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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“Oceanic Thinking,” featuring Monira Al Qadiri , Sancintya Mohini Simpson , SUPERFLEX (image: Dive-In Blue Assembly project (which connects marine scientists and artists, as part of an UN initiative ), the show invites viewers to “think together with these liquid, vast, biodiverse, and non-binary spaces to speculate our collective future.”
The world’s first NFT vending machine opens in New York’s Financial District. A PR stunt slash proof of concept, it sells QR codes denoting ownership of NFTs from the Neon marketplace. Purchases are made via credit or debit card, and two collections are available: Project Color and Party Pigeons . “[A vending machine] means we can engage the widest possible audience. NFT buying and selling doesn’t need to be a mystery,” says Neon’s Jordan Birnholtz.
“Independent game design and independent publishing have similar end goals: fostering creativity, making money, finding community, and avoiding institutional pressure.”
– TXTbooks’
Nichole Shinn , speaking about
Book Fell Into Ocean (2022), their browser-based “search-and-rescue game“ where the player pilots a
risograph drone and surveys flotsam after an art fair-bound container ship explodes off the coast of Miami [quote edited]
“Formulations as Texture, Horizontal and Vertical Crossings,” a solo exhibition by Florian Hecker opens at Simian in Ørestad, Copenhagen. The show’s single spatial audio piece deploys two variants of Formulations (2015), an algorithmically-generated composition, into a new 3-channel version that capitalizes on distinctions between the two versions producing “a maze of different resolutions, gradations, scales, similarities, and differences.”
“Working with quantum physics can subvert the endless categorizations and control of humans and non-humans alike in pursuit of never-ending profits, causing accelerating alienation.”
– British artist and physicist
Libby Heaney , on the positive potential of ‘thinking quantum.’ In the wake of her new quantum-coded immersive installation
Ent- (2022), Heaney argues for new pluralities to “break down binary thinking and political polarisation, engendering community thought that might solve global problems.”
Libby Heaney ’s Light Art Space (LAS) commission Ent- (2022) premieres at Schering Stiftung , Berlin, taking quantum computing as both medium and subject matter. Inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights
“I hope y’all see this show, but to clarify, it features the smallest pieces I have ever made, including engravings that are only 150 atoms thick.”
–
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer , responding to Pace Gallery highlighting the large-scale installations on view at the Mexican-Canadian media artist’s SFMOMA solo show “
Unstable Presence .” The microscopic piece in question,
Babbage Nanopamphlets (2015), comprises 2 million nanopamphlets, each 150 atoms thick, printed in elemental gold.
Berlin-based artists Kat Austen and Fara Peluso are announced winners of a six-month residency at the S+T+ARTS Center Upper Austria to work on “Circular Records”—a low-carbon alternative to vinyl. “We will develop a record production process that uses sustainable biomaterials,” says Austen. The goal is to create a high-fidelity reproduction of This Land is Not Mine
“Enough people purchased the preservative to attempt suicide that the company’s algorithm began suggesting other products that customers frequently bought along with it to aid in such efforts.”
–
Megan Twohey &
Gabriel J.X. Dance , on a dark twist of Amazon’s ‘frequently bought together’ recommendation engine. The journalists reveal that while eBay and Etsy have stopped carrying a chemical compound linked to
scores of suicides , Amazon has dragged its heels.
OUT NOW :
Conrad, van Leijsen, Héritier
Graphic Design in the Post-Digital Age
A much needed survey of graphic design
after creative coding, featuring interviews with
Jürg Lehni ,
Casey Reas ,
Yehwan Song ,
Dia Studio , and others
“The WWW was not designed, rather implemented ad hoc. There are no versions. Its story is one of the initial gift and promise of free and open access to knowledge and culture, and the power and money people that have since sought to control, steer, surveil and exploit that gift.”
– Media artist and critical engineer
Julian Oliver , pushing back on the framing of (and hype around)
Web 3.0
After its 2020 premiere at K21 in Düsseldorf, Hito Steyerl ’s retrospective “I Will Survive” opens at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The show offers an expansive overview of the German artist and filmmaker’s oeuvre, from the early documentary works to the more recent CGI video installations (image: Social Sim , 2020). “Her work has always had a clairvoyant and penetrating understanding of society,” curator Karen Archey writes about Steyerl’s importance. “She disrupts the status quo as the bedrock of her practice.”
“EMPATHIE,” an exhibition of Scenocosme ’s interactive works from the last decade, opens at Musée de Vence in France. Whimsical interfaces by the artist duo on display include musical plants , resonant stones , wood veneer instruments , and other experiments in haptics, materials, and audiovisual abstraction. Also featured is Metamorphy
“When we started, CLIP already had an idea of who I am. It’s hard to exist online without being swept up into a training set.”
– American composer, musician, and sound artist
Holly Herndon , on creating her recent NFT collection of self-portraits,
CLASSIFIED , that were assembled feeding OpenAI’s neural network
CLIP a series of custom prompts. “Artificial intelligence is inherently communal,” says Herndon, “and we’ve all contributed to it through participating in humanity.”
“Kazuo Umezz the Great Art Exhibition,” opens at Tokyo City View . For his career celebration, the manga legend has painted a sequel to his classic Watashi wa Shingo exonemo pay tribute; their array of 12 screens mimic the form of panels, displaying infinite randomized scenes “that Shingo would have seen in the comic.” Fittingly, the installation sits in front of a view of the Tokyo Tower , an important site in the comic’s narrative.
Brigitte Kowanz
Austrian light art pioneer
Brigitte Kowanz dies at 64 in Vienna. Known for her fluorescent light sculptures and immersive spaces, the 2009 Grand Austrian State Prize winner and
Transmedia Art Professor exhibited internationally (e.g. Venice Biennale) and regularly incorporated codified language into her work.
“A 1,000 times increase in power is needed over our current collective compute capacity to power the metaverse—which could grow its carbon footprint even further.”
– Tech journalist
Kyle Wiggers , surveying the feasability and potential impact of a fully realized digital future. In a
recent editorial , for example, Intel’s Raja Koduri pours cold water on
Ready Player One and
Snow Crash fever dreams: “Our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this vision.”
“Making more items in the crypto space ‘soulbound’ can be one path toward an alternative, where NFTs can represent much more of who you are and not just what you can afford.”
– Ethereum co-founder
Vitalik Buterin , proposing a
richer type of NFT: one that ties non-transferable credentials or accomplishments to a particular identity, versus simply serving as fodder for trading and speculation
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