1,182 days, 1,855 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“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?”
“The algorithm estimates Hito’s gender, it says she is 57% female and 42% male. Which begs the question: what would 100% female be? Whether that’s Barbie, Grace Jones, or Angela Merkel—who knows?”
– Trevor Paglen on
Machine-Readable Hito (2017), which tasked facial analysis algorithms with guessing Hito Steyerl’s age, gender, and emotional state across hundreds of photos. In dialogue for SJMA’s “
Artists in Conversation ” series, the duo discuss representation, truth, and power relations.
Anicka Yi ’s In Love With The World , the annual Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, opens, turning the iconic post-industrial space into a machine ecosystem. Eight helium-filled “aerobes” drift through the hall’s upper reaches, tentacles gently rising and falling as their artificial life software system guides them towards human heat. To enhance the scenery, the Korean-American artist added weekly ‘scentscapes,’ evoking the smell of prehistoric oceans or that of the industrial age.
“Hard to imagine how this could be faster or more cost-effective than humans. It just looks like a performance to scare increasingly organized gig workers.”
– Indie game developer
Paolo Pedercini aka
Molleindustria , on
Kiwibot ’s semi-autonomous delivery robots taking over his Pittsburgh neighbourhood. “It [the robot] performs well on the rough sidewalks but it randomly stationed on a curb cut for five minutes, blocking the ramp and confusing drivers—do they even have right of way?”
The culmination of a three-year inquiry into “the extractive gaze of European institutions and policies” with a focus on “how resource management shapes and gives corporeality to geopolitics,” artist duo FRAUD (Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo) launches the EURO—VISION platform. A growing resource and archive, the site reveals the links between international relations, trade, economic policy, and border security through the lens of Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) such as phosphate, fish(eries), sand, and carbon.
“No one would have been able to feed multiple TV monitors in real time with visual data from an affordable computer system. We used VHS tapes and cheap Panasonic video mixers. Everything was pre-rendered at that time and it took ages to do.”
– Musician and artist
Robert Henke , critiquing a scene in the new Netflix miniseries
The Billion Dollar Code . “Clubs in Berlin did not look like this,” Henke squirms. “And whoever wrote the dialog has neither a clue of 1990s club culture nor any technological background. Cringe.”
“a=tF²,” a solo show by Igor Štromajer , “the Pavarotti of HTML,” opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. Drawing on the artist’s favoured tropes and aesthetics, ranging from CGA graphics to toolbar mandalas , the show juxtaposes knowledge work’s ephemera with the austerity of the white cube. On Instagram, in advance of the opening, Štromajer has teased work-in-progress, his strategically cropped previews revealing “dirty, radical, minimal” assemblages of e-junk and toy robots (image), and an adorable pint-sized workstation .
“Temperature check on late-stage capitalism: you can buy NFTs of AI-generated descriptions of imaginary girlfriends.”
With “Natural Sovereignty,” a solo show opening at Capri’s MiBACT Certosa museum, Italian artist and activist Paolo Cirio offers a “utopian vision of climate justice.” Building on his conceptual framework of a ‘climate crime tribunal’ that combines the legal concept of “environmental personhood” with the “right of nature” theory, Cirio presents evidence, plaintiffs, and sentence in the form of informational visuals featuring scientific and economic data, legal documents, and biological studies.
Curated by Colección SOLO , “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” a show named after the 15th century tryptych it pays tribute to, opens at Matadero Madrid. Featuring contemporary artists inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece, the show assembles strange scenes by Cassie McQuater , Mario Klingemann , SMACK , and others. American artist Dan Hernandez’ injket transfer and acrylic painting GOED The Legend of Zelda
“We stamp a coin with the face of a dead president and it’s worth as much as we say it is because that’s what the law says. It’s something I can teach to a seven-year old and it has the benefit of being true.”
– Financial regulation scholar
Rohan Grey , noting that the only thing stopping America from minting a
$1 trillion coin to solve its imminent debt ceiling crisis is a lack of imagination. “It’s no more silly that judges wearing robes.”
“The NFT market is increasingly reframing ‘digital art’ to mean image making in popular usage. This is a cultural setback, of about 50 years.”
–
Julian Oliver , media artist and ‘critical engineer,’ on how the crypto boom flattens the perception of computational art practice. “‘Digital art’ began as an image making practice, then in ’80s, ’90s, and noughts came to encompass a far broader and exciting diversity of practices, methods, and materials,” Oliver writes on Twitter. “Now, with the NFT market, it’s come full circle to refer to image making again.”
Currently setting up several major exhibitions all across Europe, Turkish-American media artist Refik Anadol shares a (stunning) glimpse of installing Alkazar Dream: AI Cinema at a yet undisclosed location in Istanbul. Los Angeles-based Anadol is renowned for his rich data-driven architectural projections, large-scale media facades, and immersive experiences. Alkazar Dream: AI Cinema will feature ‘machine hallucinations’ of an AI trained on 150 historic movies and is set to open on October 29th.
“Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age” opens at Mudam Luxembourg. Exploring the paradox that capitalism is ”both dependent upon and threatened by technological progress,” the show includes polemical works by Simon Denny , Oliver Laric , Martine Syms , and others. Strongly signalling the capital-collides-with-lifeworld aesthetic is Cao Fei’s Asia One
“Atkins adapts the term corpsing … his examples are when a vinyl record jumps or a streaming movie buffers. To corpse a medium is to expose its materiality, even to underscore its mortality, and in this moment the real might poke through.”
– Critic Hal Foster, on the simulated bodies and ‘dead’ media in
The Worm (2021), the centrepiece of Ed Atkins’
recent show at New York’s New Museum
“Real-Time Limbo,” a solo show by Amsterdam-based CGI artist Jaehun Park opens at Seoul’s Alternative Space LOOP . Organizing a virtual itinerary of stopovers in global hotspots including Palestine and Syria, Fukushima, and CERN—explored through animation and installation—and a broadside against the colonial legacy of his country of residence (image: Overheated Windmill
EIGENHEIM gallery launches an edition box dedicated to digital art. Curated by medienkunstverein (mkv), “Digital Art Collection” features 30 artists including LaTurbo Avedon , Jeremy Bailey , Lauren Lee McCarthy , and Zach Lieberman , who “deal with the effects of the (post)digital age on our everyday life, our culture and our society.” Each artwork is represented by an NFC-chipped wooden cuboid that activates the respective piece on an enclosed tablet. Box and works are now on view at EIGENHEIM Berlin.
“The participants are bureaucrats who live in the machine endlessly dragged along by conveyor belts, chutes, and pneumatic tubes from the time of birth to the time of death.”
–
Hito Steyerl ,
Department of Decentralization , and
GPT-3 , describing La Ville-Machine Habitée, one of “Twenty-One Art Worlds: A Game Map,” a choose your own adventure journey through various corners of the contemporary art world—both vital and obsolete
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