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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“The dish’s colonial origins not only placed an elided aspect of European history in the spotlight, but also sought to explore the quasi-colonial relations that are built into the Internet’s infrastructure, a mentality we wanted to confront and oppose.”
“Ultimate Vatos: Force & Honneur,” a solo show by French artist Sara Sadik opens at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany. Executed in her “Beurcore” style—reflecting working class North African diaspora youth culture—Sadik’s video installation chronicles pressures faced by young adult post-migrants. The CGI narrative sits “between The Hunger Games and voyeuristic survival training,” and is heavily inspired by first-person videogame playthrough videos.
Software artists and project co-founders Paloma Rodríguez Carrington and Harm van den Dorpel announce the discontinuation of Left Gallery . Active since 2015, the blockchain-based space for the display and dissemination of downloadable objects pioneered crypto art with a curated marketplace and exhibitions. Launched at Spike Art ’s Berlin project space, Left Gallery fittingly concludes with NFT auctions of the magazine’s covers throughout the years.
“This week it’s like everyone is drinking from the same well of #midjourney.”
– Software artist
Karsten Schmidt , quipping about a twitter pic’s resemblance to a
flood of imagery . On March 21st a
beta opened for Midjourney, a new machine learning tool, yielding a stream of demented imagery from dozens of participating artists.
“Robota,” a show featuring Matthew Angelo Harrison’s encasements of auto industry ephemera and African sculptures in sold resin blocks, opens at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. A Detroit native who worked as a clay modeller for Ford, Harrison “attends to the devaluation of human labour” by freeze-framing UAW strike ephemera and hardhats, headlights (image: Seer: Lay Bare , 2020), and African sculptures in vitrine-like forms.
A new iteration of Shirin Fahimi ’s Umm al Raml’s Sand Narratives (2021–) opens at articule in Montreal. In this version, the Iranian artist conjures a “future of female prophecy” in VR by foregrounding two of her central motifs: the desert and divination. “I like to think about the connection of sand to technology, from the journey of silica sands to silicon used in computer chips,” she reveals to Akimbo Sand and Silicon Studies , 2022).
“There is a war going on between simplicity and complexity, and we live right at the edge of it.”
–
Luís Seoane , complex systems researcher at Spain’s Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia, on evolution’s tendency for symmetry. The reason, researchers argue in a
new paper , is that the instructions to produce symmetry are easier to embed in genetic code and follow. “These simple, symmetrical building blocks help make sense of [the universe’s] complexity,” says Seoane.
A survey of seven performance and software works that explore human connection during COVID, Lauren Lee McCarthy ’s solo exhibition “I Heard Talking Is Dangerous” opens at EIGEN+ART Lab , Berlin. In the 2020 piece the show is named after, for example, a masked McCarthy delivers text-to-speech monologues about safety and distancing to friends—on their doorstep. Captured in documentation and artifacts, the works reveal moments of augmented, but real, intimacy.
In the CLB Berlin exhibition “Assembly Strategies,” Chilean architect Pedro Serrano explores how JOYN MACHINE might help address local infrastructure needs sustainably. Developed by the research-driven Berlin-based Studio Milz , the portable all-in-one design and assembly system allows for low-cost, low-footprint fabrication of wooden architecture. During the inaugural JOYN residency in 2021, Serrano realized speculative spatial configurations “that have no site or client.”
“We expect that our decision will encourage other developers to bring animal biotechnology products forward for the FDA’s risk determination, paving the way for [genome-edited] animals to more efficiently reach the marketplace.”
– The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA)
Steven Solomon , on the agency’s approval of the first
CRISPR cows. The new breed was ‘engineered’ to endure climate change: their slick, short hair is said to help the animals cope with hot weather.
“When I was pregnant, I had this powerful experience of understanding myself as a vessel or a container for another voice.”
– Sound artist
Aura Satz , reflecting on
Ventriloqua (2003-4), a performance in which the artist played the electromagnetic waves of her (late pregnancy) belly using a
theremin
OUT NOW :
Wershler, Emerson & Parikka
The Lab Book
Darren Wershler ,
Lori Emerson , and
Jussi Parikka reveal the history of media labs, sites where the “materials and aesthetics of technical modernity were developed”
A solo show by Russian digital artist Olia Lialina opens at Pasadena, California’s And/Or Gallery. Mixing long term project Online Newspapers False Memories Lossless
After ‘squatting’ the Ethereum domain of Germany’s Bundeskunsthalle in July 2021, provoking questions about ownership of public art institutions, German artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl and the Berlin-based Department of Decentralization launch Strike DAO , an “experiment in participatory governance of blockchain art institutions.” Three models are put up for a vote, and visualized through a vote-based re-edit of Steyerl’s eponymous 2010 video piece .
“It’s really tough to find the right words that really mean anything in a situation like this.”
– Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, acknowledging the grim situation in Ukraine to a
South by Southwest audience, before hyping up the metaverse
American artist Molly Soda ’s Cleaning My Desktop (2018) opens at /rosa in Berlin. In the cheeky video -based work, Soda green screens herself onto her computer and performs various acts of handiwork and space organizing—conflating knowledge work and domestic labour. The case study of how “the figure of the artist treats the desktop as a physical space” is installed at panke.gallery and Zentrum für Netzkunst ’s project space through April 9th.
“Our expansion as a company over the years was made possible by our work with government agencies in the military and intelligence sectors in the United States, whose leaders took an interest in software and understood its potential to reshape national defense.”
– Palantir CEO
Alexander C. Karp , analyzing post-Ukraine invasion geopolitics and calling for for Europe to wake up to the (what
he describes as) necessary partnership between Big Tech and the liberal democratic state
An installation version of Timothy Thomasson ’s CGI film Slow Track (2021) opens at Montreal’s ELEKTRA Gallery. Putting the self-described “slow CGI” artist’s philosophy into (in)action, the film scans mundane, messy, and unremarkable scenes—to contrast the bombastic VFX and gleaming product shots the medium is often associated with. “Rather than a CG image that seduces us with excess, this one asks for patience,” writes Thomasson.
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