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 ended up in a projection fight where the official projectionist only ended up drawing more attention to our action and then came out and congratulated us.”
– COP26 activist
Graeme Eddolls , sharing a small win for climate justice. When protestors projected slogans such as “Cut Methane Now” onto the COP26 conference venue, officials ‘fought back’ by projecting colours, noise, and the words “go away”—to no avail. “I haven’t stopped laughing since,”
The Guardian cites one campaigner.
NINE , a mini-version of media artist Martin Bricelj Baraga and electronic musician Olaf Bender ’s installation Neunundneunzig (2015) opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. Riffing on the 1984 German new wave hit “99 Luftballons ,” viewers position themselves under a matrix of black balloons which gradually inflate, inducing claustrophobia. Further animated by stroboscopic light and Bender’s percing sound design, the resulting environment is a “dark field where sound, light, and objects inhale, exhale and pulsate.”
“To speak on the panel and by association, endorse a ‘license to operate’ for HSBC and Morgan Stanley in particular isn’t in line with my personal beliefs. It also isn’t in line with the ethics of the Eco-Bot.Net project.”
– Artist and activist Barnaby Francis aka
Bill Posters , cancelling his
The New York Times Climate Hub participation over the involvement of large financial institutions. Meanwhile, Poster’s
Eco-Bot.Net flags corporate greenwashing during
COP26
An exhibition (and symposium) curated by the head of ECAL ’s photography department, Milo Keller , “Automated Photography” opens at Espaces Commines as part of the Paris Photo fair. Reflecting on the school’s eponymous research project , works by 12 prominent digital artists including Nora Al-Badri , Simone C Niquille , and Alan Warburton explore contemporary image-making technologies such as machine learning, CGI, and photogrammetry, asking timely questions about the automation of creation.
“Artists and scientists have the same drive to explore and understand what escapes our control—the shadows in our understanding of the complex world that surrounds us.”
–
Mónica Bello , art historian, curator, and current head of
Arts at CERN , making the case for “a model of institutional cultural practice that nurtures artists’ engagement with physics and hard sciences, and that fosters research and production of deeply informed artworks.”
“The game ends when you’re so deep in the hole that there is no light anymore, the screen is just black and you have, like, trillions of dollars.”
– Software artist
Sarah Friend , on her alegorical crypto clicker game
Clickmine (2017), “where you get this little procedurally generated piece of land and as you click, you are digging a hole and the hole gets deeper and deeper and deeper, and you get richer and richer and richer.”
Arno Beck ’s not one to let a good pun go to waste: with “Don’t Put All Your Becks In One Basket,” the Bonn-based postdigital artist shows a new series of pen plotter drawings at Schierke Seinecke in Frankfurt, Germany; his third solo show with the gallery. The drawings, colourful bursts of pixels and compression artifacts that reference videogames and image processing software from the 1980s and ’90s, are presented ‘sitting’ in iconified shopping carts Beck drew on the gallery wall—one Beck per basket.
“In an economy where most people work long hours, are struggling to get by, and have deeply internalized the status quo, the question becomes: How do I get in? That’s how a million-dollar jpeg of a digital rock turns out to make sense.”
– Tech reporter
Ali Breland , on how widespread financial precarity paved the way for crypto and NFTs. “People trying to shoddily arbitrage their future is just the next logical step in an economy in which every bit of your time needs to be monetized,” he writes.
Providing a powerful visual for what’s at stake at the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference, Irish artist John Gerrard ’s latest simulation Flare (Oceania) 2021 debuts on a large-scale LED wall at the University of Glasgow South Facade. Created in response to a statement from Tongan artist and activist Uili Lousi, whose ancestral ocean is heating due to CO2 emissions elsewhere on the planet, Flare echoes Gerrard’s past software works that “fly the flag of our own self-destruction.”
“Yet, beneath the semblance of all this connectivity, the Black community remains fractured and dispossessed. The artist also offers an underlying critique of technology’s need to be ever-sleeker: what is all this shine glossing over?”
– Arts writer
Mebrak Tareke , on American Artist’s
Untitled (Too Thick) II (2021), “a tall, lean stack of used iPhone cases topped by a bulging blob of asphalt” on view as part of the solo show “
Black Gooey Universe ” at LABOR, Mexico City
Hot off demoing AI voice transfer in a performance context at Barcelona’s Sónar Festival , American artist and musician Holly Herndon muses on vocalization through a machine learning process she calls ‘Spawning.’ “Unlike sampling, which is a reproduction of sounds sampled from a recording, Spawning is the ability to create works in the likeness of others by interacting with a [voice] model trained on them,” Herndon writes on Twitter. It’s “21st century sampling, with big implications.”
“If you’re under 20 years old now, why wait 20 or 30 more years to make your hard earned future, if there’s no inhabitable future there anyway? Pump and dump becomes a rational survival technique: 100X or go home.”
Presented as part of a lecture on his climate activism , French media and visual artist Joanie Lemercier shows his film Slow violence COP26 TV , an independent news and information channel covering the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. Shot with drones during the 2020 Ende Gelände protests at Europe’s largest (and dirtiest) open-pit coal mine near Hambach, Germany, the film documents the extent of energy giant RWE’s climate crimes and how law enforcement operates as an extension of corporate power.
“Morris has been perfecting her oldest pet’s petpage since she first created her account as an 11-year-old. Neopia is filled with similar sparkling, homespun web pages—the fruits of thousands of late nights spent learning how to code.”
– Writer
Madeleine Morley , revisiting the “living time capsule” that is
Neopets . Thanks to pandemic-era nostalgia seekers, the “Animal Crossing meets Pokémon meets early Myspace” has seen a 30 to 40 percent spike in usership.
OUT NOW :
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Discriminating Data
The
media theorist and systems design engineer reveals how big data and machine learning encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage
“Although Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial recognition templates by December, it will not eliminate the software that powers the system. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition technology into future products.”
– Technology reporters
Kashmir Hill and
Ryan Mac , parsing Facebook’s
decision to shut down its decade-old facial recognition system over societal concerns
A “public service intervention” that exposes climate disinformation on social media during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), British artists Bill Posters and Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja launch Eco-Bot.Net , a system that collects, visualises, and flags corporate greenwashing (ads, sponsored posts etc) from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The dataset is updated every 24 hours and new ‘drops’ for different sectors such as lobbying, energy, and aviation will be released throughout COP26.
“It became very clear, very quickly, that things like diversity, inclusion, and access were something that we could foreground as a priority. We really wanted to support community members who hadn’t been supported in other open-source places and contexts before.”
–
Johanna Hedva , artist, writer, and
Processing Foundation ’s Director of Advocacy, on building community around values in part two of
Eye on Design ’s oral history of Processing
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