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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“I would record The Price is Right and edit it to only the losers. That was my first idea of networked culture.”
– American Artist
Cory Arcangel , describing his 1990s roots in Buffalo, New York, remixing one of America’s most famous
game shows . “Eventually, I dropped off a tape at Squeaky Wheel,” he recalls, earnestly submitting video art to his local
artist run centre . “Years later I was talking with somebody, and they realized it was probably one of the Yes Men working at Squeaky Wheel that day.”
Utrecht’s IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture opens “Out of Office,” a group exhibition that takes on exploitative productivity. “In the modern workplace, doing nothing, not showing up, or gestures of mutual support become acts of resistance,” writes curator Marijn Bril about how the contributing artists Alina Lupu , Sam Meech , Adrian Melis , Mario Santamaría , Total Refusal , and others counter efficiency and optimization. Case in point: Santamaría’s sleepy auto-reply to Bril’s exhibition invitation (image).
“A right-wing talking point is often that the Centre Pompidou should be self-funded by selling its collection—and now they are no longer able.”
– Swedish artist
Jonas Lund , rejoicing at the politics of the museum’s acquisition of his NFT artwork
Smart Burn Contract – Hoarder (2021). Part of a series of contractual agreements,
Hoarder prohibits the owner from ever selling
any works in their collection. If the agreement is broken, Lund will destroy the piece by burning the NFT and thus removing it from the museum’s wallet. [quote edited]
Paris’ Centre Pompidou adds 18 NFTs from 13 artists including aaajiao , John Gerrard , Larva Labs , Jonas Lund (image: Smart Burn Contract – Hoarder , 2021), Sarah Meyohas , Jill Magid , and Rafaël Rozendaal to its collection. “The acquisition is deeply rooted in a genealogy of dematerialization,” curators Marcella Lista and Philippe Bettinelli say about continuing the museum’s new media tradition. “It offers a unique reflection on the crypto ecosystem and its impact on the artwork, the author, the collection, and the public.”
“Numbers count landscapes and what moves through them; they count routes and their optimal relations; they count possibilities and potentials, and numbers are the backbone of both images and industrialization.”
OUT NOW :
Sommerer & Mignonneau
The Artwork as a Living System
From the early digital gardens to the recent insect studies, editors Karin Ohlenschläger, Peter Weibel, and Alfred Weidinger compile the 1992-2022 body of work of pioneering interactive art
duo Laurent Mignonneau & Christa Sommerer.
“It’s more of a bullshitter than the most egregious egoist you’ll ever meet, producing baseless assertions with unfailing confidence because that’s what it’s designed to do.”
– Scholar and
Resisting AI (2022) author
Dan McQuillan , burying ChatGPT and what he calls
AI Realism : “The compulsion to show ‘balance’ by always referring to AI’s alleged potential for good should be dropped by acknowledging that the social benefits are still speculative while the harms have been empirically demonstrated,” McQuillan writes on his blog. “It’s not time to chat with AI, but to resist it.”
The procedurally generated Seinfeld spoof Nothing, Forever
“Nobody said it was a democracy. The ‘will of the community’ is the will of whichever cartel or whale has the voting majority, not the will of the disgusting peasantry.”
– Pseudonymous crypto pundit
@degenspartan , sardonically reminding everyone that money talks in DAO governance. “If you want more votes, buy more coins,” he adds, in response to
concerns that the large stake of venture capital firm
a16z could make or break community proposals guiding the decentralized
Uniswap protocol.
“Anoxic Memory,” a show by Maria Simmons , maker of “art that eats itself,” opens at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington (VAC) in Bowmanville, Ontario (CA). Foregrounding their interest in peatlands , the Canadian artist continues to bring the bog into the white cube, here recreating its three strata—anoxic, oxic, atmospheric—vertically. One on floor Simmons evokes “the anaerobic underbellies of Canadian peatlands” in fermentation jugs, on another they fashion “sculptural ponds of brine” (image).
www.grindruberairbnb.exposed , Canadian artist Jonathan Chomko’s performance exploring how apps choreograph bodies, premieres at Tangente Montreal. Responding to the ways popular digital services guide movement, a troupe of participants walk, gesture, and synchronize themselves in response to web app prompts. Staged in private during the pandemic (image, 2020), the performance marks the first time Chomko’s glued-to-their-phone “atomized actors acting as one” pace and pivot in front of an audience.
“Being critical of extractive and exploitative technology is optimism. Saying that new tech shouldn’t happen at the expense of the vulnerable is an optimistic belief. Those who perpetuate the myth that criticism is anti-tech are the cynics.”
– American tech entrepreneur and writer
Anil Dash , refuting
Sam Altman ’s call for “techno-optimism,” that the OpenAI CEO believes to be “the only good solution to our current problems.”
The final chapter of the museum’s “Trilogy of Matter” exhibition series, “A Leap into the Void” opens at GAMeC in Bergamo, Italy, to examine “Art beyond Matter.” Interested in artistic acts of “dematerialization” that explore the void as an “ideal or imaginative dimension,” curators Lorenzo Giusti and Domenico Quaranta gather works from nearly 50 luminaries from the historical avant-garde (Alison Knowles , Vera Molnar , Nam June Paik , Yoko Ono ) to today’s (JODI , Eva & Franco Mattes , Trevor Paglen , Rachel Rossin , Hito Steyerl ).
“Ebrah K’dabri,” a solo show by Canadian artist Jon Rafman , opens at Sprüth Magers London. Diving headlong into prompt-generated AI imagery, Rafman renders scenes both mundane and horrific. Featured are large format inkjet prints of furry creatures, demon clubbers, and fleshy wrestlers, and the video piece Counterfeit Poast (2023, image), which animates similarly weird figures, abstracting tensions between online and private identities, and how they “constitute and distort” one another.
“We all knew this was inevitable, it is practically the only result when making work for a platform outside of your control. But even so. [This is] an actively destructive policy that really caps the era.”
– American software artist
Everest Pipkin , on Twitter’s decision to paywall access to their API. Unless their authors pay up, countless art and research projects including Pipkin’s Twitter bots
Tiny Star Field and
Moth Generator will stop working on February 9th.
“The world is a better place with 8 billion people than it was when 50 million people were (kind of) living in caves. I am confident that the value and progress in humanity will accelerate extraordinarily after welcoming artificial beings into our community.”
– Computer graphics legend
John Carmack , anticipating humans soon working alongside AI agents. Recently resigned from Meta, his new startup Keen Technologies is squarely focused on
artificial general intelligence . [quote edited]
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