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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“Chadslayer, Normie Slicer, Anprim Talon, Snowflake Skorcher, Soyboy Shredder—the weapons’ names echo the rage found in incel forums, far-right chats, black bloc groups, the manosphere and other rancid circles.”
Curated by British artist Bob Bicknell-Knight , “Algorithmic Bias” opens at [Senne] , Brussels, featuring works by 13 international artists, including Zach Blas , Heather Dewey-Hagborg , Ben Grosser , JODI , and Lynn Hershman Leeson , that critique computational systems of control. Among the new works included is one of Bicknell-Knight’s own: Second Variety imagines a Boston-Dynamics-inspired four-legged automaton unearthed in a distant future “by a society that has forgotten its original purpose.”
“Our memories, our tastes, our life knowledge, might owe just as much to embodied cells and tissues using the same molecular mechanisms for memory as the brain itself. The mind, I conclude, is fluid and adaptable, embodied but not enskulled.”
–
Thomas R. Verny , Canadian psychiatrist, writer, and academic, parsing research that suggests memory persists
outside the brain
“For the first time, I publicly stated my desire to take testosterone—not to become a man but to leave the body I currently exist in.”
“I love NFT Twitter because it’s half 20-tweet threads about how blockchains will be the Medicis of a new artistic renaissance and half guys trying to convince you to spend $10,000 on stuff called, like, Darryl’s Deformed Donkeys.”
– Technology writer and
New York Times columnist
Kevin Roose , on how the cryptoart craze plays out on social media
Miffed about the meager fee offered for the reproduction of two of his banknote works, Danish artist Jens Haaning pocketed the 534,000 kroner ($84,000) lent by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg (DK), and delivered two empty frames entitled Take the Money and Run . “The work is that I have taken their money,” Haaning said in an interview . “It’s not theft. It is a breach of contract, and breach of contract is part of the work.” The frames are now on view as part of “Work it Out ,” the museum’s ongoing show about art and labour.
Museum Sinclair-Haus in Bad Homburg, Germany, opens “Tempo! All the Time in the World,” a group exhibition exploring the pace of natural cycles and “humanity as an initiator and victim of acceleration.” Among the highlights: American artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s Sleep Study
“We were thinking about infrastructure, specifically: the railroad as one of the past, and the possible implications of augmented reality as another in the future.”
– Artist
Cat Blumke , speaking to
Reality Crossing , a work on rail, empire, and speculative real estate in Canada. Produced with Jonathan Carrol, the piece is part of InterAccess’ all-AR exhibition “
Geofenced ,” curated by Karie Liao.
“The art world seems preoccupied with bringing culture to the blockchain. But it already is a culture, and it’s fascinating, fast-moving, and inclusive. In many ways, the NFT space has succeeded where more traditional institutions have failed.”
– Artist and musician
Holly Herndon , during an
Art Basel panel discussion on NFTs. “I’m obsessed with the weird culture that’s coming out of this space,” says Herndon. “It has its own language, and understanding of aesthetics—and some of it is beautiful.”
A spatial collage of film and fabric, Metahaven ’s “Passphrases” opens at State of Concept Athens —the first solo show of the Dutch avantgarde film-and-design collective in Greece. Featured alongside a newly commissioned installation of their films Chaos Theory Hometown (2018), both part of a trilogy that begun with Information Skies (2016), are textile works from the series Arrows (2020) and—a premiere—Blossoms and Secrets (2021), “embodying texture, dreams, and film stills.”
“Trying out never explaining blockchain again, and instead only giving deranged answers like, ‘extremely shitty global computer’ or ‘the biggest clock ever built.’”
– Software artist and crypto pundit
Sarah Friend , on the current moment of max hype and max confusion
“What if an exhibition had an energy budget? How would it affect its design, organization, management, and activation?” With 16/2017 Joana Moll forces Barcelona’s Arts Santa Mònica Center to cut its energy usage by 50% during the “Exposar · No exposar-se · Exposar-se · No exposar” exhibition. Named after a failed policy to half the region’s CO2 emissions by 2030, 16/2017 prescribes weekly meetings to monitor the energy budget and negotiate corrective measures with management, artists, and the public.
“Call me a Gen-X’er, but I’m troubled by artwashing as a means of distancing from bigger issues, like the lack of governmental regulation of consolidation, racist AI, tunnel-effects of social media, etc. I’m almost nostalgic for days when banks bought art for lobbies.”
–
Eyebeam Executive Director
Roderick Schrock , on why he turned down an invitation to participate in a Big Tech roundtable on “the role of artist communities in promoting corporate culture through creative place-making”
The most extensive installation of Rafaël Rozendaal ’s websites series and the Dutch-Brazillian artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK, “Permanent Distraction” opens at Site Gallery , Sheffield. Existing and newly produced websites are shown as twelve, floor to ceiling projections, filling the space with abstract colour, movement and gesture. The show “forces us to confront the slippage between our physical and digital realities,” writes the gallery, “bringing bodies physically into the space of the internet.”
Drawing on Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree Claire L. Evans makes a case for reimagining the web’s central metaphor as a forest . Teasing out the famed Canadian ecologist’s findings gleaned from a life in forestry, Evans uses the symbiotic tendencies of ‘Mother’ trees, mycorrhizal fungi, and birch trees, to map alternate readings of the web. Big Tech has “privileged high-value crops—viral content, controversy, and clickbait—over a healthier ecosystem of people, opinions, and perspectives,” she writes, likening platform capitalism to clear cutting—short term profit at the ecosystem’s expense. While the diagnosis is grim, Evans ends optimistically, calling for “Mother nodes,” resilient sites of nurturing and collective memory.
“I wanted to see what human-generated randomness looks like,” writes Jonathan Chomko of his NFT project Proof of Work prompt-driven choreography , the Montréal artist created software for collecting random values from “small-scale“ gestures: typing random characters on a keyboard. Experiments with scale and colour yielded a pixellated visual language and, post-NFT drop , he notes the labourious process “records a minimum viable artwork, the hand of the artist visible in the digital image.”
“Far from being triumphantly automated, an autotelic system lays bare its vulnerable workings through fragments of machines left to care for nomadic organs.”
–
Ingrid Luquet-Gad , on Lithuanian artist duo
Pakui Hardware ’s recent body of sculptural works that delves into remote healthcare technologies and services “with an almost uncannily timely relevance.” The art critic and writer notes that “as ambiguous as a process without a subject intrinsically is, robotic and digitalized care is similarly so in its outcomes for humanity.”
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