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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Bringing together 18 immersive installations that ponder planetary co-existence, “Our Time on Earth” opens at the Barbican, London. To mitigate dread and paralysis felt in the face of compounding environmental crises, guest curators Caroline Till and Kate Franklin selected works that “carve out space to imagine a constructive way forward.” Case in point: Superflux ’ Refuge for Resurgence (2021), a interspecies dinner table “where all living beings are considered equal.”
“It is about what we pay attention to, what we understand as an emergency, and what we deem worthy of preemptive action. The siren is a portal, a metaphor to start thinking around that.”
–
Aura Satz , about her longtime research project and forthcoming feature film
Preemptive Listening , in which the London-based artist worked with collaborators to “compose new sirens” that “forge a new tentative of understanding of emergency signals”
Alice Bucknell ’s dark eco-fiction Swamp City
“Enough risks were found that maybe it shouldn’t generate people or anything photorealistic.”
– AI researcher
Maarten Sap , on
OpenAI ’s latest image and natural language model
DALL-E 2 showing bias “toward generating images of white men by default, overly sexualizing images of women, and reinforcing racial stereotypes.” People with early access to DALL-E 2 were told not to share photorealistic images in public, in large part due to these issues, reports
Wired ’s
Khari Johnson .
Metaverse Petshop , a beta version of a new project by Japanese duo Exonemo debuts at NADA New York . The “playable installation inspired by the relationship between information space and real space” lets participants purchase a CGI dog, release it from its ‘cage,’ and take custody of the pup on their smartphone. The work-in-progress will be presented at an upcoming solo show, and the duo envisions future iterations of the installation will allow users to “mint NFT pedigrees.”
DOSSIER :
“Though she used only traditional artists’ tools before working with an electronic computer in 1968, Vera remembers inventing systematic methods for making art from an early age.”
– Art historian
Zsofi Valyi-Nagy , revealing rare archival material from generative art pioneer Vera Molnar’s early years in Hungary
In the first of six performances, Kerry Guinan ’s The Red Thread links six industrial sewing machines at Dublin’s The Complex with six counterparts at a garment factory in Bangalore, India. “The kinetic installation appears to be self-operating, but there are puppeteers in hiding,” the Irish artist notes about the workers over 8,000 kilometers away. By eliminating that distance, she hopes to “make visceral the extraordinary scale, and underlying humanity, of the globalised economy.”
“It seems possible that too much globality in terms of trust leads to loss of granularity and silencing of difference, and too much locality leads to a disturbing filter-bubble effect.”
–
Sarah Friend , on turning trust into data. In her essay, published as part of
Process and Protocol festival, the Canadian software artist digs into trust network taxonomies and reveals how
Circles UBI , a community-based currency that Friend co-founded, applies “trust networks and decentralization to a social problem.”
OUT NOW :
Britt Wray
Generation Dread
An analysis of mounting environment-related fears and anxieties, in the wake of the escalating climate crisis
Monira Al Qadiri’s single-channel video Behind the Sun Gulf War , the video juxtaposes amateur VHS footage of burning oil fields with audio of Islamic television program monologues. Qadiri recalls the carnage as the “classic image of a biblical apocalypse … the earth belching fire and the black scorched sky felt like a portrait of hell as it should be.”
“The thing about the Amiga bassline is that it was constant volume, it didn’t waver. So when you pulled it up to the maximum volume that you could press on to vinyl, it made it, well, phat as fuck.”
– UK jungle and drum’n’bass legend
Gavin King , aka Aphrodite, reminiscing about making music with his Commodore
Amiga 1200 home computer in the early ’90s
Tamlin Magee revisits the 16-bit heyday of the early ’90s, when the sound and sampling capabilities of Amiga home computers were central to a burgeoning electronic music scene. “It was the poor man’s studio,” recalls Marlon Sterling , AKA drum’n’bass producer Equinox, whose recently released Early Works 93-94 OctaMED music tracker when he was only 15. (image: Sterling during an Amiga music restoration session with fellow UK producer Bizzy B )
“So, how do you build a metaverse? Rule one: spend twenty years.”
– Media artist
Claudia Hart , chronicling her decades building in virtual space. Speaking at
VR WSPark , an online exhibition space curated by
Snow Yunxue Fu , Hart ruminates on the iterations of her
Dolls (2014-) project, which blends CGI, costume design, and choreography in mixed-reality performance.
“A Sea of Data,” German media artist Hito Steyerl ’s first solo show in Asia, opens at Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). Named after an e-flux essayAnimal Spirits (2022, image) is a sensor-driven animation of post-pandemic (human) conditions—from remote culture to decentralization.
As part of her eponymous solo exhibition, American software artist Lauren Lee McCarthy performs a new iteration of her 2020 COVID response piece I Heard Talking Is Dangerous at EIGEN+ART Lab , Berlin. Whereas the original performance had McCarthy trigger text-to-speech monologues from her phone, Proceed At Your Own Risk invited the gallery audience to use the same technology (via a custom web app ) to talk back.
“If Tiktaalik is our ancestor, then perhaps our holding it accountable for the chaos it sowed is an expression of love.”
– Science reporter
Sabrina Imbler , on the meme-ification of a 375-million-year-old transitional fossil. “The memes yearn to thwack
Tiktaalik with a rolled-up newspaper or poke it with a stick,” writes Imbler, ”anything to shoo it back into the water and avoid our having to go to work and pay rent.”
“SKIN DEEP,” a Jonas Blume solo show, opens at Scope BLN in Berlin. Curated by Tina Sauerlaender , the exhibition lives up to its name, presenting works by the American artist exploring the “use of skin as medium to reflect on the relationship between reality and image world.” Included is motorized torso Partially True (2022) and creepy diptych Yes. (Double David) (2022, image). Collectively the works present the artist’s body “in an estranged and uncanny haptic beyond resemblance.”
“Tech companies provide isolated, insecure, overworked individuals with a false sense of mastery that replenishes their capacity to provide exploited labor of their own.”
– American author
Grafton Tanner , on the emergence (and history) of the “userverse,” a “customized surrogate world” of “unchallenged mastery” and “concealed labour,” where critique is “downplayed as adjustment difficulties: Give it time, and the technology will eventually work for everyone.”
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