensic accountant that gets caught up in an elaborate cryptocurrency caper.
“Americans don’t need AI generated images to imagine they’re being overrun by immigrants and that their cities have devolved into anarchy, just like they don’t need deepfakes to believe lies about Nancy Pelosi.”
–
Motherboard ’s
Emanuel Maiberg , on the Republican Party turning to cutting edge technology to tell age-old lies. In a
new political ad , RNC staffers used AI-generated imagery to fear-monger about “China invading Taiwan, massive waves of immigration at the United States’ border with Mexico, and the total collapse of civilization in San Francisco,” if Biden wins another term.
“Mutant Passages,” a new body of work by Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri , opens at Kunsthaus Bregenz (AT). Articulating her central interest in oil sculpturally, the works include petrochemical molecular structures inflatables (image: BENZENE FLOAT , 2023), gastropod seashells that tell a story of “bizarre changes and contaminations” when listened to, and a white room filled with dark glass forms (inspired by the oil-drenched animal carcasses that washed ashore during the Gulf War).
“Where Big Data is merely aestheticized, a new court art is created, in whose flickering lights you can ‘talk about e-cars’ with politicians and lobbyists undisturbed, as entrepreneur Frank Thelen enthusiastically posted.”
“A future that de-centres the human in artistic practice to make room for other-than-human, living, and nonliving configurations also ignites the field of art itself—re-framing the artist as an engineer, designer, and system architect.”
Taking its name from the eponymous searing neon work by feminist conceptual artist Claire Fontaine (2012, image), “Someone is getting rich” opens at Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum. Curated by Carrie Pilto, the show invites the aforementioned Fontaine along with Eline Benjaminsen , DIS , Femke Herregraven , Petr Pavlensky , and 10 other artists to present works that speak truth to power by “revealing how the aftermath of colonialism is still embedded in the financial sector today.”
“The board advised all their shareholders to vote against this resolution, making it clear that in addition to promoting conflict and violence around the world, Lockheed Martin is also uninterested in scaling back its significant contribution to climate change.”
– Activists
Danaka Katovich and David Gibson, reporting on whether the U.S. government’s largest military contractor will disclose plans on how to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. To do so would be “premature and not in the best interest of our Company or our stockholders,” the board argues.
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