1,548 days, 2,378 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“Metrics are dark pattern trash, responsible for amping up much of what’s toxic around here. Rest assured, if they release it to all, I’ll hide it with my Demetricator .”
– American software artist
Ben Grosser , on Twitter testing a visible ‘views’ metric feature. Grosser, whose work focuses on the social effects of software, has been a vocal critic of the toxic social media engagement game for years. His
Twitter Demetricator (2018) browser extension hides all metrics on the platform—for good.
OUT NOW :
Buozyte & Samper (dirs.)
Vesper
A fable about the aftermath of ecological collapse, centred on a 13-year-old girl’s resilience and biohacking skills
What Just Happened :
Maarten Vanden Eynde Encapsulates Human Fallibility for the Ages
The Belgian artist provides insight on his current solo show, grappling with history, and ‘skipping the apocalypse’
“The AI system renders all text as gibberish, but then again Jenny Holzer’s text nowadays is becoming harder and harder to read.”
–
Hyperallergic ’s
Hrag Vartanian , comparing views of Jenny Holzer’s current “
Demented Words “ exhibition with an uncanny
DALL-E interpretation of the gallery’s press release. “It could easily be mistaken for the work of Holzer,” Vartanian notes about the machine rendering, “maybe one that ‘questions legibility and our ability to read without understanding …’—sorry, I couldn’t resist.”
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, says Oscar Wilde. Does that count for AI models that create music in the style of Chopin?”
After its recent site-specific debut at Tieranatomisches Theater, Berlin, the online component of Rachel Rossin ’s transmedia narrative THE MAW OF (2022) launches on Artport , the Whitney Museum’s portal for internet art. Co-commissioned by Berlin’s KW Institute , the Web and AR experience follows a ghostly female figure navigating a landscape of cyborgian codes and prosthetic symbolism that is directly inspired by Rossin’s research into brain-computer interfaces.
“When people feel they are not being heard, they may resort to different measures to get their message across. In the case of programmers, they have the unique ability to protest through their code.”
– University of Melbourne software engineering lecturer
Christoph Treude , on ‘protestware’—programmers sabotaging their own software to make a political point. Categorizing these interventions as “malignant, benign, and developer sanctions,” Treude takes stock of related ethical and technical implications.
OUT NOW :
Vitalik Buterin
Proof of Stake
Collected essays by the Ethereum co-founder making the case for blockchain-powered collaboration and governance
QQQ , an NFT project by generative artist Tyler Hobbs and Web3 developer Dandelion Wist Mané that fosters “unpredictability and happenstance over forced rarity” launches. Innovating on NFT minting and market mechanics on two fronts, the American duo open up Hobbs’ algorithm for anyone to tweak via a custom web-based GUI, and instead of collectors purchasing—sight unseen—randomized mints they buy ‘mint passes’ to get the ability to save their custom designs to the blockchain for posterity.
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully impacts its target, demonstrating the potential for future asteroid deflection and planetary defence. After ten months of flying in space, NASA’s spacecraft crashed directly into Dimorphos , a 160 metre moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos . More than a feat of precise guidance and navigation, the test was “a mission of unity with a real benefit for all humanity,” says NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
“Spiders have been on this planet for almost 280 million years, we humans only for 300,000. With this Open Letter for Invertebrate Rights , we say: ‘Spiders have a right to go to the museum, too.’”
–
Tomás Saraceno , advocating for creepy crawlies at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Thanks to the artist, museum staff agreed to “recognize spider webs as art” during the “
Crawling Creatures ” exhibition (that features one of Saraceno’s
spider/web sculptures)
Taipei’s Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB) opens “The Unrestricted Society,” a group show probing the freedoms brought about by modern technology. Curator Chuang Wei-Tzu gathers works by Memo Akten , Paolo Cirio , Cheng Hsien-Yu , Theresa Schubert , Chang Yung-Ta and others that investigate agency in the age of mass surveillance. Kyriaki Goni ’s CGI narrative Not Allowed for Algorithmic Audiences (2021, image), for example, features a smart assistant bent on reconciling humans and machines.
“You don’t break into someone’s house to show them you can break into their house. You shouldn’t do it unless they ask you to.”
– Suresh Venkatasubramanian, former White House tech adviser and Brown University professor, on Dries Depoorter’s “subversive” art project
The Follower (2022). The new work juxtapozes Instagram photos with public webcam footage that shows the process of taking them—without the recorded people’s permission. “If one person can do this, what can a government do?” the Belgian artist counters.
“Refined Vision,” an exhibition in which Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadir draws parallels between Texas Gulf Coast and Persian Gulf region petro-cultures, opens at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston. Featured works include Crude Eye (2022, image), a new single-channel video piece on landscapes and infrastructures of extraction, and Spectrum (2016), a series of 3D-printed sculptural forms that abstract the ‘alien’ aesthetics of (ornate) oil and gas drill bits.
“If you look at TikTok your body is literally animated by the algorithm—it tells you how to move yourself—and you end up dancing for this abstract formulation of capital and algorithmic recommendation.”
– Online subculture researcher
Joshua Citarella , describing the diminishing agency of internet content creators. In his assessment, “people were able to make targeted critical interventions … shape it [media] with intent,” a decade ago—now users “are instrumentalized by the algorithim itself.”
OUT NOW :
The Posthumanist #1
A new periodical offering fresh perspectives on posthumanism and feminist new materialism
Duke University researchers develop a novel method of encrypting text, harnessing the chaos of computer simulated bacterial growth. Expanding on their recent article in data science journal Patterns , the team summarizes their use of machine learning frame-by-frame analysis of organic reaction–diffusion system animations to en- and decode text strings. “These patterns in essence constitutes a new, digitally generated coding scheme, which we call Emorfi,” they write .
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