1,549 days, 2,380 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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An intervention into the fabled novel Moby-Dick , “Of Whales” opens at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. American artist and MacArthur fellow Wu Tsang flips Herman Melville’s 19th century script, presenting a video installation that renders the novel’s unseen ocean depths from the White Whale’s perspective (image). A postcolonial and anti-extractivist reframing, instead of dread and death, Melville’s antagonist now offers visitors an “oceanscape-cosmos for respite, contemplation, and provocation.”
“Creators will gradually stop maintaining and perfecting their existing collections, and instead be forced to focus on always dropping new things.”
– Conceptual artist
Harm van den Dorpel , explaining the dramatic impact (leading NFT marketplace) OpenSea’s
decision to make artist royalties
optional would have on creators. “I used to employ multiple programmers to maintain projects on a daily basis,” he adds, describing how that vital income stream funded the ongoing preservation of his NFT projects.
Journalist Steffan Powell reflects on Helsinki’s dominance in mobile gaming, citing the demoscene as a key catalyst. Before Angry Birds Nokia put the city on the map, Powell writes, tracing local tech aptitude to 1990s and ’00s—still burgeoning —demoparty culture that fuelled domestic creation (image: CNCD, Closer , 1995) and attracted programmers from afar. The demoscene nurtured a culture of doing more with less, or as quoted executive Sarita Runeberg puts it: “Finns have been tech geeks since forever!”
“If Second Life goes bankrupt, like it once almost did, I would probably not go looking for another virtual world. I feel the same way about my marriage—I don’t think I’ll want another one!”
– CGI artist
Skawennati , professing her enduring lover for the
original virtual world . In conversation with
LaTurbo Avedon , the duo discuss online economies, avatar evolution, and swap 3D modelling tips.
OUT NOW :
Jerrold McGrath
In Praise of Disorder
Answering the question “what if rather than fearing disorder, we embraced it?,” cultural theorist and
UKAI Projects researcher McGrath argues for
relinquishing control rather than clinging to it.
“When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.”
– Platformer editors Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton, relating the latest antics of the current Twitter CEO. “After Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk—and Musk alone—benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.”
OUT NOW :
K Allado-McDowell
Air Age Blueprint
In their latest novel co-written with GPT-3,
Allado-McDowell weaves fiction, memoir, theory and travelogue into an animist cybernetics: a secret human-machine experiment in intelligence entanglement called Shaman.AI remakes our technologies, identities, and deepest beliefs.
“I would say there is a circuit board aesthetic, a punch-card aesthetic, as well as an interest in pristine and gleaming metallic surfaces, reminiscent of the IBM mainframe.”
Full of playful examples—statistically modelling dropping cannonballs from different heights, a neural net theory of cat recognition—Stephen Wolfram breaks down how ChatGPT works. Working from the simple claim “it’s just adding one word at a time,” the computer scientist describes how neural nets are trained to model ‘human-like’ tasks in 3D space, how they tokenize language, and concludes with a rumination on semantic grammar that recognizes the language model’s successes (and limits).
In a blog post, Swedish programmer and hobby media archaeologist Carl Svensson revisits “the colourful charm of Amiga utility disks.” Compiled by demosceners to circulate self-made and (cracked) commercial tools in the late 1980s and early 90s, these bootable software packs came in eccentric flavours—from hacked system interfaces featuring ASCII art to rich, audiovisual presentations. “If you wanted to make a demo, you’d be all set with just a handful of these disks,” concludes Svensson.
“We Are Electric: Extraction, Extinction and Post-Carbon Futures” opens at the University of Queensland (UQ) Art Museum in Australia. Foregrounding “bodily and planetary flows, the politics of extraction and exchange,” artists including Diane Borsato , Haines & Hinterding , and the Institute for Queer Ecology urge action and offer paths forward; using the trappings of Big Oil—rusty drill bits and barrels—Quandamooka artist Megan Cope’s Untitled (Death Song) (image, 2020) sounds a dire alarm.
