1,549 days, 2,379 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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Transplanting the ringing of ten iconic bells from France to Turkey, “Silent Echoes: Notre-Dame” opens. Silenced after the 2019 fire that gutted the Parisian cathedral, sound artist Bill Fontana recorded the (currently decommissioned) bells into an eponymous 10-channel mix that makes its international debut in Istanbul. The installation is accompanied by recent experimental video work that explores related soundscapes (image: Silent Echoes (Acoustic images series) , 2022).
What Just Happened :
Martin Bricelj Baraga Builds Monuments to the Sky’s 53 Shades of Blue
The Slovenian artist and curator discusses his networked environmental sculptures and the importance of data transparency in the age of climate change
“It’s not just like going out and buying a chair. There are issues of IP, of the end-user license agreements. We had to talk some producers into changing the EULA for us.”
– MoMA Senior Curator
Paola Antonelli , on the complexities of building the museum’s videogame collection that’s now on view (in its entirety!) as part of the “
Never Alone ” exhibition. “Designers want their work to be in the museum, of course,” Antonelli notes. “It’s the lawyers that stop them.”
“Dark and Perfect Memories,” a solo exhibition by Tia-Simone Gardner exploring the troubled legacy of the Mississippi River, opens in Toronto. Drawing on archival research and digital cartography, Gardner maps how the river extended the transatlantic slave trade inland, and drove economic production. Included works range from inkjet prints of salt water, to steamship models, to representations of Black geography (image: …when we had a smooth sea and moderate wind…, 2019).
“Basha’s paintings are dominated by circles, which she creates with her feet, while her lines are created by a painting arm.”
– Critic
Hrag Vartanian , describing paintings by
Agnieszka Pilat’s robot dog Basha (a renamed instance of General Dynamics’
Spot ). Wary of the gimmick, Vartanian writes “these machines … are ultimately not our friends, and humanizing them distracts from their use by authorities to police, control, or kill populations from a distance,”
“IMAGE CAPITAL,” an exhibition organized by Estelle Blaschke and Armin Linke , opens in Essen, Germany. Arguing ‘photography is information technology,’ the show (and companion website ) explores six themes: memory, access, protection, mining, imaging, and currency. Tracking the photograph across contexts including scientific imaging and archives (image: Max Planck Institute , 2018), the curators ask “when and under what circumstances did images become operational?”
Manfred Mohr ’s solo exhibition “liquid symmetry” opens at bitforms gallery, New York, presenting vibrant algorithmic compositions from the veteran’s latest phase. Started in 2020, the titular series has diagonal paths pass through 11-dimensional hyper-cubes, leaving colour traces and generating shapes. The results are shown on-screen, as inkjet prints, or laser-cut aluminum reliefs (image: P3011_3 ) and juxtapozed with several of Mohr’s historical works from the 1960s and ’70s.
“The murder of an activist sows a legacy, because the person who is buried—planted, in a manner of speaking—becomes a seed for the ongoing political and organizational processes of the community.”
– Artist
Carolina Caycedo , describing “the sowing,” a Latin America phrase used to describe the poetic return of activists killed defending territory, water, or life, to the earth.
“Common Measures,” a show featuring three installations by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer , opens at Pace Gallery in New York. Included are interactive crowd favourites Cloud on Water (2016) and Pulse Topology (2021), and a new generative work. The latter, Hormonium (2022, image), presents dynamic CGI waves crashing in synchronization with how the rhythm of human hormone release varies over the course of a day (i.e. cortisol in morning and prolactin at night).
DOSSIER :
“I’m interested in the tension between pure randomness and something controlling it. Vera found that tension. Her work just looks like it’s from another planet.”
– David Familian, Beall Center Artistic Director and Curator, discussing how the venue’s Vera Molnar retrospective, “Variations,” is rooted in his deep fascination with the early innovator
Delving into their (eponymous) new film (image, 2022), “Capture,” a solo exhibition by Metahaven , opens in Trondheim, Norway. In it, the artist collective explores ‘knowability’ on three fronts: a rumination on the inscrutability of bats, CERN’s hunt for the Higgs boson , and the remarkable qualities of lichens . Their displayed media, and accompanying textiles and collages contemplate consciousness in “both speculative deeply implicated ways,” writes curator Stefanie Hessler .
“As its possibilities expand, it’s important to consider the potential threats and dangers as the metaverse introduces risks related to legislation, property, control, fraud, privacy threats, ethics, and security.”
“On Breathing,” an exhibition by Nina Barnett & Jeremy Bolen that examines respiration relative to “pressure, particulate, filtration, and flow,” opens at Johannesburg’s Adler Museum of Medicine . Its lone installation, On Breathing—Iron Lung With Blue Gums (2022, image), puts a hulking iron lung in conversation with Blue Gum Trees , mine dust, extraction residue, and radioactive bricks, contrasting the deep time of resource extraction with local atmospheric conditions.
“Our ambition must stretch beyond the timid idea of AI governance, which accepts a priori what we’re already being subjected to, and instead look to create a transformative technical practice that supports the common good.”
–
Resisting AI (2022) author Dan McQuillan, advocating for active resistance against a dawning age of “machine learning
redlining ”
“This Unfathomable Weight,” a lightbox and billboard project parsing the trauma of “the massive crises of recent years,” opens at University of Toronto Mississauga campus. Curated by Farah Yusef for The Blackwood , the show invites Jessica Thalmann , Christina Battle , and Erika DeFreitas to sequentially contribute works; Thalmann’s opener, cut between the supports and collapse (2022, image), documents the emotional weight of time spent in the ICU (as a primary caregiver) during the pandemic.
“Ditch the pronouns and hit the gym, then you’ll realize the importance of Proof of Work.”
– Proverbial
ToxicBitcoiner , coming after
Kyle McDonald following his
Coindesk interview . Speaking on Ethereum’s impending transition to the dramatically less energy-intensive
proof-of-stake protocol, McDonald argued that “proof-of-work was never necessary,” and that “Bitcoin will never hit $69k again.” Bitcoin maxis were irritated, and have been harassing the American software artist since.
Presenting a new series of dramatic computational landscapes, Quayola ’s solo exhibition “Forces / Vectors / Chromia” opens at Marignana Arte in Venice. Storms draws on a series of “ultra-high definition videos of stormy seas shot on the coasts of Cornwall” that the Italian artist used like a dataset. “The video is not the matrix of the painting,” writes curator Valentino Catricalà , “instead it is the data inferred by it: vectors and chromia, forces and intensity.”
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