1,185 days, 1,864 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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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
“Since there seems to be growing confusion on this: I have nothing to do with anything that Facebook is up to involving the Metaverse, other than the obvious fact that they’re using a term I coined in Snow Crash . There has been zero communication and no biz relationship.”
– American scifi writer and
Snow Crash (1992) author
Neal Stephenson , going on the record
After excursions into lenticulars and tapestries, Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal renders a new series of digital drawings (reminiscent of his trademark browser canvases ) on enamelled steel plates at Amsterdam’s Upstream Gallery. These Mechanical Paintings explore “the abstraction of everyday objects and scenes through the lens of the early internet’s innocence and optimism,” contrasting the heavy, long-lasting material with Rozendaal’s spontaneous and playful compositions.
“There is a poverty line below which no one should fall, and a wealth line above which no one should rise. We need wealth taxes, not carbon taxes.”
–
Guardian columnist
George Monbiot , making the case for
limitarianism . In his scathing critique of capitalism, “micro-consumerist bollocks,” and a distracted media, Monbiot calls for
private sufficiency and public luxury : “We should each have our own small domains but when we want to spread our wings, we could do so without seizing resources from other people.”
“Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952-1975” opens at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston. Featuring Roy Lichtenstein (image: Steak , 1960), Lee Lozano , Marjorie Strider , Idelle Weber , and other artists associated with pop art , the show chronicles the gradual erasure of gesture and the move towards a machine aesthetic informed by advertising and emerging reproduction technology. The selected works “upend the traditionally assumed connection drawing has to the hand of the artist,” writes curator Kelly Montana.
“The gesture of creating a kind of ‘anti-game,’ one that goes against the typical rules of game-making, is a gesture which has been famously repeated over the decades by both artists and other video game creators.”
A heartwreching visualization of COVID-19’s impact, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ’s A Crack in the Hourglass (2020) debuts IRL at the Brooklyn Museum . An “anti-monument,” the installation renders portraits of pandemic victims with grains of sand, once realized the delicate images fall away. Commissioned by MUAC (Mexico City), NYC is a fitting first stop, given the city endured amongst the “highest number of pandemic-related deaths in the U.S.—and worldwide,” note the curators.
“Now, just as we’re waking up to ways Facebook has knowingly eroded our social, mental and civic well-being, Zuckerberg is back with a new offering: a way out. Instead of struggling to make sense of or peace in the real world, we can surrender.”
– Media theorist and author
Douglas Rushkoff , on the Facebook
rebrand . “Going meta is Facebook’s escape hatch,“ he writes. “Facebook is not cool with kids, it’s in trouble with the government and its growth prospects are quite limited.”
Software artists and VRAME.io collaborators Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace launch DFACE.app, “the first website that provides neural network face redaction in your web browser.” Using an “impressively small but performant 13MB face detection neural network” (source ) called YOLOV5 , DFACE allows users to easily anonymise profile pictures with a variety of effects while keeping their data private.
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