1,575 days, 2,408 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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Eva & Franco Mattes solo exhibition “508 Loop Detected” opens at Apalazzogallery (APG) in Brescia (IT), premiering a series of AI Circuit (2024) works that loop AI-processed photos of past shows and an updated version of Personal Photographs (2024, image). The latter conceals a data transfer of newly taken private photos inside a brightly coloured cable loop that spills beyond Apalazzo’s baroque walls. Meanwhile, Roomba Cat (2023) roams around indoors, manifesting meme culture with motorized taxidermy.
“We want to hijack mass media in order to radicalize people politically. Videogames have an enormous potential to question ideology and they don’t fulfil this potential at all .”
– Austrian machinima collective
Total Refusal , on what drives their videogame appropriations. In the film
Hardly Working (2022), for example, they cast NPC workers in critique of contemporary labour. “Videogame narratives are very obedient to authority,” the collective says, “but there’s no reason that they have to be.” [quotes edited]
Frustrated with the state of today’s social media platforms and how they extract attention (“I feel trapped! ”), German graphic designer and creative coding enthusiast Tim Rodenbröker launches a radical alternative: 128kb Challenge is a distraction-free, community-first feed for discovering and sharing minimalist programmed works. Anyone working in Processing , p5.js , or GLSL can participate by submitting GIFs that adhere to the 128×128 pixels, 128 colours, and 128 kilobyte size limit.
“I’m looking not only at what is unquantifiable or missing, but at what is unknowable. Knowledge doesn’t simply come to you; it also involves what you yourself and the space you’re in will allow you to know.”
– American artist and researcher
Mimi Ọnụọha , on exploring absence—the lapses that occur during data collection—in her work. “Things can be missing,” she says of “thorny issues” like human grief, “but there’s also the unknowable lying outside of what constitutes your framing of the world.”
“If the tale of hard work and upward mobility kept us yoked to our employers and our 9-to-5 jobs, the fantasy of the YOLO investment ‘Lambos or food stamps!’ keeps its subjects attached to the market. To risking it all.”
– Irish digital culture scholar and
Tokens (2023) author
Rachel O’Dwyer , on how disillusionment and precarity fuel the “cruel optimism” of crypto hype cycles. “Crypto did not level the playing field,” O’Dwyer summarizes. “It exposed the vulnerable to fraud and scams. It offset risk on to the poorest in society, all while paying lip service to a dream.”
A timely showcase of early computer drawing and painting in the age of generative AI, “Harold Cohen: AARON” opens at New York’s Whitney Museum. Curated by Christiane Paul , it honours Cohen’s pioneering 1970s and ’80s process, with recreations of his plotters running live in-gallery (each operating different versions of the AARON software) alongside key works. “Cohen used to joke that he would be the only artist ever who posthumously makes work,” says Paul of the late artist’s enduring prescience.
Haha Real , a very site-specific installation by Rachel Rossin , opens at Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern in Houston. Illuminating a path through the subterranean reservoir with LED panels, the American artist draws on eclectic sources including The Velveteen Rabbit (a 1922 children’s book) and “The Creative Act ” (a 1957 Marcel Duchamp lecture). Musician frewuhn contributes a score to set the mood for the 400 m journey, which culminates in a “cascade of uncanny sunsets within the darkness.”
“I’d build one-of-a-kind VR headsets into big masks from different cultures, sometimes adding lightning bolts and feathers. I wanted the headsets to be vibrant, exciting objects that enriched the real world, too.”
– American computer scientist, author, and VR pioneer
Jaron Lanier , reminiscing on the technology’s early days when, contrary to today’s efforts to make them disappear, VR goggles were exciting aesthetic objects unto themselves. “If you’re going to wear a headset, you should be proud of that weird thing on your head!” Lanier writes.
With “My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard,” New York’s Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) opens the first major survey of pioneering net artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey . Featuring more than 40 works spanning early net-based interactives, videogames (created with Michaël Samyn under the Tale of Tales moniker), mixed media and AR sculptures, curator Regina Harsanyi celebrates Harvey’s capacity to “reflect the paradoxical power of computers to enable intimacy” over nearly four decades.
