1,182 days, 1,854 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“We felt it was important to emphasize that technologies have a history, because if they have a history, they can be changed. Technology can be intervened in, and different futures imagined.”
Motherboard ’s Matthew Gault reports that the Slovak Game Developers Association in collaboration with the Slovak Design Museum compiled English localizations of ten computer games created in former Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s. Programmed on Didaktik 8bit computers—Slovak ZX Spectrum clones—the games are considered “a key part of the history of home production,” notes the Design Museum’s multimedia curator Maroš Brojo. “Like other historical works, they belong to our cultural heritage.”
“There’s something really interesting in the practice of critiquing automation through apparently menial labour: That by intentionally pursuing hard, human tasks, you can show the work that is done.”
– Artist and designer
Tobias Revell , theorising the reverse-engineering of OpenAI’s natural language processor
GPT-3 by a “time-rich” artist or writer. “The author of such a work would effectively be manually mining
ngrams for the
least likely combination of words that maintain some meaning.”
“If there was a small city of 380,000 people where painted beer caps were highly valued, but they were only valuable in that city and worthless to the other 7.75 billion people in the world, would you consider painted beer caps the next big thing in the global economy?”
– Metaverse researcher Wagner James Au, observing that, despite all the hype, there are more active users of moribund virtual world
Second Life (500,000) than NFT collectors [quote edited]
“Yesterday I spent 10 hours appreciating 100 people,” Lauren Lee McCarthy recaps her Zoom performance Appreciate You Dec 21 , the American media artist offered 100 five-minute appreciation sessions—“friends, acquaintances, and strangers all invited”—taking place over Dec 31 and bookable via (inexpensive) NFTs. “I could never have imagined 100 zooms flying by but they did,” writes McCarthy, Zoom screenshot attached. “My heart is full.”
For generative artists, it’s the most wonderful time of the year: #genuary. Starting today, thousands of creative coders including Nadieh Bremer , Jess Hewitt , William Mapan , and Frederik Vanhoutte take to social media to share wild geometries forged in Processing , p5js , openFrameworks and other tools, in response to daily creative prompts . Surprises are to be expected: Amy Goodchild , for example, went analog with markers to ‘draw 10,000 of something’ (image). Follow along !
“12 billion shots will be given out against COVID-19 globally by November 2022.”
–
Vox Future Perfect contributors Dylan Matthews, Kelsey Piper, and Sigal Samuel, predicting
most people on Earth will have received two vaccine doses by this time next year. However, their forecast fails to account for anti-vaxers and wealth inequality, and they also predict “the WHO will designate another variant of concern” in 2022.
ONWARDS !
Happy 2022, dear HOLO readers! We look forward to exploring more art, science, technology, and culture with you!
<3 from team HOLO
GIF created with NaN’s Glyph Filters , a powerful (and free) procedural font toolkit
“More and better facts will not catalyze this sociocultural tipping point, but more and better stories might.”
– Climate scientist and
Being the Change (2017) author
Peter Kalmus , on the power of
Don’t Look Up . The new Hollywood satire from director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota tells the story of two astronomers who discover a ‘planet killer’ comet on collision course with Earth, but are ignored and gaslighted by society. “The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel,” writes Kalmus in his opinion piece.
Following Kyle McDonald ’s example, Mexican-Canadian media art icon Rafael Lozano-Hemmer “demystifies” his studio’s funding structure with a money flowchart shared on Twitter. Public funding (green) “is the slowest but most reliable source,” notes Lozano-Hemmer, while private collectors (red) provide resources “the fastest but the most out of my control.” The spontaneous acts of transparency were triggered by questions about art as public service and who is in control.
“We had this system of discourse and this way of presenting ideas, and all of it seemed to be spectacular but none of it seemed to have any substance at its core.”
Demosceners celebrate the 30th anniversary of the inaugural edition of The Party , a landmark meetup of ~1,200 young computer enthusiasts in Aars, Denmark, that would inspire similar creative gatherings—demoparties —across Europe for years to come. The three-day jam saw the release of many 16-bit classics such as Hardwired Odyssey Voyage
“Now look up at the sun, close your eyes, feel completely wrapped in virtual goods and commerce. That is the ultimate expression of social networks. That is the metaverse.”
–
The Guardian ’s own Zuckerbot, on Facebook’s future. As the real Zuckerberg wasn’t available for commentary, technology reporter
Julia Carrie Wong worked with
Botnik Studios to create “a predictive keyboard trained on the past two years of Zuckerberg’s public statements” and interviewed it instead.
“Hello, Robot. Design between Human and Machine,” opens at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing. A collaboration between the Japanese auto manufacturer’s culture wing and Vitra Design Museum , it aims to “inspire in-depth thinking about the human-machine relationship, and interaction.” Spanning four thematic rooms, the show surveys the history of robots in science fiction, across industrial applications, ‘helpers’ and companions in domestic space, and the fusion of human and machine.
Art blogger Régine Debatty reflects on Éva Ostrowska ’s series of post-internet wool tapestries, currently on view at the “Swipe Right! Data, Dating, Desire ” exhibition at iMAL, Brussels (image: I am not the only one wondering… , 2019). Rather than using craft for romantic commentary, the French mixed media artist “holds a facetious and slightly cruel mirror to our new dating habits,” notes Debatty. “Her woolly compositions lay bare our insecurities, little infamies, and anxieties.”
Shortly after liftoff from a French Guiana spaceport, the James Webb Space Telescope departs Earth’s atmosphere. Outfitted with sophisticated infrared sensors, it’s en route to a distant solar orbit where it will study residual heat from stars and galaxies that appeared 13.7 billion years ago. Beyond the bevy of sensors, its 6.5 m primary mirror is seven times more effective at light gathering—it will see further into the past—than the long-ailing Hubble Telescope .
“Servers are places, vessels, townships. This feeling of leaving an old home is profound.”
– Media artist and critical engineer
Julian Oliver , after leaving a server he deployed for
Extinction Rebellion “2 years and 364 days” ago. “After migrating the last of its many open source platforms to a new dedicated server, one far more capable, I’m left with a ghost town,” Oliver writes on Twitter. “Attacked day and night, I watched a global environmental movement bloom on it to 10s of 1000s of accounts, a thriving hub of action, community, and ideas.”
Psychologist Eiko Fried points out the curious path pattern 800 unsteered bicycles create when pushed in Matthew Cook ’s 2004 computer simulation. In his paper “It Takes Two Neurons To Ride a Bicycle ,” the CalTech mathematician and computer scientist demonstrated that a two-neuron network can learn how to cycle, displaying human characteristics: “Just as when a person rides a bicycle, the network is very accurate for long range goals, but in the short run stability issues dominate the behavior.”
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