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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“There’ll be all kinds of crazy subcultures of image generation. So if it produces these kind of hazy, slightly mangled images with people’s arms in the wrong places, that’s OK, we just get used to that aesthetic.”
–
Dr Oliver Bown , computational creativity researcher at the University of New South Wales, on the the clunky look of
DALL-E mini -generated images becoming an internet art form of its own
“Biotopia,” an exhibition that “questions the central position of humans in the world,” opens at Le Pavillon in Namur, Belgium. Curated by KIKK Festival ’s Marie du Chastel, the show features Thijs Biersteker , Design I/O , Teresa van Dongen , Agnes Meyer-Brandis , AnneMarie Maes , Zimoun , and others. Thomas Thwaites’ GoatMan
“We chose to make a product—tire sandals—which are made across the developing world, where the tires are solely made of rubber. But in Europe, tires are reinforced with steel wire, which meant we couldn’t cut through them.”
– Artist
Tom James , on the biggest challenge faced during
Absolute Beginners , “a factory where young people learn how to make basic goods that used to be produced locally.” In addition to sandals, James paid West London youth a living wage to learn to make clay cups and paper.
“Do not give the vampires who host these panels about their landlord metaverse country club they’re building a goddamn inch. Ask provoking questions, make them uncomfortable, be confrontational.”
–
Sean Kennedy , calling on fellow artists and art workers attending
NFT NYC 2022. “I’d like to remind everyone of what this event really is,” he warns on Twitter: “a business conference for crypto startups with art as a pathetic sideshow.”
DOSSIER :
Continuing her exploration of Vera Molnar’s legacy, art historian Zsofi Valyi-Nagy excavates the history of the drawing machines that defined early computer art. From the Zuse Graphomat that was adopted in laboratories in the 1960s (image) to the Benson drum plotters Molnar used a decade later, Valyi-Nagy considers “the complex, iterative, nonlinear, and very hands-on process that was early computing.”
“The self-reflexive NFT that employs the theater of absentness suggests that if art offers grace at all, it is volatile, conditional, and inseparable from the systems of capital under which it operates.”
– British essayist and art historian
A.V. Marraccini , on NFTs and the theatre or risk. Invoking Shl0ms’
$CAR , she writes: “The theatricality of the exchanged tokenized object in the volatile market holds none of the surety one expects from grace.”
“On Copper, Wax, Iron, Wisteria and Ice,” a show documenting a decade of “smellscapes, labs, and conversations” by Italian artist Elena Mazzi opens at Parco Arte Vivente (PAV) in Turin. Featured works include En route to the South Smellscapes (2022), a “valorization of the olfactive dimension” of local Turinese culture.
“We will become rootless, we will become seedless, we will lose our leaves.”
–
Pinar Yoldas , infradisciplinary architect and
UC San Diego educator, offering “plant vocabulary” to consider and mitigate the impacts of climate change. In her
re:publica lecture, Yoldas introduces
Dark Botany , a WIP speculative biology project that genetically alters plants for accelerated photosynthesis and thereby rapid carbon capture.
Physicists Corentin Coulais , Vincenzo Vitelli , and collaborators solve a key robotics problem: emergent locomotion. Nicknamed the ‘odd wheel,’ their 12 motor-assembly adjusts its wiggling motion to move forward and navigate uphill, despite the fact it can’t perceive its terrain. “These are indeed behaviours you would not expect,” notes bioroboticist Auke Ijspeert . Future kinetic and structural applications include odd balls and odd walls.
OUT NOW :
Paolo Cirio
Monitoring Control
An incisive Big Tech critique and counter-control guide, that offers texts (by, among others,
Bruce Sterling ) and artistic research to highlight “the overt yet covert ways in which tools and platforms control our lives.”
“This is the first time I’ve been able to just log in, browse new work, and acquire it. It’s changed my view of how an economy of digital art could exist.”
–
Christopher Coleman , digital artist and
University of Denver educator, on how NFTs have energized his passion for collecting. For Coleman, it’s about availability and access: “I’ve approached many of the famous galleries over the years to talk to them about acquiring works and they wouldn’t give me the time of day because I wasn’t a high-profile collector.”
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, acquired the taxidermy of Cumulina , the world’s first successfully cloned mouse. Named after the cumulus cells vital to the cloning process, Cumulina was created by University of Hawai’i researchers in 1997 and died of natural causes in 2000. The specimen is now held at the museum’s Medicine and Science Division. “I’m happy that more people can see her there,” says Ryuzo Yanagimachi, Cumulina’s father.
“These next three days will be an end of an era, the end of a project that has taken up 1/4 of my life and given me some of my greatest joys.”
– Data artist and
Eyeo Festival co-curator
Jer Thorp , on Dave Schroeder’s announcement that this year’s edition will be the last. Minneapolis’ annual creative technology summit first emerged on the scene in 2012 and, thanks to immaculate speaker selection, became one of the finest gatherings for digital creative practice in North America. As Thorp put it: “There was an awful lot of magic.”
“Computing in Crip Time,” an article from the forthcoming 16th issue of Logic is published online. In it, artist and social computing researcher Christine T. Wolf takes the field of user UX design to task on its central tenets of ‘seamless’ interactions and accessibility. Drawing on disability scholar Ellen Samuels ’ notion of ‘crip time ,’ Wolf describes how her post-spinal injury experience of time and space is fundamentally different than that of abled bodies, and she uses that perspective to chip away at the biases embedded in UX. Putting both the flow state and productivity in her crosshairs, she challenges those working in the field to rethink their assumptions about access, and move towards a UX where “doing is re-imagined and re-configured, a process driven by … [bodies’] differing, situated abilities, instead of some trend, pattern, or prediction.”
“The current Ethereum price crash is doing more for the environment than the planned move to PoS. Compared to just three weeks ago, estimated carbon emissions related to the ETH network have gone down by around 30,000 metric tons of CO2 per day.”
– Alex de Vries’ tech-skeptic research platform
Digiconomist , on the upsides of the crypto crash
Created between summer 2020 and spring 2022, during COVID isolation, Marcel Schwittlick ’s plotter drawing series Upward Spiral concludes with an online archive and a show. The 144 cylinders, each penned by a custom-built drawing machine performing continuous spiral motions, contain all possible colour combinations of the solid-paint marker brand used. Whereas the archive compiles all the Spirals in a neat calendar view, the Berlin Bark LAB exhibition presents a selection of ten.
“LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence.”
– Google engineer and whistleblower
Blake Lemoine , in a farewell message to an internal mailing list after the company placed him on paid leave. Lemoine had presented evidence that
LaMDA , Google’s advanced chatbot AI, reached sentience—evidence the company dismissed and that Lemoine has since
shared with the public .
“Because The Sky Will Be Filled With Sulfur,” a show by artist Jeremy Bolen opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia (MOCA GA) in Atlanta. Contemplating deep time , its works consider the future-history of the climate crisis and the “aesthetics of a possible geo-engineered future.” Included are photos of an expedition to a key Anthropocene site , and a new series of casts of 20th century relics: air conditioners, airplane parts, and leaf blowers (image).
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