OUT NOW :
Yuk Hui (ed)
Cybernetics for the 21st Century
In the first volume of a new series, Hong Kong philosopher
Yuk Hui revisits the origins and 20th Century geopolitics of cybernetics with texts by Brunella Antomarini, Slava Gerovitch, Daisuke Harashima, Katherine Hayles, and others
“At its best, it tapped into creativity and wit that had lain dormant in the population, showcasing talents that didn’t previously exist because there had been no form or shape for them to take. Live snark became an art.”
– Journalist
Jonathan Goldsbie , mourning the death of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. In his extended monologue, Goldsbie celebrates the early days of the microblogging platform and how it changed the nature of discourse, and laments the rot that ensued when Elon Musk took over.
“Hello, Human!” opens at MoCA Taipei, showcasing works by 16 artists and collectives including Morehshin Allahyari , Blast Theory , Mario Klingemann , Daito Manabe , Lev Manovich , onformative , Anna Ridler , and Winnie Soon that anticipate “the moment AI finally breaks through the black box and snarls at humanity.” In Dimension Plus ’ (Keith Lam & Escher Tsai ) post-humanity arcade machine VS AI Street Fighting (2023, image), for example, two AIs compete in endless content generation and reasoning sessions.
“Decoding the Black Box” opens at Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, Germany, exposing the corporate surveillance systems that invade the private sphere. 14 artists and collectives including Aram Bartholl (image: Are you human? , 2017), James Bridle , Adam Harvey , Femke Herregraven , Jonas Lund , !Mediengruppe Bitnik , Metahaven , and Mimi Ọnụọha make transparent the capitalist power structures of the internet and virtual image economy with evocative counter-narratives and provocations.
“I was cosplaying masculinity for years, sometimes pretty well frankly, but the suit literally never fit. So that gives you a different way of thinking, like what’s a better fiction? This is not my true self. This is a better fiction that I would so much rather play.”
– Theorist
McKenzie Wark , on the fluidity of gender and identity. “There’s no such thing as a true self,” says Wark, in conversation with
Jordan Kisner about transitioning and its profound impact on her writing practice.
LaTurbo Avedon ’s “Trust Your Technolust” opens at panke.gallery, marking the avatar artist’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. Examining “the wavering promises of virtual worlds” through AR sculptures and projection, Avedon presents past and present works from Club Rothko (2012-), a “virtual nightclub rendered at the end of the metaverse.” Meanwhile, IRL clubbers get to exlore Avedon’s site-specific AR sculpture Sky Queue (2024) while waiting outside of Berlin’s Tresor .
“For me, it encapsulates the ways we’ve come round to performing and selling ourselves online. How we’re urged to almost embody capitalism!”
– transmediale Artistic Director
Nóra Ó Murchú , on this year’s theme “
you’re doing amazing, sweetie .” Named after a Kim Kardashian meme, the 2024 edition of the Berlin-based media arts festival will focus on “the horrors of content,” Ó Murchú reveals. “It’s warm, feels good, and builds community, “ she says, “but by trapping us in eternal viral loops and precarious economic models, it creates toxic engagements and a sense of meaninglessness.”
“Creating a single artwork on a small website at this point is a kind of Land Art. To view it you have to leave the urban centers of the feed and go to some off-grid locale. Nobody is coming to visit, but everyone says they want to.”
– American software artist
Andrew Benson , on the platform consolidation of the internet—and escaping it. “Out there you can have more freedom, the access to raw material is abundant, and it feels better to feel like you made something real,” Benson muses. “But if you aren’t posting pics [on social media], does it even matter?”
OUT NOW :
Georgina Voss
Systems Ultra
Researcher
Voss examines networked technologies, supply chains, and international regulation in a sweeping analysis of complex systems. Ports, air traffic control, software—pertinent case studies offer insights into “scale, time, materiality, deviance, and breakages.”
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