1,577 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
Year
Month
Tag
Order
Custom
Filter
Navigating the gap between veteran digital artists and next generation upstarts, “Machine Violence” opens at Postmasters Gallery in New York City. Twelve artists including Damjanski , Huntrezz Janos , Eva & Franco Mattes , and Jennifer & Kevin McCoy present works spanning machinima to painting. Of note: the show includes Biennale.py (2001, image), the Mattes’ 49th Venice Biennale contribution, in which a connected virus-laden and ‘clean’ computer “infect and disinfect each other in an endless cycle.“
“We become fixated on the affordances of a software program or the politics of a database; we even classify works according to the tools with which they were made, unintentionally reviving largely outmoded notions of medium-specificity.”
– Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator
Tina Rivers Ryan , on the “intersection of art and technology” where classics like Charles Csuri and James Shaffer’s 1967
Sine Curve Man are valued primarily for their technical traits. “I wonder if our focus on how these works are made tends to inhibit our ability to also fully experience them as art, pushing us away instead of drawing us closer.”
LaMont Hamilton ’s sound installation To Hear the Earth Before the End of the World (2023) opens at Alaska’s Anchorage Museum, immersing visitors in sonicifications of the five planetary systems: the geosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. Building on years of research to gain “a ground-zero understanding of our changing Earth,” the American multi-disciplinary artist added a new chapter drawing on field recordings made during a 2022 residency with the museum.
“It is therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency.”
–
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announcing the end to the coronavirus crisis as a “public health emergency of international concern”—its highest level of alert—which has been in place since January 30, 2020. The battle, however, is not over. “We still have [systemic] weaknesses,” notes WHO’s emergencies director Michael Ryan. “And those weaknesses will be exposed by this virus or another virus. In most cases, pandemics truly end when the next pandemic begins.”
OUT NOW :
Interface Critique 4
Diagrammatic Operations
Johanna Drucker ,
Dora Đurkesac ,
Sabine Wirth ,
Jonathan Zong , and other interdisciplinary contributors explore the semiotics of information visualization and the history of diagrammatically organized interaction.
“What surprised us was that the majority of species that are traded on the dark web are for their recreational drug properties, particularly for psychoactive compounds. People trade these to essentially lick them.”
– University of Adelaide ecologist
Phill Cassey , on the booming illegal wildlife trade on darknet markets. In a
new paper , Cassey and team identified 153 different species on offer, many of them with known drug properties. The toxic glands of the advertized Sonoran desert toad (
Incilius alvarius ), for example, contain the psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT.
“Space synthesis,” the debut solo show of German artist and composer Jan St. Werner, opens at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (DE). Known as half of musical duo Mouse on Mars , his recent projects include directional speaker experiments and “Alchemical ,” a 2021 Bitforms exhibition with Casey Reas. Curated by Çağla Ilk, Werner activates the Kunsthalle’s acoustics with an installation that modulates sound and light, inviting visitors to explore and “become part of a moving, multi-perspective scenario.”
“The fact that we all need land to live, and that there’s no more land available, is the crux of the immorality in profiting from it. You’re renting someone’s rights back to them.”
– Writer and engineer
Jehan Azad , on the travesty that is land ownership. Drawing on the agrarian justice teachings of
Thomas Paine and
Henry George , Azad makes the case against a system of perpetual “existential debt.” He writes: “From the moment you emerge, you’re in a space that belongs to someone else, and from then on, money is spent each day to give you access to the space you require to exist.”
“Back to Earth: Contested Histories of Outer Space Travel” opens at New York’s Canal Projects. Nuotama Bodomo , Zahy Tentehar , and Alice dos Reis contribute to a film program that counters colonial space narratives (conquest, mining, tourism, etc.) with intersectional perspectives. Subash Thebe Limbu’s film Ningwasum (2021, image), for example, is a sci-fi film about a trio of Indigenous time travellers, from a future where Yakthung “knowledge, culture, ethics, and storytelling are still intact.”
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.
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 print
Become a HOLO Reader