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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Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist for the 15th anniversary of the Julia Stoschek Collection, “WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age” opens at Stoschek’s Düsseldorf location. Obrist assembles over 30 works from true pioneers of interactive and time-based media art including Cory Arcangel , JODI , LaTurbo Avedon , and Ian Cheng (image: BOB (Bag of Beliefs) , 2018-19) to explore digital aesthetics and alternate realities, be it in single channel video or immersive installations.
“I am waiting for a system that will say, ‘eh, I can’t really draw that,’ or, better yet, ‘no, I refuse to draw that.’”
– American fiction writer
Robin Sloan , flagging the “unflagged enthusiasm” with which new AI image models accept free-form text prompts and render “whatever’s been requested, no matter how absurd or overwrought.” “Nearly all presentations of art produced with these models include the text prompt,” Sloan observes. “The pleasure, it seems, is not in the image; rather, it’s in the spectacle of the computer’s interpretation.”
“Indivisible,” a show presenting installation, film, and software from Ralf Baecker , Yunchul Kim , Semiconductor , and Richard Vijgen , opens at New Media Gallery, in New Westminster, British Columbia. The focus on “prosthetics and strategies that help us reach beyond human perception” is exemplified by the inclusion of Kim’s ARGOS Geiger–Müller tubes encased in a glass and aluminum exoskeleton—fusing scientific instrument with sculptural form.
“Is it like a postcoital-snail telegraph? Or like a Renaissance-era wheel device that allowed readers to browse multiple books at once? Or perhaps like a loom that weaves together souls?”
Bringing together 19 artworks, “Earthbound—In Dialogue with Nature,” opens at Luxembourg’s Möllerei learning centre. Part of the 2022 European Capital of Culture , artists including Refik Anadol , Tega Brain , and Mary Maggic help viewers “become aware of otherwise invisible ecological processes.” Sabrina Ratté’s Floralia I – IV
“Public blockchains, through making visible latent forces such as financing, unequal returns, or scarce and valuable ownership, are bringing long existing dynamics to the surface to be scrutinized. These forces are not new , they are nude.”
– Technologist
Mat Dryhurst , on “the shock of the nude:” the realization that financialization and inequity have been part of our digital lives all along. Web3 introduces “feasible abundance,” Dryhurst argues: free media that sustains the people creating it.
The 2nd Biennale Warszawa opens, themed “Seeing Stones and Spaces Beyond the Valley,” to examine the relation of technology, power, and capital. On view are 25 works by, among others, Paolo Cirio , Kyriaki Goni , Metahaven , Laura Poitras , Jenna Sutela , and Julian Oliver that dig deep into reactionary politics and Silicon Valley ideologies. Luis August Krawen ’s The Shire II , (2022, image), for example, connects Tolkien’s fantasy to tech start-ups idealising both progress and conservatism.
“The white coat acts as a hinge between the visible and the invisible. Its smooth surface actively resists the unseen bacterial sources of disease. It is a kind of inhospitality to disease.”
– Scholar
Mark Wigley , on the pathology of “chronic whiteness” in modernist architecture. Part of
Sick Architecture , Wigley’s text is one of two dozen essays in a research project cataloguing how “past health crises are inscribed into the everyday.”
OUT NOW :
David Cronenberg
Crimes of the Future
A visceral journey into a grisly world of embodied posthuman performance art
Rethinking Our Futures: Art and Collaboration , a follow-up publication documenting an eponymous 2021 symposium is published. Organized by Molior , the initiative brought curators including Natacha Clitandre , Dominique Fontaine , and Mikhel Proulx to Montreal to discuss challenges facing digital art. Now, those conversations are echoed by a rich collection of short essays on “internet-specific” exhibitions, alt-infrastructure, and intercultural exchange.
“It felt like it was taking away the power of computing from people. I could see that this was slowly eating away at people’s ability to see the computer for what it was: an open a box of tricks.”
– American artist
Auriea Harvey , on how the convenience of Web 2.0 disempowered users and, ultimately, ended Net Art. “Now ‘good navigation’ is expected, whereas we were all about crashing the browser and making people think.”
OUT NOW :
Mark Peter Wright
Listening After Nature
An excursion into field recording, ecology, and critical practice that grapples with the thresholds of sensory perception and what we are not hearing
Bloomberg ’s Allyson Versprille and Bill Allison report that US political donations from the crypto sector surged to more than $26 million during 2021 and early 2022—a rise of 5,200%. Faced with increased scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators, the digital-asset industry outspent internet giants ($20M), drug makers ($7M), and the defense industry ($18.6M). “It has come out of nowhere to spend a significant amount of money on politics,” said OpenSecrets senior researcher Dan Auble.
“I don’t subscribe to the view that flipping is a bad thing, partly because this art form is not pure art. It’s a strange combination of community, cult, Robin Hood, slot machine, and status game all in one.”
– Galaxy Interactive Managing Director
Richard Kim , answering a fiercely debated question:
is buying and then quickly reselling NFTs to profit on the money (and greed) in the cryptoart space gross ?
Three Doors—Forensic Architecture/Forensis, Initiative 19 opens at Frankfurter Kunstverein (FKV). Featuring London-based Forensic Architecture working with local partners, the show (re)presents evidence in three instances of racially motivated violence in Germany. Oury Jalloh’s Cell: Smoke Traces (2022, image), demonstrates the central architectural motif, by modelling the circumstances of an African asylum seeker’s burning death, while in police custody in 2005.
“The Octopus,” an exhibition of art made within a multi-year research-based educational program spearheaded by curator Başak Şenova , opens at Vienna’s Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL). For the show, Bengü Karaduman , Maarit Mustonen , Alina Rentsch (image: Figur(e)/ation
AI art and biohacks that ponder post-humanism, CGI fever dreams that (further) distort reality, software that speaks truth to power: HOLO Readers enjoy full access to our weird and wonderful discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture. Join us and support indie publishing in the process.
“This is not AI ‘inventing language’ but rather an inhuman process turned to human patterns, picking up on already existent and present aspects there that humans do not currently use as footholds in understanding.”
– Software artist
Everest Pipkin , debunking a viral
Twitter thread about
DALL-E 2 ’s supposed use of a ‘secret language.’ “Machine learning could be humanist,” Pikin fumes, “but it’s only ever used to launder histories of human making into propaganda for a shiny tech futurism that won’t come to pass.”
Over the course of Melbourne’s RISING festival, local audio-visual artist Robin Fox alters the city-landscape with a newly commissioned laser composition. MONOCHORD features a powerful, one kilometre-long beam that, at regular intervals, articulates planes and patterns to synchronized sound just above the Yarra River. Playing the beam like a single-string instrument, Fox expresses the changing voltage both visually and sonically to create what he calls “mechanical synaesthesia.”
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