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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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).
An interplay of audience, point cloud projections, and a living system, Theresa Schubert ’s audiovisual installation Hylē opens at Atelierhof Kreuzberg, Berlin. Schubert invites visitors to breath into a funnel device to kickstart—and sustain—a circular chain reaction: exhaled CO2 animates three algae bioreactors and, through sensors, immersive imagery. 3D-laser scans of forests and data centres collapse and twitch, as the algae converts CO2 input into Oxygen.
“It’s similar to when people talk about an opening going well; maybe they’re trying to access a vibe about what the health and state of the art world is currently.”
–
Ryan Kuo , in conversation with fellow artist
Zach Gage , noting that fixating on market dynamics often gets in the way of “what’s actually in the file” in NFT culture. Neither schmoozy openings or price speculation “is about an actual kind of engagement or confrontation with a piece of art,” Kuo continues.
Marshmallow Laser Feast ’s newest collective VR experience, Evolver , premieres at Tribeca’s Immersive showcase, dropping New York audiences “deep inside the landscape of the human body.” On their journey, narrated by Cate Blanchett , visitors follow the flow of oxygen through our branching ecosystem, to a single ‘breathing’ cell. The transcendental trip, the London-based collective argues, reveals our connection to the nature through the cycle of respiration.
“Of the five museums Al-Badri contacted to secure permission for the use of images of Babylonian artifacts, only two responded. This virtual gatekeeping reveals the continuum of colonial thinking still active within the contemporary museum context.”
– Critic
Erëmirë Krasniqi , on why
Nora Al-Badri ’s video series
Babylonian Vision (2020), currently on view at
Galeria 17 , Pristina (XK), features AI hallucinations of ancient artifacts (instead of real ones)
Mario Santamaría ’s solo exhibition “Remote Hands” opens at àngels barcelona as part of the 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA). In addition to showing his Cloudplexity Underdesk (2022): an invitation to ‘lounge in the cloud’ and explore the gallery’s material internet infrastructure from a hammock underneath a fireproof computer desk.
“Trained on images of the forest in knowing anticipation of its loss, the fossil here precedes the body, making a shape a felled tree can fall into.”
For Art in America , Walker Downey describes recent trends in sound art that “suggest a revision of its parameters.” Drawing on works by multidisciplinary artists Kevin Beasley (image: A Cotton Gin Motor , 2012-18) Christine Sun Kim , and Nikita Gale , Downey forges connections between 1980s and early 2000s sound practice, and uses his case studies to discuss the emergence of “sound sculptures,” and multimodal deployments of sound that challenge ”logics of power and prejudice.”
“The people in the room were the good ones. The bad ones were (thankfully) not in the room. It was our task to legislate or otherwise mitigate the excesses of the bad ones.”
– UKAI Projects Managing Director
Jerrold McGrath , noting the ‘moral composition’ of attendees at a recent event on big data and surveillance. In his simultaneously cheeky and erudite post “Not Every Story Needs a Villain,” McGrath mulls over how “abstracted ethics” (and emotional reactions) often steer conversations about AI and automation in an unproductive direction.
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