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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“Le Pain Symbiotique is like a synthetic gut: in constant motion, it ferments in the literal and allegorical sense. Maybe that’s why the structure is off-limits: to avoid the release of intestinal gases.”
– Curator and critic
Régine Debatty , parsing
Anicka Yi ’s inflatable PVC dome currently installed at
Pirelli HangarBicocca , Milan, as part of Yi’s solo show “
Metaspore .” The 2014
piece harbours an eco-system of bread dough, ochre pigment, and resin sculptures, highlighting the critical ”work performed by invisible bacteria and yeasts.”
The U.S. debut of Neural Swamp (2021), a multi-channel video installation by American artist Martine Syms made for The Future Fields Commission , opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the work, three characters trained on Syms’ voice engage in awkward, disjointed dialogue in a narrative ostensibly about golf (bolstered by related videogame footage), demonstrating the frustrating isolation of communication where “neither listening nor comprehension is possible.”
“Until all energies used to extract and process these four indispensable materials come from renewable conversions, modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.”
– Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst
Vaclav Smil , on how cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia—the “four pillars of modern civilization”—are (largely) incompatible with a
net-zero emission future
“If a Token Could Speak,” a show of video works by Sophie Auger that “put the NFT and the traditional art world in perspective,” opens at Montreal’s ELEKTRA Gallery. In Catalog (2022), the Quebec artist gets meta, tokenizing 3D models of the exhibition press release, archive, and making-of documentation—and puts everything up for sale on the blockchain; while an eponymous work (2022, image) demonstrates how even a ‘poor ’ image can attain “the same value as a rare work of art.”
“The evidence now suggests a 3 to 4 degree warming by mid-century, not accounting for tipping points—which could easily be 5 or 6 degrees.”
–
Benjamin Sovacool , University of Sussex energy researcher and one of the lead authors of the recent IPCC
Working Group III report , on the damning implications of current climate legislation implementation gaps. “Even if we were to meet 100% of the 2015
Paris accord , we’d still be pretty far off from 2 degrees,” says Sovacool.
“Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul,” a whitepaper by researchers E. Glen Weyl and Puja Ohlhaver , and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is published. In it, the trio describe a web3 where tokens denoting “commitments, credentials, and affiliations” are “soulbound” to individuals, and these non-transferable identity markers are used to govern more efficiently (e.g. DAO vote-weighting based on expertise) and to generate more equitable datasets (opt-in with privacy controls). Moving beyond ‘trustless’ DeFI frameworks, they propose decentralized sociality (DeSoc) “which encodes trust networks that underpin the real economy today.” Drawing on the community and infosec foibles in crypto over the last decade, they extend the model to prevent concentrations of power, and propose checks and balances to protect its decentralization.
“It takes at least 10 hours to produce 1 kWh on a bike generator. The electricity price in France is roughly €0.20 per kWh, so that’s what you would earn that day!”
OUT NOW :
Manouach & Engelhardt
Chimeras
An “inventory of synthetic cognition” featuring 150 artists, writers, and researchers that disassemble—broaden—the definition of AI to include non-human perspectives and anticipate modes of symbiosis
With a market capitalization of $2.4 trillion, Saudi Aramco replaces Apple as the world’s most valuable company. Meta, Netflix, Robinhood—tech stocks are tanking right now and Apple is down 20% this year. There is more at play here than investors exhibiting a newfound skepticism towards Big Tech’s bottom line—or optimism that the oil sector will clean up its act. The Russian incursion into Ukraine has sent oil prices—commodities—soaring, further exasperating supply chain woes brought on by the pandemic. “There’s panic selling in a lot of tech and other high-multiple names, and the money coming out of there seems headed for energy in particular,” notes Tower Bridge Advisors ’ James Meyer on the cynical flow of capital back to fossil fuel.
“It stopped being something that resided only within the skull, only within the individual, and became something that mattered when it emerged between bodies, between species, between beings. Something that’s active in the world.”
– British artist and writer
James Bridle , discussing broader definitions of intelligence laid out in their newest book
Ways of Being with musician and
5×15 interlocutor
Brian Eno
“The funniest, saddest aspect of this boom is that the digital and internet artists who had long awaited a salable moment performed a sort of due diligence, or conceptual laundering, for the nothings to come.”
– Artist and writer
Elisabeth Nicula , on watching digital artists ‘pivot to NFTs’ and lend credibility to the cryptoart scene. While critiques are plentiful, Nicula offers new insights, discussing NFTs alongside the extractive nature of land art and the idea of ‘the void.’
OUT NOW :
Anne-Katrin Weber
Television before TV
A transnational study of “new media and exhibition culture” in the late 1920s and 1930s, where television met its first audiences
“Deploying more capital—steady lads.”
– Terraform Labs CEO
Do Kwon , reassuring investors that the
stewards of the Terra cryptocurrency ecosystem are working to quell a major crash. Second only to Ethereum in
total value locked , Terra’s $40 Billion in assets are in freefall due to its central UST stablecoin ‘
depegging ’ from the U.S. Dollar.
“The Artwork as a Living System,” a retrospective of works by Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau , opens at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. Included are early A-Life works (image: Interactive Plant Growing augmented reality —14 interactive installations in total. “Few artists have shaped the transition from the moving image media phase to the living image media like Sommerer and Mignonneau,” note the curatorial team.
OUT NOW :
Hertrich & Miyazaki
Following the Elephant-Nosed Fish
A
research -driven reimagination of the human sensorium that is part theory-poetry and part theory-fiction
The culmination of the Studiotopia program, which embedded 13 artists in labs for 17 months, “Colliding Epistemes” opens at Bozar in Brussels. For their residencies, artists including Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand , Kuang-Yi Ku , and Sandra Lorenzi (image: How to read poetry to cancer cells? , 2022) were paired with quantum physicists, molecular biologists, and other niche researchers, yielding works about “the collision of disciplines, methodologies, and mindsets.”
“Crypto-toys collapse the distinction between a financial and an emotional investment—a necessary maneuver for a digital asset class ultimately backed by nothing more than flows of sentiment.”
– Writer and researcher Richard Woodall, on why some of the biggest NFT projects look like they were made for children. Juvenile aesthetics help “compensate for a lack of utility or fundamental value,” notes Woodall, “encouraging buyers to imbue them with sentimental worth.”
“Our leaders have offered few spaces for reflection, so artists have stepped in to fill the gap.” In her piece on COVID memorials, New York-based writer Jillian Steinhauer considers four exhibitions that “offer us a place to put our grief.” Featured works by Jill Magid , the Zip Code Memory Project , Rafael Lozano-Hemmer , and Coco Fusco in particular (Your Eyes Will Be An Empty Word , 2022, image) go beyond puncturing the anonymity of numbers; they “memorialize those whose stories we don’t know.”
The Processing Foundation , a champion of software literacy within the visual arts and developer of the eponymous creative coding toolkits, announces that it received a record-breaking $10 million in donations in 2021, a majority of which came from artists donating cryptocurrency. This generous support has “allowed the Foundation’s work to become sustainable for the first time,” writes Executive Director Dorothy R. Santos , citing particularly generous artists such as Joshua Davis , Monica Rizzolli , Jared Tarbell , and Lia . Santos further announces that the foundation’s board decided to suspend new Ethereum donations over environmental concerns. Support for Tezos, a more energy-efficient cryptocurrency, will continue.
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