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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“Responses to his early art were not encouraging: ‘Your electrons are only virtually existing, you cannot touch them. This can’t be art.’”
– Writer and researcher
Steve Taylor , recounting the rejection Austrian computer art pioneer
Herbert W. Franke experienced (here, by the Ulm School of Design co-founder
Otl Aicher ) in the early 1950s. At the time, Franke experimented with oscilloscope forms generated via a DIY analog computer.
Ben Grosser ’s solo exhibition “Software for Less” opens at Aksioma, Lubljana, as the final chapter of a four-part program on “New Extractivism .” The American artist and programmer whose works examine how clicks, likes, and endless notifications fuel our “appetite for more” presents several recent software provocations that “produce less profit, less data, and fewer users.” Case in point: Minus
OUT NOW :
Domenico Quaranta
Surfing with Satoshi
Putting the NFT boom in a historical context,
Quaranta investigates blockchain technologies, the role of certificates and contracts in contemporary art, and the evolution of the media art market
“Emmy’s parroting was convincing: In a 1997 Turing test that set one of Emmy’s ersatz compositions against a Bach-inspired piece written by a music professor and an actual work by the German composer, the audience thought Emmy’s rendition was the real deal.”
– Music writer
Philip Sherburne , on the pioneering work of American composer
David Cope whose neural net EMI or Emmy wrote 5,000 ‘new’ Bach chorales in the 1980s
“Even if it feels bad, this is an intersubjective connection that social media allows us to feel. We could also call it empathy. ”
– Los Angeles-based writer
K Allado-McDowell and AI language model
GPT-3 (
italics ), in a joint interview about cringy content on the internet, a theme central to their newly released and co-authored novel
Amor Cringe . “I write works of fiction partly so I can vicariously live through my characters’ cringe experiences,” the AI states about their collaboration.
Athens’ Onassis Stegi returns to Pedion tou Areos park with “Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data,” a digital art exhibition that explores expanded corporeality. Curator Irini Mirena Papadimitriou gathered works by Morehshin Allahyari , LaTurbo Avedon , Kimchi and Chips , Ekene Ijeoma , SUPERFLEX , Liam Young , and many others that consider bodies as individuals, collectives, human, non-human, and even planetary. (image: SpY , Divided , 2022)
“BREATHLESS,” an exhibition “that considers the urgencies evoked by today’s air crises,” opens at The Power Plant in Toronto. Featuring Flaka Haliti , Marguerite Humeau , Donna Kukama , and Julius von Bismarck , the show deploys video, sculpture, and sound works that foreground the primacy of air and the fragility of the environment. Of note: Humeau’s polemical biomorphic sculptures, which include Waste I – 1 (a respiratory tract mutating into industrial waste) (image, 2019).
“I want to do a show which is purely about its own financial flows, and the beauty of paying people well. There needs to be an aesthetic around this. An aesthetic of financial fairness.”
– German media artist
Hito Steyerl , discussing (decentralized) financial flows and public good with
Other Internet ’s Laura Lotti and Sam Hart. Together, they proposed a blockchain-based governance model for legacy institutions like Germany’s Bundeskunsthalle.
SUPERFLEX ’s Interspecies Campus opens at Roskilde University , Denmark, reimagining the school grounds as a space for interspecies living. Built with curved “superbricks,” the web of sculptural infrastructures create “new pathways for walking and thinking” by interrupting and redirecting human movement, while offering cracks and holes for critters of all kind. The forms sprout out of sandstone flooring—“a reference to the land’s underwater past and its possible future.”
The Shape of Light , a moving image work by Ellen Pau created especially for the media façade of newly-opened M+ museum, debuts in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District. Co-commissioned with Art Basel , the short film deploys the Buddhist Heart Sutra ’s rumination on form and emptiness in a CGI narrative about elemental transformation. With the film, Pau offers “a gesture of guidance and hope” for her native city’s citizens, presumably alluding to their steadily eroding self-governance.
Debuting as part of the 8th Gherdeina Biennale in Northern Italy, Greek artist Kyriaki Goni ’s installation, The Mountain Islands Shall Mourn us Eternally , invites a rare regional flower to address humanity. ‘Speaking’ through CGI video, a wooden sculpture, and silkscreen prints, Saxifraga depressa
“I’m a licensed crypto trauma counselor and I’m here to help you process any feelings of grief, trauma, anxiety, and depression that you may be feeling at this time.”
OUT NOW :
Karen Archey
After Institutions
An analysis of the waning influence of institutions in the art world, and reflection on needed rehabilitation
“Earth Indices: Processing the Anthropocene,” a show by Giulia Bruno & Armin Linke working in consultation with the Anthropocene Working Group , opens at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). Foregrounding imagery that translates evidence of the earth’s transformation into “data that can be interpreted” (image: Line Scans of Antarctica Ice Core , 2022), the show reveals the “instruments, procedures, and practices” that produce geological knowledge, write the curators.
“It’s a way of not only conflating space—like the real landscape of Los Angeles with a fictional landscape of Robledo—but also the sense of time, because you don’t really know what time period you’re existing in.”
–
American Artist , on his upcoming exhibition “
Shaper of God ” that is “like a road map through Southern California locales inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s
Parable of the Sower .”
“I think of this as a monument that has been purpose-built to be torn down. It shouldn’t be the job of artists to save the planet, but sometimes we can create social and conceptual infrastructure to guide attention and action.”
– American artist
Kyle McDonald , on his new cryptoart piece
Amends , that seeks to offset the climate footprint of three major Ethereum-based NFT marketplaces once—if ever—the cryptocurrency switches to the less energy-intensive proof-of-stake consensum mechanism
DOSSIER :
In her latest entry to “Weaving Variations,” HOLO’s dossier on generative art pioneer Vera Molnar, art historian Zsofi Valyi-Nagy examines Hommage à Barbaud , a 1974 tribute to the French founder of algorithmic music, Pierre Barbaud. “By dedicating a work to Barbaud, Molnar immortalizes the impact of algorithmic music on her work, and on early computer art more broadly,” writes Valyi-Nagy.
“I’m starting to accept that the 1995-2020 period didn’t happen, and that generative art emerged out of nothingness in 2020 after being dormant for 40-50 years. People keep telling me, so it must be true.”
– Digital artist
Marius Watz , decrying widespread amnesia in this current moment of generative (crypto) art. A big reason is “very bad discoverability,”
notes fellow aughties innovator
Karsten Schmidt . Due to link rot and software obsolescence, most works done in Director, Flash, Processing, and Java in that era are “GONE.”
Kyle McDonald announces Amends (2022), a project mitigating NFT marketplace emissions. When Ethereum abandons the proof-of-work consensus mechanism later this year, three digital sculptures (CGI by Robert Hodgkin ) will be auctioned on Open Sea , Rarible , and Foundation . Priced at $17 million total (and rising), proceeds will go to air and ocean carbon capture projects. Owners can exchange their digital sculpture for a physical one—if they burn their NFT.
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