1,182 days, 1,854 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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Taking a wide angle view of the (recent) history of urbanism, artist and researcher Chris Salter publishes an essay arguing “the smart city is a perpetually unrealized utopia” on Technology Review . Starting with architect Constant Nieuwenhuys’ vision for New Babylon that dream, relative to corporate forces that followed (i.e. IBM). Situating the discussion in the moment, he further connects the extractive tendencies of the smart city with the role data is playing with the war in the Ukraine, glibly noting that both the contemporary urban warzone and our idealized sensor-laden city of tomorrow chronically “seem to lack a central ingredient: human bodies.”
“He was the first man to fill a movie screen with pixels. Now, every movie you see was created on a digital machine.”
– Information technology pioneer and philosopher
Ted Nelson , cited in
Ken Knowlton ’s obituary. Knowlton, who died on June 16, was an American engineer, computer scientist, and artist whose work at
Bell Labs in the 1960s paved the way for computer animation. To create his self-referential 1964 short
A Computer Technique for the Production of Animated Movies , for example, Knowlton paired a dedicated programming language with an automatic micro-film recorder.
After its inaugural showing at Switzerland’s Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2021, an adaption of “How to Win at Photography” opens at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. The group exhibition gathers 30 international artists whose works explore “image-making as play,” from early photography to nascent videogames. Case in point: Roc Herms ’ Study of Perspective (2015) series appropriates Ai Weiwei’s eponymous photo provocations in Grand Theft Auto V .
Meriem Bennani ’s first public sculpture, Windy (2022), touches down on New York City’s High Line, kicking off the summer season of the High Line Art program. Installed on 24th Street through May 2023, Windy is a tornado-shaped kinectic structure that is made from black foam and spins so fast, its details escape perception. “Inspired by the dynamism and constant movement on the High Line,” the Moroccan artist created a sculpture that “captures and works within this urban energy.”
“Black art is held, then, to show white viewers what they refuse to see while critically refusing to provide a prosthetic for white vision.”
“Outside In,” a web-based, site-specific AR exhibition by Manuel Rossner and Damjanski opens near /rosa , panke.gallery and Zentrum für Netzkunst’s Berlin project space. Realized on Panke’s OpenAR.art platform, the two sculptures—Rossner’s Spatial Painting (image) and Damjanski’s Inside: Spatial Painting —stand in dialogue, where the latter takes visitors into the former—“a perspective that wouldn’t have been possible with AR technology.”
“SPACE PROGRAM: Indoctrination,” a solo show by American sculptor Tom Sachs opens at Art Sonje Center in Seoul. The fifth in a series of exhibitions where the artist playfully reconstitutes the aesthetics of his nation’s rich aereospace history (image: Launch , 2010), the show evolves the format through indoctrination . After participating in “missions and tests of knowledge” visitors can join Sachs’ DIY space program—and those lacking ‘the right stuff’ can attend a reeducation centre.
“Plants are already extremely efficient carbon fixing machines, resulting from millions of years of evolution, so I still remain to be convinced that CRISPR can do much to improve carbon sequestration at the scale we need.”
–
César Terrer , an MIT assistant professor focused on plant-soil interactions, on a new
$11 million push by the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) to alter rice plants for improved carbon removal
Part of Serpentine’s long-term climate crisis program , “Back to Earth” opens in London with arresting propositions. Works by Agnes Denes , Brian Eno , Carolina Caycedo , Formafantasma , Sissel Tolaas , and others present research, experiences, and interventions: A new edition of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg ’s Pollinator Pathmaker
“The wreck is not just important to art historians or to the reconstruction of ancient trade routes, but also to our understanding of the travelers, merchants, and sailors of the ancient Mediterranean.”
– Historian
Sarah E. Bond , on the
Antikythera Shipwreck site off the coast of Greece, where a colossal marble Hercules head was recently recovered. Beyond describing how the find completed a
headless Hercules statue in Athens, Bond notes that teeth and bones found at the site “are a fundamental part of the ancient tale told by the wreckage.”
“Pardon Our Dust,” a solo show by avatar artist LaTurbo Avedon , opens at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Vienna. The show’s titular work (image, 2022) riffs on a slogan used to describe 1990s websites as ‘under construction,’ revising that narrative of progress for nascent Web3. Serving as tour guide and critic, Avedon parses emerging decentralization and ever-present commercialization, in a narrative rendering virtuality torn between “construction and deconstruction.”
Sarah Friend drops the final chapter of her NFT “social sculpture” Off Public Works , New York. “Off: Endgame,” a solo show commissioned by Rhizome , Fingerprints , and Refraction , also introduces Wildcards (image), a new work and key to Off ’s secrets: The Canadian software artist offers customised card decks containing mint instructions for one of 52 NFTs; Wildcard tokens, however, will not become tradeable unless Off ’s hidden message is revealed through cooperation.
“Scraping can sound like intrusive hacking—because it is. It disregards contextual integrity and asserts a right to inhale entire data sets and process them.”
–
David Golumbia , American author, researcher, and Virginia Commonwealth University Associate Professor, making the case that data scraping, commonly used by researchers and journalists, is an underacknowledged privacy concern. “Scrapers’ indifference to consent means their data and results are conceptually unreliable,” Golumbia writes.
OUT NOW :
David M. Peña-Guzmán
When Animals Dream
A synthesis of neuroscience and philosophy addressing nonhuman cognition, and argument that animals are conscious beings
“You can play recordings of a whale’s song, but that doesn’t show what it means for whales to hear each other across oceanic distances. You can depict the magnetic field that envelops the planet, but that can’t begin to capture the experience of a robin using that field to fly across a continent.”
– British science journalist
Ed Yong , on the “permanent divide between our Umwelt and another animal’s”
As documented in his now viral Twitter thread, British CGI artist Alan Warburton recovers hundreds of op art drawings from his upstairs neighbour, George Westren. Westren, “a sweet guy” who battled addiction and anxiety but found solace in his art, died during Covid. As the clearance company got to work, Warburton rushed in to save Weston’s legacy from the bin. “It’s just such a privilege to see all this work that must have been carefully amassed over years,” he writes.
Ars Electronica announces this year’s Prix winners, awarding a prestigious Golden Nica to Jung Hsu and Natalia Rivera’s Bi0film.net open platform aids the creation of decentralised, nomadic protest networks by turning umbrellas into parabolic Wifi antennas. Other awarded works include Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne ’s Perfect Sleep , Cristhian Avila ’s Eternal Return , and Kimchi and Chips ’ Another Moon .
“I can barely type an email and they’re raising millions to help people and save the rainforest. They are heroes.”
– Original net.artist
Olia Lialina , in a caption mocking performance artist
Marina Abramović ’s gushing praise for the NFT community during
ArtBasel . “Sorry, needed to monumentalize this nonsense,” she adds, further qualifying her feelings.
Much to the delight of writers, concrete poets, and ASCII artists, creative coders Play and EREN launch Typed , a text-based NFT market place on the Tezos chain. Featuring a spartan interface reminiscent of the Hic et Nunc glory days, Typed allows minting of bare-bones text entries, inviting all kinds of character-based experimentation. Within hours of being announced on Twitter, the platform was bustling with activity (image: Leander Herzog ’s adaption of his generative art hit Agglo
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