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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“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.”
“Talking about building this city beside a volcano is like thinking you are rich because you live next to a bank.”
–
Ricardo Navarro , El Salvadoran ecologist and head of the country’s Center of Appropriate Technology (CESTA), on President Nayib Bukele’s plans for a “Bitcoin City” powered by volcanoes. “Geothermal still costs more than oil, otherwise we would already be using more of it,” Navarro notes. Geothermal energy also needs steam and groundwater, Navarro adds, “but we already have problems with not enough water in El Salvador.”
Clemenger BBDO and University of Tasmania researchers announce the construction of Earth’s Black Box , a steel monolith filled with solar-powered tech for documenting the planetary crisis. “If the Earth does crash as a result of climate change, this indestructible recording device will be there for whoever’s left to learn from that,” states Clemenger BBDO’s Jim Curtis. Due for completion on the west coast of Tasmania in 2022, data collection has already begun.
A new site-specific iteration of Robert Irwin ’s iconic Light and Space installation opens at Kraftwerk Berlin. Commissioned by the LAS foundation, the American artist who pioneered the Light and Space movement of the 1960s intervenes in Kraftwerk’s notable brutalist architecture with a 16 x 16 metre matrix of white and, for the first time, blue fluorescent light tubes to immerse audiences and explore, in his own words, “how art structures the way we see the world.”
“The revival of pixel art may be a quest for the kind of variety and texture that massive social-media networks have gradually banished, a harkening back to a messier, more human moment in our digital lives.”
Danja Vasiliev announces that Vending Private Network Julian Oliver , was banned from display at Moscow’s soon-to-open Cryptography Museum . The installation sets up a virtual private network (VPN) as publicly funded infrastructure (taking cues from condom vending machines). A way around government censorship and surveillance, VPNs are deemed illegal by the Russian state, Vasiliev explains on Twitter.
“This is the case of someone that thinks they’re just messing around on a computer but is actually changing the world. These days AI is a lot of people insisting that they’re changing the world while really just fooling around on a computer.”
–
Os Keyes , PhD student at the University of Washington’s Department of Human Centred Design & Engineering, on the 1983 American Cold War classic
WarGames
OUT NOW :
Flash Art #337
Includes a special section entitled “Crypto Art‘s New Ecology,” featuring a roundtable, a rumination on the prehistory of crypto, and a conversation with
Simon Denny
“Cities are the result of a meticulously managed infrastructure. They need a sanitation department to make sure that garbage doesn’t pile up in the streets, and transit authorities to keep the trains on time. They need bureaucrats, not visionaries.”
– Writer
Charlie Warzel , commenting on Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg’s retreat “from their bloated, boring second incarnations of the internet” for
Web3 ’s greener pastures. “It’s the dreamers moving on,” he writes of the CEO duo, abandoning the mess of Twitter and Facebook for shiny new vistas.
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