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’re talking about something that is going to profoundly disrupt politics. If you thought Super PACs were bad, wait until you find out about the funneling of money through blockchain, completely outside of any regulatory mechanisms.”
– Art historian and Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator
Tina Ryan Rivers , on the dangers of wide-spread adoption of (unregulated) cryptocurrencies. “The art world needs to understand the stakes,” urges Rivers. “It’s much bigger than ‘I don’t like this cartoon monkey.’”
NASA researchers announce that “for the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun.” Launched in 2018 to observe its coronal plasma and magnetic field, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe cut through the Alfvén critical surface—the edge of the Sun’s superheated atmosphere—on April 28 and entered its corona. “We can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed from Earth during a total solar eclipse,” said Nour Raouafi, the probe’s project scientist.
“Much of what is sold commercially today as ‘AI’ is what I call ‘snake oil’. We have no evidence that it works, and based on our scientific understanding of the relevant domains, we have strong reasons to believe that it couldn’t possibly work.”
– Computer scientist and Princeton University associate professor
Arvind Narayanan , discussing how companies exploit the public’s confusion around AI with tech policy analyst and
Fake AI editor
Frederike Kaltheuner
“Industry norms frustrate me. One, is that If you come from a place like Hollywood, you are the one creating the value or the IP, and if you come from a place like the Philippines you are the back office—where the work gets executed after the ideas are formed.”
–
Yield Guild Games co-founder Gabby Dizon, who sees ‘play to earn’ gaming as a way to economically and creatively empower the Global South, describing legacy thinking he hopes will fade into oblivion [quote edited]
Self-professed “NFT Archaeologist” Leonidas lives up to his Twitter bio and shares “The Definitive Timeline of Early NFTs on Ethereum.” Spanning July 2015 to May 2019, the compilation includes everything from Terra Nullius CryptoPunks , CryptoKitties , and EatherRocks , to Digital Zones Mitchell F Chan . After that, it’s “lots of apes, toads, and squiggles.”
“It takes a filter designed for people of colour to make us realize the extent to which most filters aren’t.”
– Writer Leo Kim, exploring TikTok filters not made for white faces. “Tools of representation are neither objective nor inevitable,” writes Kim. “Like all popular technologies, their development is motivated by a variety of economic interests and swayed by assumptions and bias.”
Anna Ridler and Caroline Sinders ’ collaboration Cypress Trees: Fragmentation premieres as a façade projection at M Museum in Leuven, Belgium, as part of “(Un)Holy Light.” The infinite treescape generated from thousands of photographs taken by the artists draws attention to Louisiana’s vanishing wetlands, whose ancestral Cypress trees are vital to the state’s coastline. “The more they disappear, the more erosion accelerates,” notes curator Juliette Bibasse .
“I just unfollowed @artnet”
– Mexican-Canadian media artist
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer , after the art market behemoth handed its Twitter account over to NFT enthusiast
Andrew Wang for a day. The takeover is part of artnet’s broader push into Web3: on December 7th, the company
teased its first NFT auction, a special NFT report, and a new dedicated Discord channel. In their own words: “Artnet is Apeing in NFTs.”
Commissioned by the University of Edinburgh’s College of Science and Engineering to celebrate King’s Building ’s centenary, Scottish artist and alumna Katie Paterson ’s Ideas open to the public. 100 three-line texts, each a thought experiment rendered in stainless steel, are planted throughout the campus, inviting a cosmic treasure hunt. “The artwork has never been created as an outdoor experience, with such immensity,” states Paterson. “There couldn’t be a more apt context.”
Computational artist Karsten Schmidt proposes a less random NFT minting process, to increase control over generative works. “Instead of a slot-machine ‘mint now’ button collectors get to choose parameters from a pool,” he tweets of his idealized system. Freshly-minted himself, Schmidt’s analysis draws on his first NFT drop (image: De/Frag
“The Log4j meltdown speaks more to how widely the effects of a single flaw can be felt if it sits in a foundational piece of code that is incorporated into a lot of software.”
–
Wired ’s security reporter
Lily Hay Newman , on the recently discovered vulnerability in a widely used logging library that could affect digital systems across the internet, leading to what experts fear could mount to “a full-blown security meltdown”
Rule-driven, like his indexical artworks (image: 640 numbers between 1 and 10 , 1969) John Cage’s Museumcircle opens at ZOLLAMT MMK in Frankfurt. Conceived by Cage 1985-91 to apply his aleatoric composition strategies to curation , the scheme calls on local museums to loan a venue works, from which a random selection are “hung or placed in chance-determined positions.” Its first staging in several years, Museumcircle last showed at Toronto’s Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in 2015.
“The sculptures and paintings travel very nicely as JPEGs, even as product shots: no need for installation photos with contemplative viewers for scale; save the context for the caption.”
– Writer and editor
Alexander Provan , on the piercing form (and images) authored by
Tauba Auerbach , surveying the American artist’s work in advance of her upcoming SFMOMA show “
S v Z ”
Commissioned by Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) for its current Tomas Schmit retrospective , Swiss net art collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik launch an Internet take on the Fluxus artist’s 1962 theatre piece A bus carries the audience 100 km away. There the audience is deposited . Bitnik’s Non Guided Tour
“With all of its superlatives, this book describes something bordering on the divine, which bears no resemblance to the automated decision systems that are currently developed by AI companies.”
–
Meredith Whittaker and
Lucy Suchman , shredding Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher’s new book
The Age of AI . It frames AI as inevitable and Big Tech as “too important to the American national interest to regulate or to break up,” they write.
“Sculpted in Our Image, Forged in Our Minds,” an online exhibition curated by Tristan Sauer , launches as part of the InterAccess Current program. Featured artists Mads Brimble , Benjamin Chang , Cezar Mocan , and others explore “the erosion between digital and physical spaces” with works spanning animation and interactive embeds. Sarah Boo ’s Zoom Princess (2021, image), for example, transforms video chat tedium into visual recursion, and an unruly subject escaping the grid.
“The sunniest place in the world Azerbaijan is only four times sunnier than the cloudiest place in the world, Norway. Contrast this with how oil is distributed, you’ll see that the places with the most oil have a million times as much as the places with the least.”
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