1,577 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“A premature extinction event occurs before we’ve flooded the universe with ‘value.’ We, then, shouldn’t spend money on global poverty: those resources should instead go to ensuring that we realize our ‘longterm potential.’”
– Philosopher and author
Émile P. Torres , parsing the moral bankruptcy of
longtermism , an ideology espoused by, for example, crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, who claimed to “get filthy rich, for charity’s sake.”
“Unsupervised,” a solo show by artist Refik Anadol opens at New York’s MoMA. Working with the metadata for the museum’s 130,000 artworks, the Turkish-American artist’s eponymous AI model (image) fluidly morphs through the latent aesthetic space of the collection. Viewers revel in flowing transitions between myriad possible artworks, the experience subtly intensified by camera, microphone, and local climate data-informed real-time interactivity, tweets Anadol.
“Paid in attention, the critic becomes captured by their audience and prioritizes subject matter that maximizes attention, retains or pleases an existing audience, and does not jeopardize their reputation.”
–
New Models ’ Caroline Busta & Lil Internet, schematizing how the attention economy has (largely) eradicated substantive art criticism, during their
The Future of Critique keynote at Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clears “slaughter-free” lab-grown chicken by California-based Upside Foods (image) as safe for consumption. The approval caps a decade of research to bring lab-grown meat substitutes to market, in hopes of reducing both factory farming’s carbon footprint and the cruelty of industrialized poultry production. “Now we shift focus towards what really matters in this industry, which is scale up,” says Good Food Institute scientist Liz Specht.
“From compromised system integrity and faulty regulatory oversight, to the concentration of control in the hands of a small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated, and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”
– Lawyer and corporate restructuring specialist John Jay Ray III,
bluntly assessing bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX
“DO COMPUTERS WORRY YOU,” an exhibition of recent work by Canadian artist Matt Nish-Lapidus opens at Toronto’s Collision Gallery. Presented alongside “Greenlight: Carlaw,” a companion exhibition by Simon Fuh , Nish-Lapidus deploys assemblies of custom networks and Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) combining “industrial and domestic materials, found texts, and bespoke algorithms” into a materialized polemic for more poetic (and personal) modes of computation.
OUT NOW :
Cohen & Van Balen
Not What I Meant But Anyway
Dutch
artist duo Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen document a decade of transdisciplinary work—from producing sterile goldfish to choreographing an assembly line.
“Our land, our ocean, our culture are the most precious assets of our people and to keep them safe from harm, no matter what happens in the physical world, we will move them to the cloud.”
– Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister
Simon Kofe , announcing plans for a metaverse twin of the Pacific island nation as sea levels rise. “The idea is to continue to function as a state and beyond that to preserve our culture, our knowledge, our history in a digital space,” Kofe told
COP27 climate summit attandees.
Daniel Franke ’s CGI short Ich sitze in der Wolke (2022) premieres at the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival in Kassel, Germany. In his film, the German artist and researcher takes viewers deep into the digital cloud, a GAN -generated post-nature dreamscape where semiconductors, bitcoins, electricity, rare earth minerals, and crystals manifest to force questions about “environmental sin and digital evolution.”
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. I call this enshittification .”
– Canadian sci-fi writer and tech pundit
Cory Doctorow , on the decay of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and the following mass exodus, or “social quitting,” of users that Doctorow suggests is currently underway
“Duckweed doubles its weight in just two days, is harvested continually, and is high in protein, nutrients, antioxidants, and vitamins. Only a few essential elements are missing that could make it a reliable base source for complete human nutrition.”
– Life sciences researcher
Kim Johnsons , on how the
Lemnoideae plant subfamily (aka duckweed) is stellar space food. Bonus: human urine is acceptable plant food for duckweed.
German artist and designer Philipp Schmitt publishes Blueprints for Intelligence , a “visual history of artificial neural networks from 1943 to 2020.” Compiling 56 diagrams sourced from machine learning research papers, the web project invites visitors to trace key tendencies in AI evolution. “It draws connections between the visual representations of neural networks and the researchers’ conception of cognition,” Schmitt writes in his introduction.
“Consider how we think of AI as a black box and thus in accounting for its harms demand transparency or explainability of algorithms rather than of the institutions that create and maintain them.”
– Cultural scientist and AI researcher
Maya Indira Ganesh , contemplating the “performative force of AI imaginaries” with a thorough “metaphorology” published in
ACM Interactions and as part of Philipp Schmitt’s
Blueprints for Intelligence visual history
Probing for human qualities that escape capture in AI training datasets, Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald ’s new collaboration Unlearning Language (2022) opens at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), Japan. Both an experiential performance—“a one-act play for four,” as described by McDonald —and an interactive installation, the American artists (with support from Rhizomatiks ) conjure a “futuristic AI that tries to help us become more human.”
“DATA STREAMING,” featuring late Luxembourgish artist Michel Majerus , opens at Kunstverein in Hamburg. Lost to a 2002 plane crash , Majerus made waves in the dotcom era for playfully integrating digital images—videogames, animation, desktop publishing—into his paintings. Now, a major retrospective sees Kunstverein and 12 German museums mounting exhibitions reviewing the artist’s work “with the hindsight of artistic and technological developments of the past twenty years.”
“The hermit crab is, unlike its name suggests, a social creature. They live in groups and are probably much more comfortable in the wild than in an exhibition space.”
DAM Projects Berlin (formerly DAM Gallery) opens Mark Wilson ’s solo exhibition “Moveto Lineto,” surveying essential plotter drawings and canvas prints the American digital art veteran has produced over more than three decades. Wilson, a painter who turned to generative software in the 1980s, is known for his recognisable style of layered, densly-meshed geometries. “Indeed, it is hard to imagine creating these works with any other medium,” says Wilson.
“This foundation, which I won’t mention, sent me back a letter saying no, we do not fund computer art, we do not want to have anything to do with computer art. So I applied for grants as a painter, because that’s ultimately what my work is.”
–
Mark Wilson , on the rejection he and other digital artists faced even in the 1980s
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