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
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“After 5 weeks of vacationing and disconnecting myself from crypto, it is truly amazing how utterly irrelevant crypto is in every day life and how little it matters to most people. Yes we’re early, but also we are clearly caught up in a tiny niche bubble that no one cares about.”
– Web3 enthusiast
Foobazzler , providing a much-needed reality check
“Nature/Code/Drawing,” an exhibition of plotter drawings by Hiromasa Fukaji and Junichiro Horikawa , opens at CUBE 1,2,3 in Tokyo, showing exceedingly natural, but algorithmically generated forms. In joining forces—Horikawa on programming, Fukaji on plotting—the two designers attempt to express nature’s complexity by simulating the delicate interplay of logic and chaos that governs the world. They reveal process too, drawing new forms during the exhibition.
Reddit user Monsur_Ausuhnom points out that Lake Mead in the dystopian videogame Fallout New Vegas
“People were producing galaxy catalogues just from a JPEG.”
– European Space Agency astronomer
Sarah Kendrew , describing how star gazers were stunned by the clarity of
preview images collected by James Webb Space Telescope instruments, eagerly anticipating the
release of many more next week
Ana Prvački ’s Apis Gropius , a new site-specific species of bee, takes over the atrium of Berlin’s Gropius Bau. An AR experience hatched in collaboration with NEEEU during the museum’s residency program, the project draws on Prvački’s long-standing interest in bees, our dependence on them, and the venue’s history in taxonomical research. The goal: playfully explore “the manifold ways in which institutions and nature intersect and co-evolve.”
Presenting a new large-scale eponymous work by installation and media artist Stéphane Thidet , “Bruit rose” (2022, image) opens at LiFE in Saint-Nazaire, France. Extending the elemental engagement with materials from his iconic waterfall façade Rideau
“Another popular hypothesis is that squirrels just flat-out run a better PR operation. In other words, their superior status is not innate but cultural, resulting from a long history of favourable media depictions.”
– Science journalist
Jacob Stern , trying to reconcile why rats elicit disgust from humans but squirrels are viewed as harmless (or even cute)
What Just Happened :
Jeremy Bolen Casts Haunting Artifacts That Capture Climate Crisis Future-History
The American artist and researcher discusses the environmental calamity depicted in his current MOCA GA show
Cryptoheaven3 (2022), a CGI short imagining the “digital afterlife” of disgraced ponzi crypto exchange CEO Gerald Cotton, premieres at Milan Machinima Festival. After defrauding traders for $180 million the QuadrigaCX CEO died in 2018—Ukrainian artist Letta Shtohryn began making shorts about his idyllic posthumous adventures with The Sims 4
“The Stutter of History,” a retrospective of singular German sculptor-photographer Thomas Demand , opens at Shanghai’s Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA). Known for his meticulous cardboard reconstructions of real-world scenes, the show depicts “scenarios from the margins of historical events” including a meditation on the banality of Edward Snowden’s Russian hotel room (2021), and the squalor of the Stasi offices (1995, image), after being ransacked by German citizens.
“These policies have been flawed, to say the least. There has to be a complete and total mindset shift. Otherwise one day we’ll turn on the faucet and nothing will come out.”
– Hydrologist and Berkeley Lab researcher
Newsha Ajami , describing the unfortunate confluence of droughts, a (rapidly) disappearing
Great Salt Lake , middling water conservation efforts, and booming population growth in Salt Lake City, Utah
Marking the emergence of three new avatars, or non-fungible people (NFPs), to inhabit LaTurbo Avedon ’s blockchain-integrated Materia (2022) collection, “Club Zero” launches as part of arebyte on Screen . Non-binary, unnamed, and unfinished, the avatars’ final form is determined by visitors in three public editing sessions. Avedon’s NFPs are brought to life slowly, arebyte writes, presenting an antidote to the hyper-capitalised avatar moment of the metaverse.
“Xenogenesis,” a retrospective of the London-based Otolith Group , opens at Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Collecting works produced between 2011-18 by Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun, and collaborators, that cultivate “a science fiction of the present” through media, installation, and performance, the show includes Sovereign Sisters Universal Postal Union’s “imperial ambition,” and a special public program curated by the collective.
The Art Directors Club Germany (ADC) celebrates the legacy of the late Joachim Sauter with a lifetime achievement award at the annual Night of Honour. Sauter, who died unexpectedly in 2021 at the age of 62, pioneered media art and interactive architecture with his award-winning Berlin-based studio ART+COM for nearly three decades. “He was a rare hybrid creature, part artist, part scientist, part researcher, part generalist,” notes GRAFT co-founder Thomas Willemeit in his eulogy .
“Over the last 200 years, sudden outbreaks of this globe-trotting fluff have damaged economies, influenced wars and sparked social unrest.”
– Writer
Joe Zadeh , examining the history of
Phytophthora infestans , “the plant pathogen that has most greatly impacted humanity to date.” The parasitic microbe, a species of oomycete or water mold that, for example, caused the
Great Irish Famine , reminds us that “in an era of animal pandemics, it’s easy to overlook the fact that plants also experience them, and they can have an equal or more devastating impact on human society.”
OUT NOW :
Paris Marx
Road to Nowhere
Uber, Lyft, The Boring Company—a polemic arguing Silicon Valley’s urban interventions are profoundly misguided
“I’ve resigned myself to being a non-stop curmudgeon about this, but an aspect of Dall-E’s closed invite beta I haven’t seen touched on is how it’s enlisted artists to act as unpaid influencers for a company whose backers include Peter Thiel and Elon Musk”
– Comic artist
Michael DeForge , observing that the prominent digital artists flooding our timelines with AI-generated images are doing free PR for
OpenAI (and its odious investors)
“The Byzantine Generals Problem,” a group show seeking consensus on crypto, opens at distant.gallery. Curated by Domenico Quaranta , the online exhibition features Sterling Crispin , Sarah Friend , Ben Grosser , Anna Ridler , and 10 others. Interrogative in tone, included works span Rhea Myers’ blockchain visualizations (2014-5), Kyle McDonald’s Ethereum carbon footprint calculations (2021), through a Web3 Dot Com Séance Simon Denny and collaborators.
“The AI discovered a mechanism that redressed initial wealth imbalance, sanctioned free riders, and successfully won the majority vote.”
–
DeepMind researchers, studying policy innovation through AI. In a new paper, published in
Nature Human Behaviour , the UK-based team reports on their “human-in-the-loop research pipeline called Democratic AI” that ran an online investment game with a thousand human players. “By optimizing for human preferences, Democratic AI offers a proof of concept for value-aligned policy innovation,” write the researchers.
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