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
Year 2023 2022 2021 2020 Show All
Month January February March April May June July August September October November December Show All
The Smithsonian ’s 175th anniversary exhibition “Futures” launches at the reopened Arts + Industries Building, displaying 150 objects—iconic collection pieces, industrial prototypes, and art installations—that invite “all dreamers, makers, and change makers” to imagine a better world. Among the touted highlights is architect and artist Suchi Reddy ’s rotunda piece me + you (image), a towering AI (and Amazon) powered light sculpture that reflects “society’s collective conscious.”
DOSSIER :
“There’s much more self-reflection and embrace of doubt in this issue than I’m used to seeing in the art, science, and technology discourse space. Contributors reflect on what systems they are unwillingly contributing to, regardless of their criticality.”
– HOLO Annual (HOLO 3) editor
Nora N. Khan , reflecting on the forthcoming issue with scholar and research partner
Peli Grietzer
Adam Basanta ’s mixed media installation “Possible Futures” opens at Maison des Arts de Laval in Laval, Quebec, confronting viewers with three “oblique thought-experiments” comprised of discarded domestic objects, biological and artificial ecosystems, and techno-cultural artifacts. Future balanced (Chesterfield) , for example, combines a discarded sofa with a miniature, fully-functioning, aquaponic farm. It’s a living sculpture that makes “tentative proposals and uneasy predictions.”
“Clickbait actors cropped up in Myanmar overnight. With the right recipe for producing engaging and evocative content, they could generate thousands of US dollars a month in ad revenue, or 10 times the average monthly salary—paid to them directly by Facebook.”
–
Karen Hao ,
MIT Technology Review ’s senior AI editor, on how Facebook and Google not only amplify but fund disinformation
Infiltrating Ender Gallery ’s Minecraft server with his generative image systems, American artist Travess Smalley turns the in-game exhibition space into “a surreal reading experience” via a custom texture pack. Developed during his residency, “Change Language Resource Pack” replaces all images and textures with randomly generated language, resulting in “a concrete poem, that turns the familiar Minecraft world into an abstract, austere, and newly dangerous place (be careful identifying lava!).”
In an attempt to become the “Singapore of Latin America,” President Nayib Bukele announces El Salvador will bootstrap an entire city around Bitcoin’s economic prospects. Building on the country’s recent recognition of the leading cryptocurrency as legal tender, the so-called “Bitcoin city” will be located along the Gulf of Fonseca near the base of Conchagua volcano , the geothermal energy of which will be harnessed to power the city and an industrial-scale Bitcoin mining operation. Honouring the libertarian ethos that is common amongst Bitcoin-boosters “the city will have no income, property, capital gains, or payroll taxes.”
Laura Splan ’s Rhapsody for an Expanded Biotechnological Apparatus takes over an elevator of the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY, as part of the museum’s Elevator Music Series . The tactile sound installation “reenvisions the elevator as a biological cell and its visitors as proteins.” Sitting on a rug made from the fiber of laboratory llamas (used to produce antibodies for human drugs) they are invited to “consider the invisible” while listening to a sonic tour of a biotech laboratory.
“Data Refraction_Digital Orchestra,” a solo show by Jung Seung , opens at Seoul’s Alternative Space LOOP. Centring the media artist’s preoccupation with digital traces, it includes three new works: a sonification of plant growth, a robot animated by related data, and a performance of a dancer in a “wearable robot” beamed into a digital environment (image: Scattered Scream-harness , 2021). Collectively they “redefine life through the coevolution between human senses and machines,” notes curator Sun Mi Lee.
OUT NOW :
The Field Guide to Digital and/as Public Space
Toronto foresight studio
From Later and
The Bentway team up to explore place making, people, and protocols
Lauren Lee McCarthy ’s latest interactive performance Womb Walk premieres as part of her Surrogate installation at IDFA DocLab , the Amsterdam documentary film festival’s new media program. As the American artist strolls the city wearing a prosthetic belly (image), participants ‘become’ McCarthy’s baby. “You control my movements by triggering small internal kicks to the sides of my belly directing me when to turn,” she writes on Instagram . “Together, we navigate the city, with imagined baby as interface.”
“The science is now clear that decapods and cephalopods can feel pain and therefore it is only right they are covered by this vital piece of legislation.”
– UK Animal Welfare Minister Lord Zac Goldsmith, on the extension of the country’s
Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill to include lobsters, octopus, and crabs. The bill, however, will not affect any existing legislation or industry practices.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley ’s solo exhibition “SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE” opens at London’s arebyte. Subverting the language of the first-person shooter, the game asks players—armed with a hot pink firearm—to NOT shoot Black Trans people, and then witness the results of their (in)action. Inverting the standard logic of the shooter genre, the installation creates a space to “capture, preserve and archive Black Trans existence” and reflect on personal responsibility.
“Telepathy becomes a puppet concept, intensifying surveillance by allowing private interest to become less conspicuous, while rendering the consumer more accessible.”
– Writer
Dolly Church , rejecting Big Tech’s notion that “conceptual telepathy”—or “mindspeak,” a term coined in Ursula K. Le Guin’s
Left Hand of Darkness —is the “natural conclusion of digital communication”
DOSSIER :
HOLO Annual (HOLO 3) editor
Nora N. Khan shares insight into searching for meaning
beyond words in the forthcoming issue’s third chapter. “I found I needed to rescind the position I’m entrenched in as a critic—that of the capacity for language as the primary medium through which we understand the world,” Khan writes about working with choice contributors
Francis Tseng ,
Nick Larson , and
K Allado-McDowell .
“The characters experience their various BOB plugins through a hallucinatory interface; their neural guides are represented by red worms with up to three heads, each tipped with eye-like shapes, as if they can see the future.”
OUT NOW :
Marie Foulston
The Grannies
Foulston ’s documentary follows a group of players—the Grannies—beyond the boundaries of the videogame
Red Dead Online (2018) and into “an ethereal space that reveals the humanity and materiality of digital creations.”
Load More
To dive deeper into Stream, please
Log-In or become a
HOLO Reader .
Daily discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture: Get full access by becoming a HOLO Reader !
Perspective : research, long-form analysis, and critical commentaryEncounters : in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovatorsStream : a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and countingEdition : HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in printBecome a HOLO Reader
