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“Digital sculptures live in the now, in a future that never ages. The physical object is the archive. That object was digital, but now it is real, pinned to a certain moment, and it can travel through different times and contexts as long as it exists.”
– Sculptor
Auriea Harvey , on working across worlds and mediums. “The actual sculpture is the digital model on my computer,” she insists. “That is the
real sculpture.”
A critique of how humanity disrupts Earth’s hydrologic cycle, “Still Waters Run Deep” opens at Nieuw Dakota, Amsterdam. Curator Marlies Augustijn gathers works by Phoebe Boswell , Patrick Hough , Kasia Molga , Hannah Rowan , and others that explore how water “inextricably interconnects everything.” Deep Time Agency ’s Concrete Reef (2021), for example, memorialises the region’s prehistoric ocean with a geodesic array of concrete fossil casts.
“Temporary Atlas” opens at London’s MOSTYN, ‘mapping’ personal experiences and perspectives with works by Manon Awst , Ibrahim Mahama , Kiki Smith , and 14 others. Of note: Oliver Laric’s erudite video essay Versions (2010, image) “that muses on the manipulation and re-appropriation of images throughout history” is featured, as is Jeremy Deller’s The History of the World (1997-2004), which diagrams improbable connections between the social forces that begat acid house and brass band music.
Joanie Lemercier ’s latest solo exhibition opens at Le Tetris in Le Havre, Normandy, France. The show gathers recent works (Slow Violence , Brume , Edges ) and new creations, capturing the French artist’s sustained interest in light and activism. In Prairie , a new collaboration with curator Juliette Bibasse , the two change focus from big to small: tracing mundane roadside grasses with small lasers, they shed light on beauty that is often overlooked.
“The worst-case scenarios are coming home to roost. We simply cannot afford to sustain separate, siloed movements; they are coming for every hard-fought civil right won in the last 50 years. WE have to fight back like our lives depend on it. Because they do.”
– Civil rights advocate
Kimberlé Crenshaw , calling for solidarity across movements in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning
Roe v. Wade
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A grim sign of the times, surveillance capitalism and “more frequent, larger, and financially ruinous” forest fires converge in a Portland General Electric pilot project. In the initiative, a network of 5 (soon to be 22) cameras are deployed across rural Oregon, collecting footage that is monitored 24/7 by proprietary wildfire detection AI, which can distinguish “benign clouds from troubling smoke” with 90% accuracy; remote workers on standby protect against false positives.
“If we had the Web3 dream world, it would be William Gibson with a concussion. It would be a really stupid cyberpunk hellscape—far dumber than the world we’re actually in.”
“Chronicles from a near Future,” a show featuring two installations addressing biodiversity, opens at iMAL, Brussels. Golnaz Behrouznia and Dominique Peysson ’s Phylogenèse Inverse (2022, image) draws inspiration from Turritopsis dohrnii (the immortal jellyfish ), presenting vitrines of de-evolved “lifeforms with strange anatomies and enigmatic functions,” while Stéfane Perraud ’s Sylvia (2022) offers an at times “absurd or conspiratorial” audio narrative about a forest in peril.
Taking a wide angle view of the (recent) history of urbanism, artist and researcher Chris Salter publishes an essay arguing “the smart city is a perpetually unrealized utopia” on Technology Review . Starting with architect Constant Nieuwenhuys’ vision for New Babylon (1959-74)—a speculative city and engine of serendipity that helped residents transcend bourgeoisie life—Salter lingers on the potential of that dream, relative to corporate forces that followed (i.e. IBM). Situating the discussion in the moment, he further connects the extractive tendencies of the smart city with the role data is playing with the war in the Ukraine, glibly noting that both the contemporary urban warzone and our idealized sensor-laden city of tomorrow chronically “seem to lack a central ingredient: human bodies.”
“He was the first man to fill a movie screen with pixels. Now, every movie you see was created on a digital machine.”
– Information technology pioneer and philosopher
Ted Nelson , cited in
Ken Knowlton ’s obituary. Knowlton, who died on June 16, was an American engineer, computer scientist, and artist whose work at
Bell Labs in the 1960s paved the way for computer animation. To create his self-referential 1964 short
A Computer Technique for the Production of Animated Movies , for example, Knowlton paired a dedicated programming language with an automatic micro-film recorder.
After its inaugural showing at Switzerland’s Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2021, an adaption of “How to Win at Photography” opens at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. The group exhibition gathers 30 international artists whose works explore “image-making as play,” from early photography to nascent videogames. Case in point: Roc Herms ’ Study of Perspective (2015) series appropriates Ai Weiwei’s eponymous photo provocations in Grand Theft Auto V .
Meriem Bennani ’s first public sculpture, Windy (2022), touches down on New York City’s High Line, kicking off the summer season of the High Line Art program. Installed on 24th Street through May 2023, Windy is a tornado-shaped kinectic structure that is made from black foam and spins so fast, its details escape perception. “Inspired by the dynamism and constant movement on the High Line,” the Moroccan artist created a sculpture that “captures and works within this urban energy.”
“Black art is held, then, to show white viewers what they refuse to see while critically refusing to provide a prosthetic for white vision.”
“Outside In,” a web-based, site-specific AR exhibition by Manuel Rossner and Damjanski opens near /rosa , panke.gallery and Zentrum für Netzkunst’s Berlin project space. Realized on Panke’s OpenAR.art platform, the two sculptures—Rossner’s Spatial Painting (image) and Damjanski’s Inside: Spatial Painting —stand in dialogue, where the latter takes visitors into the former—“a perspective that wouldn’t have been possible with AR technology.”
“SPACE PROGRAM: Indoctrination,” a solo show by American sculptor Tom Sachs opens at Art Sonje Center in Seoul. The fifth in a series of exhibitions where the artist playfully reconstitutes the aesthetics of his nation’s rich aereospace history (image: Launch , 2010), the show evolves the format through indoctrination . After participating in “missions and tests of knowledge” visitors can join Sachs’ DIY space program—and those lacking ‘the right stuff’ can attend a reeducation centre.
“Plants are already extremely efficient carbon fixing machines, resulting from millions of years of evolution, so I still remain to be convinced that CRISPR can do much to improve carbon sequestration at the scale we need.”
–
César Terrer , an MIT assistant professor focused on plant-soil interactions, on a new
$11 million push by the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) to alter rice plants for improved carbon removal
Part of Serpentine’s long-term climate crisis program , “Back to Earth” opens in London with arresting propositions. Works by Agnes Denes , Brian Eno , Carolina Caycedo , Formafantasma , Sissel Tolaas , and others present research, experiences, and interventions: A new edition of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg ’s Pollinator Pathmaker (2021), for example, algorithmically arranged 62 plant species in nearby Kensington Gardens to “serve the greatest diversity of pollinators.”
“The wreck is not just important to art historians or to the reconstruction of ancient trade routes, but also to our understanding of the travelers, merchants, and sailors of the ancient Mediterranean.”
– Historian
Sarah E. Bond , on the
Antikythera Shipwreck site off the coast of Greece, where a colossal marble Hercules head was recently recovered. Beyond describing how the find completed a
headless Hercules statue in Athens, Bond notes that teeth and bones found at the site “are a fundamental part of the ancient tale told by the wreckage.”
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