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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Swiss artist collective Fragmentin unveils Global Wiring , a new permanent sculpture extracted from a hypothetical Alpine future. A stratified column of recycled glass, realized during a recent residency , resembles a glacial ice core sample contaminated with contemporary infrastructure: water piping, electricity cables, fiber optics. Part of the collective’s Obsology
Martine Syms’s solo exhibition “She Mad Season One” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), marking the U.S. premiere of the fifth and newest episode of the artist’s titular sitcom project. She Mad tells the story about a young woman trying to make it as an artist in Los Angeles, “dissecting the ways Black experiences are mediated on television, in film, and online.” Shown in its entirety for the first time, the museum situates each episode within an immersive sculptural installation.
Exonemo ’s CGI puppy mill Metaverse Petshop opens at NowHere in New York City. Building on a May beta test , this version adds NFT functionality and complicates transactions. Purchasers of virtual pups are faced with an ethical dilemma: keep their ‘metaverse pet’ in its entirety or strip off its 3D texture map and sell it on OpenSea . “It is like catching an actual animal and processing its skin to make it live much longer than the original,” the artist duo (ominously) note.
“Compared with energy use, data center water consumption is much more behind-the-scenes, is much more controversial, and in some cases is considered a trade secret.”
–
David Mytton , former researcher at the Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy, on why the droughts in the American West could bring about a reckoning for the tech industry’s “secret water hogs”
What Just Happened :
Mindy Seu Forges Deep Links Between Cyberfeminism, Net Art, and Web3
The American designer and researcher in conversation about “WETWARE,” her Cyberfeminism all star NFT collection that’s currently on Feral File
“To this childless writer, it was an eye-opening lesson—all the more acute in a post-Roe America—in just how much labor it takes to keep someone alive.”
– Critic
Jillian Steinhauer , on
Ani Liu ’s solo show “
Ecologies of Care ” in which the American artist turns her experience of new motherhood into thought-provoking works. For example: “
Untitled (Labor of Love) (2022) charts every feeding and diaper change during the first 30 days of Liu’s infant’s life through vials containing breast milk, formula and pieces of diapers.”
OUT NOW :
Garrett & Colakides
Frankenstein Reanimated
A collection of texts on art, culture, technology, and politics that retraces exhibitions at
Furtherfield (UK),
NeMe (Cyprus), and
LABoral (Spain)
“It is understandable that people with no technical training might rely on metaphors to understand complex technology. But we would hope that policy-makers might develop a slightly more sophisticated understanding of AI than the one we get from Robocop .”
– Legal scholar
Tomas Fitzgerald , in an article detailing how bad metaphors (e.g. comparing neural networks to brains) hamper our attempts to understand AI
“We really have a very fixed idea of what kind of art we’re interested in. It requires a new model of running a gallery—especially one that shows challenging and forward thinking art.”
–
Postmasters ’ co-founder
Magda Sawon , on transitioning to a new nomadic model as the pioneering digital art gallery is being forced out of its Tribeca neighbourhood. Instead of showing in one fixed location, “Postmasters 5.0 locations will be tailored to the art we will present,” the gallery’s
announcement states, defiantly.
American art historian (and HOLO collaborator) Zsofia Valyi-Nagy demos her ‘re-enactment’ of Vera Molnar’s Lettres de ma mère (1981-1991) on a vintage Tektronix 4052 computer at Humboldt University, Berlin. Valyi-Nagy, currently a visiting doctoral student at media theorist Stefan Höltgen’s Signallabor , reverse-engineered the digital art pioneer’s famous plotter drawing series in BASIC code, “a programming language Molnar would have used at the time.”
Berlin’s panke.gallery and Zentrum für Netzkunst celebrate the 10th anniversary of iPhone live Johannes P Osterhoff . From June 29, 2012, the German media artist broadcast screenshots from his jailbroken iPhone to a public website whenever he pressed the home button, aggregating 13,567 snapshots (about 40 per day) of his digital life. In commemoration, Osterhoff and invited experts reflect on the iconic project at /rosa , Berlin.
“Within the form of the simple square, Molnár offers philosophical musings on the passage of life, a romp through our attempts at order and a graceful attention to the fragility of established structures, both geometric and, implicitly, social.”
– Arts writer
Charlotte Kent , meditating on “
Variations ,” the major Vera Molnar retrospective currently on view at the Beall Center for Art + Technology in Irvine, California
John Gerrard ’s solo show “Endling” opens at Pace, New York, presenting three new and recent large-scale simulations. Flare (Oceania) (2022, image), the exhibition’s centrepiece, links fossil fuel extraction and rising sea levels in the South Pacific, as documented by Tongan activist and artist Uili Lousi. Programmed in the Unreal game engine, Gerrard’s virtual environment runs on local Tonga time, resembling an evocative video feed from the affected region.
“There’s a prevailing narrative in society that it’s all or nothing—you’re a winner or a loser. It’s Trumpian and driven by the greed of glassy-eyed decentralized gamblers who are afraid if a project doesn’t sell out, their pathetic investment is in peril.”
–
Kevin Abosch , Irish conceptual artist and crypto pundit, on NFT artists (all too often) working against the clock
Igor Štromajer ’s hybrid installation ƒ(x)=ax³+bx²+cx+d* , realised together with German art historian and curator Sakrowski , opens at the Aksioma project space in Ljubljana. The titular cubic function is expressed in a 1 m³ concrete cube balancing on one of its vertices, as did the cube in the iconic GIF animation the Slovenian net artist (also known as intima) created in 1996. Through AR, the two can exist together (image), traversing materiality, technologies, and time.
“It’s important to accept loss, to accept decay, and to let go. We lose things constantly in computational culture, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
–
Annet Dekker , Dutch curator and digital art researcher, on the challenges (and anxieties) of conservators. Rather than obsessing over perfect preservation, “we need to plant finds—fragments—that trigger a memory,” Dekker suggest, citing former SFMOMA collection director Jill Sterrett. [quotes edited]
OUT NOW :
Michael Century
Northern Sparks
A history of how hosting
Expo 67 and innovative cultural policies kicked off a golden age in Canadian art and technology
“He was homeless for quite a long time during his life, and he really struggled with alcoholism. He had no interest in art at all, and then one day he went into an exhibition to get out of the rain.”
– Kim Noble, art instructor of the late
George Westren , whose op art legacy was recently saved by artist neighbour
Alan Warburton . “The exhibit was the work of
Bridget Riley ,” writer Sydney Page notes. “Westren was inspired by her.”
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