1,369 days, 2,175 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“Might there be a role that institutions could play if we know that sound and music is healing? Can that open up new possibilities for arts funding, for policy, for what is considered a therapeutic experience or an artistic experience?”
– Writer and musician
K Allado-McDowell , on the questions driving their new AI opera
Song of the Ambassadors . The piece premiered at New York’s Lincoln Center on Oct 25th with the support of composer Derrick Skye, visual artist Refik Anadol, and neuroscientists Ying Choon Wu and Alex Khalil.
“My blindness informs how I hear. And it’s really hyperactive and weird. My ADHD adds to that too. But I would never say I’m doing this to emulate what it sounds like to be blind.”
For the launch of Vertical Atlas exhibition capturing Hivos and Het Nieuwe Instituut’s joint research into digital geopolitics, South African artist Francois Knoetze unleashes the mythical e-waste creature from his 2018 short Core Dump ‘E-Revenant’
Italian computer scientist Giacomo Miceli launches The Infinite Conversation , an AI-generated, never-ending voice chat between filmmaker Werner Herzog and philosopher Slavoj Žižek . Described as a love letter to the two icons, the exchange aims to raise awareness of the ease of AI voice synthesis. “Any fool with a laptop can do this,” Miceli warns and wonders: “What would our favourite people do, if we had unlimited access to their minds?”
“Kim Jung Gi left us less than [a week ago] and AI bros are already ‘replicating’ his style and demanding credit. Vultures and spineless, untalented losers.”
– Comic-book writer
Dave Scheidt ,
blasting the release of an
AI model trained on the renowned South Korean illustrator’s work within days after his passing. “In effect, manga and anime are acting as an early testing ground for AI art-related ethics and copyright liability,” notes reporter
Andrew Deck in his analysis.
“Futures Past,” a CGI-heavy survey of abstract imaginaries opens at London’s arebyte. Contributing esoteric artifacts and “excavated ruins” of distant and fantastical futures are artists including Morehshin Allahyari , Lawrence Lek , and Kumbirai Makumbe . Contributed works include Juan Covelli’s GAN-generated Speculative Treasures Beyond Matter
“Dancing While Waiting (for the end of the world),” the 12th edition of Eastern Bloc ’s Sight + Sound Festival, opens in Montréal. Curated by Nathalie Bachand and Sarah Ève Tousignant, it features Adam Basanta , Johanna Bruckner , Faith Holland (image: Detumescence Max Lester , Sabrina Ratté & Roger Tellier-Craig , Florence To , and 30 others in a program that explores tensions between (pandemic) before times and “a ‘future’ that may or may not live up to its name.”
In the works since 2019 and then postponed during the pandemic, Kurt Hentschläger ’s audiovisual performance EKO premieres at the Theatre Royal Plymouth, UK. Part of an ongoing series set in complete darkness, the Austrian artist’s composition interrupts the absence of light with intense millisecond-long bursts of “micro-animated geometric forms” emanating from an LED wall. As a maelstrom of ambient sound envelopes the viewers, “retinal afterimages unravel within their eyes.”
“AI art is, in my view, soft propaganda for the ideology of prediction. As long as it remains tied to the paradigm and politics of ever-large models, increasing capital and marketing hyperbole, its contribution to art practice will have little meaning, if any.”
– Artist and performer
Marco Donnarumma , fiercely arguing that AI art is a direct manifestation of “prediction ideology … the operating system of the Global North”
“Yeah, we solved narrative generation, but it turns out that no-one wants to read five thousand fanfic stories unless they have an emotional connection to the authorship, and it flopped. Was a total Bach Faucet.”
– Artist and scholar
Kate Compton , demonstrating the use of “Bach Faucet,” a new (
David-Cope -inspired) term she coined for the burgeoning “fully fractal” era of AI-powered cultural reproduction
Known for inventive hardware hacks, Swedish musician and self-professed ‘mad engineer’ Linus Åkesson debuts his Commodordion : an 8-bit accordion made from two Commodore 64s . Both run QWERTUOSO , Åkesson’s programmable SID chip synthesizer, played via computer keyboard. As with a real accordion, the sounds are triggered by the bellows (that Åkesson improvised from 5 ¼ floppy disks): a sensor measures air flow as the virtuoso plays.
“Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere” opens at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. Featuring Jes Fan , Jenna Sutela , and Anicka Yi , and 11 other artists that reveal the “interspecies entanglements” that shape our world. Contributed works range from Špela Petrič’s poetic shadow study Confronting Vegetal Otherness: Skotopoiesis Candice Lin’s “communal piss” fungal sculpture Memory (Study #2) (2016, image).
An output of the STARTS4Water art-science research initiative, “Faces of Water” opens at Bozar Brussels. Featuring works by Haseeb Ahmed , Anna Ridler , Theresa Schubert , and Joshua G. Stein , each artist highlights different water challenges from across Europe. For Schubert’s Glacier Trilogy—Part 1
“In everyday life, 13 is less common than 12. There’s no 13th month, 13-inch ruler, or 13 o’clock.”
– Sociologist Barry Markovsky, explaining how “sense of anomaly” can contribute to the irrational fear some people have of the number 13 (a phobia not so commonly referred to as
triskaidekaphobia )
“Terms & Expectations,” a group exhibition curated by Barbara Cueto & Bas Hendrikx , open’s at Toronto’s InterAccess. Focused on “distribution centres as agents within our natural environment,” the show hones in on critical infrastructure that underpins platform capitalism (e.g. the ubiquitous Amazon fulfilment centre). Featured are artists including Hiba Ali Simon Denny , Sophia Oppel , and Coralie Vogelaar , contributing works in mediums ranging from installation to performance.
“They’ve contributed $73 million through June 30th of this year. That’s more than the oil and gas industry has put into politics, more than defence, and more than the transportation sector.”
– Campaign finance reporter
Bill Allison , explaining how high-net-worth individuals from the crypto space (e.g.
Sam Bankman-Fried ) are U.S. midterm election megadonors. “They’re really focusing on Congressional races, and trying to influence the outcome of those races,” he continues, predicting industry friendly regulation in 2023.
The first retrospective of the late German artist’s five decade career, “Walter Giers: Electronic Art” opens at ZKM Karlsruhe . Initially producing kinetic and op art, Giers began referring to his works as elektronische spielobjekte (electronic playthings) in 1974. The show offers a broad survey of his light and sound sculptures, and his signature exposed circuits (image: Kunst Macht Nature , 1979), which let viewers get up close and personal with the materiality of electronics.
“I dunno exactly who wrote the headline for my column this week but give ’em a raise.”
–
Toronto Star tech and culture columnist
Navneet Alang , giving props to the heroic unknown editor that titled his
commentary on Meta’s latest VR developments. The headline: “Mark Zuckerberg’s Dream for the Metaverse Doesn’t Have Legs”
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