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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DOSSIER :
“One might describe this moment as a pre-scientific , proto-scientific , alchemical stage where we may have not particularly scientifically rigorous explanations, but instead, have complicated, intuitive stories about how the science works.”
– Scholar
Peli Grietzer , on AI alchemy and partial ways of knowing. In their second research transcript, Grietzer and
HOLO Annual editor
Nora N. Khan discuss hazy methods of prediction, tarot compression, and Chomsky the mystic
OUT NOW :
Saul Griffith
Electrify
An A to Z action plan for fighting climate change, focused on creating jobs and a healthier environment
“The court jester often says things people need to hear, from angles no one else would think of. Those in power listen for amusement and crazy insight.”
– Sci-fi author
Kim Stanley Robinson , on his imagined role and capacity to speak truth to power when he attends the upcoming “combination diplomacy, trade show, and circus”
COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow
A collaboration between celebrated computer art pioneer Vera Molnar and a team of traditional Venetian glassmakers, Icône 2020 premieres at New Murano Gallery, Venice, in an eponymous exhibition. The gold-dusted glass slab—Molnar’s first use of the medium—is punctured by an ‘on brand’ parametric grid of trapezoids. Instigated in 2019 by curator and producer Francesca Franco , the collaboration aims to connect two traditions: that of making computer art and that of making glass.
“Don’t catalogue eyeballs. Don’t use biometrics for anti-fraud. In fact, don’t use biometrics for anything. The human body is not a ticket-punch.”
–
Edward Snowden , on the launch of
Worldcoin , a new cryptocurrency made available in return for biometric data. “This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people’s iris scans, and waves away the implications by saying ‘we deleted the scans!’” warns the famous whistleblower.
The last stop in the year-long exhibition rally “Multiverse,” Hoonida Kim ’s “Landscape being Decoded” opens at Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). The Korean artist deploys a series of mobile “environmental recognition apparatuses” called DataScape that allow the person inside to navigate the world like an autonomous car: 360° LiDAR sensors collect spatial information and translate them into sound, “because our auditory sense has the least latency.”
“If realized, the metaverse would become the ultimate company town, a megascale Amazon that rolls up raw materials, supply chains, manufacturing, distribution, and use and all its related discourse into one single service. It is the black hole of consumption.”
– Author
Ian Bogost , on silicon fantasies of power. As rumours of Facebook’s metaverse rebranding propagate, Bogost warns: “A metaverse is a universe, but better. More superior. An
überversum for an
übermensch .”
Transforming Galería Curro in Guadalajara, Mexico, into an incandescent landscape, Italian artist Andrea Galvani ’s solo show declares “Time Is the Enemy.” A constellation of 11 neon sculptures, Instruments for Inquiring into the Wind and the Shaking Earth
“By now, AI is as ambient as the internet itself. In the words of the computer scientist Andrew Ng, artificial intelligence is ‘the new electricity.’”
– Author and journalist
Sue Halpern , on the prevalence—and human cost—of artificial intelligence. “AI has been used to monitor farmers’ fields, compute credit scores, kill an Iranian nuclear scientist, grade papers, fill prescriptions, diagnose various kinds of cancers, write newspaper articles, buy and sell stocks, and decide which actors to cast in big-budget films in order to maximize the return on investment,” Halpern writes.
A team of machine learning researchers including Ferenc Huszár , Sofia Ira Ktena , and Conor O’Brien publish findings that Twitter’s algorithmically ranked home timeline amps up the visibility of right-wing content when compared to the reverse chronological timeline. Analysis of 2020 tweets from America, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, and the UK revealed that in six out of seven of those countries elected officials on the political right received more amplification than those on the left, and that right-leaning news organizations were also amplified. “We hope that by sharing this analysis, we can help spark a productive conversation with the broader research community,” write Twitter’s Rumman Chowdhury and Luca Belli .
New Orleans news nonprofit The Lens Michael Isaac Stein , Caroline Sinders , and Winnie Yoe demonstrate how a $40 million public safety plan created a “sprawling, decentralized and constantly changing patchwork of tools” maintained by various departments, agencies, private nonprofits, and law enforcement with little oversight.
DOSSIER :
“As we struggle to disentangle ourselves from predictive regimes and algorithmic nudging, we need to tackle what prediction means, and has meant, for control and computation.”
OUT NOW :
Superflux
The Intersection
A sci-fi short (screenplay by Tim Maughan) that takes the climate crisis and disinformation as a jumping off point, extrapolating a “co-operative future” where our relationship with technology—each other—has been rebuilt from the ground up
“The problem with planetary-scale computation is with scale itself. It fails to reckon with what we might call the deep time of facts .”
–
Peter Polack , designer and UCLA PhD candidate, critiquing Benjamin Bratton’s
The Revenge of the Real (2021). Rather than suffering from “impractical applications, ideological criticisms, and a lack of recursive models,” Polack argues that Bratton’s planetary-scale computation doesn’t account for the “historical heterogeneity of facts, their capacity to change unpredictably, and their variations across geographical and cultural contexts.”
“Boston Dynamics, the best-known manufacturer of quadrupedal robots, has a strict policy agains weaponizing its machines. Other manufacturers, it seems, aren’t so picky.”
“Offshore finance pierces reality,” French artist collective RYBN reflects on their Offshore Tours Palm editorial. Over two years, the artists mapped 785,000 leaked addresses tied to offshore activity. “Behind each photographed facade hides a hot spot, a gap in the urban landscape connected to elsewhere, a true crossing point to offshore space,” they write. “These addresses are deserted at the very moment of their unveiling, the tracking of offshore finance thus turns into ghost hunting.”
DOSSIER :
“Making the ‘decision-making process’ of a predator drone more ‘legible’ to the general public seems a fatuous achievement. Even more so if it is an explanation in service of a capitalist state or state capital, and we know how that works.”
Extending out of Oli Sorenson’s visual cataloguing of the technological artifacts and compromised landscapes of our current era, “Diamond edition: Panorama of the Anthropocene” opens at Montréal’s ELEKTRA Gallery. For the show, Sorenson adapts material from the his ongoing painting and inkjet series about the perennial clash between production and nature (image: Oil extraction detail, 2020) rendered in the style of “Minecraft ’s landscapes and Peter Halley ’s geometries,” and (re)presents it on angled digital displays.
“The only thing we can make now is ourselves; day after day, again and again. To sculpt one’s own individuality has ballooned into an endless task. To post every day, to express yourself creatively, to have opinions on the churning discourse.”
–
Spike ’s New York Editor
Dean Kissick , on the cult of celebrity and the cult of self. In his latest “The Downward Spiral” column, he asks: “Are we human, or are we content?”
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