1,182 days, 1,855 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 future’s gonna be weirder than anyone can imagine,” Turkish AI artist Memo Akten writes about the effect TikTok’s newly released Teenage Filter has on people. “It makes you look young,” he demonstrates in an uncanny reaction video, “and now TikTok is full of middle-aged folks trying come to terms with this, trying to understand where their life went.” Facing your younger self can be “quite emotional,” says Akten and provides dozens of examples in a (now viral) Twitter thread.
“Even though © doesn’t provide for any protection against biometric use, it does prohibit the redistribution of the image file. CC allows it. Ideal for packaging files into datasets.”
– Software artist
Adam Harvey , warning about the use of
Creative Commons licenses. Photos of people shared with the latter “can be freely redistributed in biometric AI and machine learning databases with virtually no legal recourse,” writes Harvey, referencing his
2022 research for the Open Future think tank’s
AI_Commons project.
OUT NOW :
Peter Weibel (ed)
BioMedia
Discussing the works over 60 contributing artists and institutions, Weibel anthologizes the ZKM Karlsruhe’s 2021-22 “
BioMedia ” research exhibition that surveyed “The Age of Media with Life-like Behavior”
“It feels so prescient today because it captures the moment we became completely overwhelmed by information.”
– Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth curator Allison Hearst, discussing
Gretchen Bender ’s 1987 video installation
Total Recall —the first work “
I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen ” visitors encounter. “It’s a complete assault of the senses,” she adds, describing the din produced by its 24 stacked TVs and multiple projections.
“Semi-autonomous weapons, like loitering munitions that track and detonate themselves on targets, require a ‘human in the loop.’ They can recommend actions but require their operators to initiate them.”
– Human rights researcher
James Dawes , describing how
most drones deployed in the Russia-Ukraine war are still overseen by a human. Fearing that’s about to change,
activists warn that imminent autonomous weapons “erode meaningful human control over what happens on the battlefield” and will inevitably kill civilians.
An intervention into the fabled novel Moby-Dick Wu Tsang flips Herman Melville’s 19th century script, presenting a video installation that renders the novel’s unseen ocean depths from the White Whale’s perspective (image). A postcolonial and anti-extractivist reframing, instead of dread and death, Melville’s antagonist now offers visitors an “oceanscape-cosmos for respite, contemplation, and provocation.”
“Creators will gradually stop maintaining and perfecting their existing collections, and instead be forced to focus on always dropping new things.”
– Conceptual artist
Harm van den Dorpel , explaining the dramatic impact (leading NFT marketplace) OpenSea’s
decision to make artist royalties
optional would have on creators. “I used to employ multiple programmers to maintain projects on a daily basis,” he adds, describing how that vital income stream funded the ongoing preservation of his NFT projects.
Journalist Steffan Powell reflects on Helsinki’s dominance in mobile gaming, citing the demoscene as a key catalyst. Before Angry Birds still burgeoning —demoparty culture that fuelled domestic creation (image: CNCD, Closer
“If Second Life goes bankrupt, like it once almost did, I would probably not go looking for another virtual world. I feel the same way about my marriage—I don’t think I’ll want another one!”
– CGI artist
Skawennati , professing her enduring lover for the
original virtual world . In conversation with
LaTurbo Avedon , the duo discuss online economies, avatar evolution, and swap 3D modelling tips.
OUT NOW :
Jerrold McGrath
In Praise of Disorder
Answering the question “what if rather than fearing disorder, we embraced it?,” cultural theorist and
UKAI Projects researcher McGrath argues for
relinquishing control rather than clinging to it.
“When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.”
– Platformer editors Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton, relating the latest antics of the current Twitter CEO. “After Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk—and Musk alone—benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.”
OUT NOW :
K Allado-McDowell
Air Age Blueprint
In their latest novel co-written with GPT-3,
Allado-McDowell weaves fiction, memoir, theory and travelogue into an animist cybernetics: a secret human-machine experiment in intelligence entanglement called Shaman.AI remakes our technologies, identities, and deepest beliefs.
“I would say there is a circuit board aesthetic, a punch-card aesthetic, as well as an interest in pristine and gleaming metallic surfaces, reminiscent of the IBM mainframe.”
Full of playful examples—statistically modelling dropping cannonballs from different heights, a neural net theory of cat recognition—Stephen Wolfram breaks down how ChatGPT works. Working from the simple claim “it’s just adding one word at a time,” the computer scientist describes how neural nets are trained to model ‘human-like’ tasks in 3D space, how they tokenize language, and concludes with a rumination on semantic grammar that recognizes the language model’s successes (and limits).
In a blog post, Swedish programmer and hobby media archaeologist Carl Svensson revisits “the colourful charm of Amiga utility disks.” Compiled by demosceners to circulate self-made and (cracked) commercial tools in the late 1980s and early 90s, these bootable software packs came in eccentric flavours—from hacked system interfaces featuring ASCII art to rich, audiovisual presentations. “If you wanted to make a demo, you’d be all set with just a handful of these disks,” concludes Svensson.
“We Are Electric: Extraction, Extinction and Post-Carbon Futures” opens at the University of Queensland (UQ) Art Museum in Australia. Foregrounding “bodily and planetary flows, the politics of extraction and exchange,” artists including Diane Borsato , Haines & Hinterding , and the Institute for Queer Ecology urge action and offer paths forward; using the trappings of Big Oil—rusty drill bits and barrels—Quandamooka artist Megan Cope’s Untitled (Death Song)
“It’s consistent with earlier results, that large language models can keep track of variables and attributes in simple stories. Calling this ‘theory of mind’ is vast over-interpretation.”
– Complexity researcher and AI critic
Melanie Mitchell , calling the conclusions—that GPT-3.5 models display an emergent
theory of mind comparable to 9-year-olds—of Stanford computational psychologist
Michal Kosinski ’s recent (viral)
paper into question. Instead, Mitchell points at
research that demonstrates neural language models’ capacity for “dynamic representations of meaning and implicit simulation of entity state.”
“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982,” a major survey of early computer art, opens at LACMA in Los Angeles. Curated by Leslie Jones, the show assembles works from Analívia Cordeiro , Hans Haacke , Frederick Hammersley , Vera Molnar , Stan VanDerBeek , and others, that reimagined methods and materials. Edward Kienhol ’s The Friendly Grey Computer (image, 1965), for example, “anticipated the coming age of personal computing” with a big-eyed anthropomorphized bot, made of salvaged industrial parts.
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