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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“Emo Gym,” a show inviting artists to “confront, dissect, and possibly embrace the vulnerability of our times,” opens at Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Contemporary. Participating artists include Chloë Cheuk , Yim Sui Fong , and Eason Tsang ka wai contributing installations and video works. Of note: recent RCA grad Michele Chu ‘s inti-gym (2021, image), a cozy tunnel that offers enclosure and respite for ‘intimacy fitness,’ an affective counterpoint to the physical regime of traditional gyms.
“People are going to be doing their regular work, that’s what’s being recorded and reproduced … every time there’s movement, you know, it’s kind of mirrored in Ireland.”
– Irish artist
Kerry Guinan and Deepa Chikarmane, factory director of Pret Interpret Clothing, about how Guinan’s exhibition “
The Red Thread ” will link six sewing machines in Bangalore, India, with respective counterparts at Dublin’s
The Complex from May 4th to 10th
“Different possibilities are revealed, and others are destroyed. It breaks down the illusion of absolute truth. For me, this is a step forward in understanding ourselves, the world, and our place in it in new plural and relational ways.”
– British scientist-turned-artist
Libby Heaney , on the implications of quantum computing. In her latest immersive installation
Ent- , Heaney explores a “quantum aesthetic” that “reveals the pluralities at the heart of all matter.”
Augmenting “
Variations ,” a major
Vera Molnar retrospective exhibition at the Beall Center for Art + Technology in Irvine, California, art historian
Zsofi Valyi-Nagy unravels the many threads that run through the work of one of generative art’s foundational figures.
“The experience of AI in everyday life renders us default Surrealists, deferring to opaque automatic processes that no longer need be arduously evoked with Ouija-esque analog rituals.”
–
Real Life Editor
Rob Horning , on the parallels between
automatic writing and the artistic exploration of language models like
GPT-3 and
DALL-E . Unimpressed, he characterizes AI-generated prose and images as “estranged from human agency yet nonetheless has some perceivable sense to it that a reader can extract, or project on it.”
Natively Digital 1.3: Generative Art, Sotheby’s third post-NFT auction begins. While earlier editions sprinkled works from talent with contemporary art world bona fides (Addie Wagenknecht , Simon Denny , Casey Reas ) into the mix with figures that emerged during the NFT boom, this auction looks in the rear view mirror. Lots include a 1976 Vera Molnar disorder study , a dot com-era Roman Verostko binary self-portrait , and Charles Csuri’s Sine Curve Man
A hotspot in the Tezos NFT ecosystem, generative art marketplace fxhash emerges from beta. Version 1.0 boasts more robust architecture and speedier page updating (latency plagued past popular mints), and the new smart contract allows royalty splits between collaborators and Dutch auctions (which gives collectors better access to the primary market and discourages scalpers). “We’ve applied a global layer of polish across the whole website,” the fxhash team notes.
“Like air, time is both expansive and simultaneously a resource that moves through us. When we embody time, who do we become?”
OUT NOW :
Internet Yami-Ichi
A DECADE TO DOWNLOAD
Archiving 43
events in 30 cities over 10 years, with submissions from 200+ vendors who brought weird internet culture ‘offline’ to an IRL flea market
“Today I’m announcing a new feature for my social platform Minus : no billionaires want to buy it.”
– American software artist
Ben Grosser , plugging his “finite social network” as Elon Musk offers to
buy Twitter for $43 billion.
Minus was commissioned by arebyte Gallery, London, as part of Grosser’s 2021 solo exhibition “
Software for Less ” and grants users no more than 100 posts—
for life .
The U.S. Treasury Department has identified the culprits behind a recent $625 million theft from a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) exchange: North Korea’s Lazarus Group . The jaw-dropping 173,600 ETH and 25 million USDC heist took place on March 23rd, when Ronin Bridge (a DeFi exchange connected to Axie Infinity ) was accessed via hacked private keys and then drained. DeFi hacks have been frequent thus far in 2022, and this is the largest yet. That a state actor is behind the theft, and bypassing sanctions by pickpocketing the NFT play-to-earn economy speaks to the deep strangeness of international banking and finance right now. “There may be mandatory secondary sanctions requirements on persons who knowingly, directly or indirectly, engage in money laundering,” warns the Treasury Department, stating they are working to track the purloined funds.
“And if you do live that strange life, then honestly, your decision to become a vegan shut-in who sits in a tiny house heated exclusively by the exhaust from your massive gaming rig is probably sort of ethically praiseworthy.”
– TechScape columnist
Alex Hearn , hypothesizing a monk-like gamer that is (somewhat) free of blame from the medium’s massive carbon footprint
OUT NOW :
Alexander Monea
The Digital Closet
An exploration of how heteronormative bias is deeply embedded in the internet’s platforms and protocols
OUT NOW :
K Allado-McDowell
Amor Cringe
A partially AI-generated “deepfake autofiction” novelette about a TikTok influencer that seeks God, intented to be “as cringe as possible”
“The content moderation algorithms that Tumblr implemented to institute its ban on ‘pornographic’ content was comically inept—with tragic consequences. Many LGBTQ+ archives lost their entire catalogues overnight with no redress and no way to recover their lost content or user base.”
A retrospective of the feminist performance artist in her native France, “ORLAN Manifesto. Body and Sculpture” opens at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse. Collecting 100+ works from ORLAN ’s archives, the show links 1960-70s photography and performance, the iconic cosmetic surgeries (image: 7th Surgery-Performance called Omnipresence , 1993), to works in bioart and robotics, underscoring how her practice “opposes morality, natural and social determinisms, and all forms of domination.”
Japanese media artist Ryoji Ikeda and Les Percussions de Strasbourg perform 100 Cymbals (2019) at The Hague’s Rewire Festival. In the piece, 10 percussionists weave through a 10 x 10 grid of Turkish cymbals articulating their texture and (revered) harmonics. The piece “produces alluring and hypnotic sounds that verge on droning synthesizers” and “invites us to rethink the overlap and differences between electronic and analogue,” writes the Rewire team.
“Meta Folklore,” a collection of recent sculptures by Polish artist Janek Simon opens at The Hague’s experimental art space 1646. Analyzing a trove of images from Etsy and eBay that “problematically categorize folkloric sculptures from around the world,” Simon used machine learning to generate a new homogenized ‘meta’ sculptural language for a series of 3D prints. The resulting colourful forms are recognizable to “everyone and at the same time no-one,” notes the artist.
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