“It’s consistent with earlier results, that large language models can keep track of variables and attributes in simple stories. Calling this ‘theory of mind’ is vast over-interpretation.”
– Complexity researcher and AI critic
Melanie Mitchell , calling the conclusions—that GPT-3.5 models display an emergent
theory of mind comparable to 9-year-olds—of Stanford computational psychologist
Michal Kosinski ’s recent (viral)
paper into question. Instead, Mitchell points at
research that demonstrates neural language models’ capacity for “dynamic representations of meaning and implicit simulation of entity state.”
“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982,” a major survey of early computer art, opens at LACMA in Los Angeles. Curated by Leslie Jones, the show assembles works from Analívia Cordeiro , Hans Haacke , Frederick Hammersley , Vera Molnar , Stan VanDerBeek , and others, that reimagined methods and materials. Edward Kienhol ’s The Friendly Grey Computer (image, 1965), for example, “anticipated the coming age of personal computing” with a big-eyed anthropomorphized bot, made of salvaged industrial parts.
An eponymous retrospective of Swedish artist Charlotte Johannesson opens at Nottingham Contemporary in the UK. Presenting textiles, plotter prints, and installations from her five decade career, the show underscores her importance bridging weaving to early digital aesthetics in the 1980s (image: Digital Human , 1981-86). A tableau of “1960s counterculture, feminism, punk,” as described by curator Nicole Yip, Johannesson was recently recognized at the Venice Biennale (2022) and the Reina Sofia (2021).
Peter Wu+ ’s EPOCH opens “XENOSPACE,” an experimental virtual exhibition showcasing the “expansive collaborative potential of AI and machine learning.” Set in the 360-degree panorama of a Stable Diffusion generated server room, seven ‘site-specific’ artworks by Connie Bakshi , Ana María Caballero , CROSSLUCID , Libby Heaney , Harvey Moon , and others await exploration. “As viewers navigate the installations, they will experience a disorienting and uncanny repetition that challenges their familiar frame of reference,” notes ChatGPT.
“I would record The Price is Right and edit it to only the losers. That was my first idea of networked culture.”
– American Artist
Cory Arcangel , describing his 1990s roots in Buffalo, New York, remixing one of America’s most famous
game shows . “Eventually, I dropped off a tape at Squeaky Wheel,” he recalls, earnestly submitting video art to his local
artist run centre . “Years later I was talking with somebody, and they realized it was probably one of the Yes Men working at Squeaky Wheel that day.”
Utrecht’s IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture opens “Out of Office,” a group exhibition that takes on exploitative productivity. “In the modern workplace, doing nothing, not showing up, or gestures of mutual support become acts of resistance,” writes curator Marijn Bril about how the contributing artists Alina Lupu , Sam Meech , Adrian Melis , Mario Santamaría , Total Refusal , and others counter efficiency and optimization. Case in point: Santamaría’s sleepy auto-reply to Bril’s exhibition invitation (image).
“A right-wing talking point is often that the Centre Pompidou should be self-funded by selling its collection—and now they are no longer able.”
– Swedish artist
Jonas Lund , rejoicing at the politics of the museum’s acquisition of his NFT artwork
Smart Burn Contract – Hoarder (2021). Part of a series of contractual agreements,
Hoarder prohibits the owner from ever selling
any works in their collection. If the agreement is broken, Lund will destroy the piece by burning the NFT and thus removing it from the museum’s wallet. [quote edited]
Paris’ Centre Pompidou adds 18 NFTs from 13 artists including aaajiao , John Gerrard , Larva Labs , Jonas Lund (image: Smart Burn Contract – Hoarder , 2021), Sarah Meyohas , Jill Magid , and Rafaël Rozendaal to its collection. “The acquisition is deeply rooted in a genealogy of dematerialization,” curators Marcella Lista and Philippe Bettinelli say about continuing the museum’s new media tradition. “It offers a unique reflection on the crypto ecosystem and its impact on the artwork, the author, the collection, and the public.”
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