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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In her first institutional solo show “The Notebook Simulations,” on view at Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Berlin-based artist Agnes Scherer supersizes the laptop, rendering its mythos in paint (not pixels). Nine monumental laptops evoke “contemporary folklore” with error messages from Microsoft Windows and endlessly multiplying program windows. Recalling “megalithic stone formations and ancient temple sites,” Scherer’s notebooks resemble archaic ruins of an era in the process of drifting away into the past.
DOSSIER :
“How have we ‘half-known’ and ‘half-understood’ the appearance of new intelligence, human-like or not, throughout history? What ways of partial knowing do we exercise all the time?”
–
Nora N. Khan , on the questions driving the first chapter of the
HOLO Annual , featuring contributions by Huw Lemmey, Elvia Wilk, Nicholas Whittaker, and Thomas Brett
“Time Holds All the Answers,” a survey of Postcommodity ’s work opens at Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Canada. Duo Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist have long “injected Indigenous knowledge systems into the museum,” challenging its hermeticism and, here, Let Us Pray For the Water Between Us
“The lifespan of bitcoin mining devices remains limited to just 1.29 years. As a result, we estimate that the whole bitcoin network currently cycles through 30.7 metric kilotons of equipment per year.”
A survey of the Argentinian artist’s inquiries into breath, spirit, and regeneration, Tomás Saraceno ’s solo exhibition “We Do Not All Breathe the Same Air” opens at Neugerriemschneider in Berlin. A highlight is Saraceno’s newest installation, Particular Matter(s) , that illuminates microscopic air particles “like millions of suspended galaxies” with a beam of light. Noteworthy: the exhibition is powered by renewables and opening hours shift with daylight to conserve energy.
“I couldn’t meet any students for almost three semesters. However, it would have been no problem for me as a director to shoot commercials or reality TV. How is system relevance defined here? Not to mention culture?”
– Artist, filmmaker, and educator
Hito Steyerl , declining one of Germany’s most prestigious civilian honours, the Federal Cross of Merit. In a
letter published in the German weekly
Die Zeit , Steyerl decried the government’s’ uneven response to the pandemic, which she cast as confusing, “half-baked and unendless.”
Seoul-based light art studio Kimchi and Chips launches Another Moon into the skies over Zeche Zollverein , a former coal mine turned World Heritage Site in Essen, Germany. Premiering as part of NEW NOW festival in celebration of the end of fossil fuels, the installation’s ring of 40 solar-powered laser projectors captures sunlight during the day to cast it back into the sky at night. Where the beams meet, a 3D sphere—another moon—appears.
“Yet function is rarely an obvious impediment in wearable tech. Wristwatches only tell time, and sunglasses only tell the world you’re awesome. In some ways not doing too much was the point of Glass.”
– Opinion columnist
Farhad Manjoo , reminiscing about the simplicity of
Google Glass in a hyperbolic (but amusing) rumination on the looming age of VR, AR, and “face computing”
Curated by Karie Liao, “Geofenced” opens at (and around) Toronto’s InterAccess . Presented on the artist-run centre’s steps, at a local parkette, microbrewery , and other sites, the show features AR works by Cat Bluemke & Jonathan Carroll, Scott Benesiinaabandan , Jenn E Norton , and Adrienne Matheuszik . The latter’s Proxima-B (2021, image) superimposes scenes from an “extraplanetary resort … free from the troubles of the earth” in the InterAccess gallery, at a nearby parking pad, and on a billboard.
OUT NOW :
Stanislaw Lem
The Truth and Other Stories
A collection of twelve short stories from the late Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem, nine of which have never been published in English before
Twitter user and Blockchain sleuth Zuwu shares an incriminating paper trail revealing a senior employee of the NFT platform OpenSea has been engaging in insider trading. In a Twitter thread they list a number of suspicious transactions from wallets connected to OpenSea Head of Product Nate Chastain—indicating purchases of NFT projects right before they were featured on the site’s homepage, and then corresponding sales when the price spiked. While unscrupulous NFT collectors engage in a range of dubious practices including scalping, bribing miners, and gas wars, this is the first instances of a major NFT platform employee being caught red-handed.
“The work is also significant for raising the question of whether it is a representation of a flag or an actual flag.”
– Creative computing scholar
Nick Montfort , on
Flag , “a Commodore 64 BASIC v2 poem for Jasper Johns,” coded as tribute to the artist’s
iconic painting
Huidi Xiang ’s “How to Be an Artist in Minecraft ” opens at Ender Gallery. A sculptor who became obsessed with the routine (and implicit labour) of Animal Crossing during the pandemic, Xiang’s Ender residency culminates with the presentation of a spreadsheet of every act she performed in Minecraft over a three-month period. Building construction, skin customization, tutorial creation, every minute of her residency—and for those that can’t visit in-game, note the complete log on the artist’s website.
DOSSIER :
“Transcribing, translating, and free-associating live—there was no time to sit with our thoughts. We were forced to reflect as we went, in God mode, getting it all down for posterity. A syndrome I called documentia .”
– MUTEK Recorder Lead
Claire L. Evans , reflecting on the breakneck speed of HOLO’s two-week publishing sprint to document the 2021
MUTEK Forum
Marjolijn Dijkman ’s solo exhibition “Electrify Everything” opens at NOME Gallery, Berlin, bringing together three interrelated bodies of work that ruminate on the history of electricity and the environmental impact of modern energy storage. The photo series Earthing Discharge (2019-21, image), for example, is made with a high voltage electro-photography technique in which the Dutch artist uses a discharge plate made from a tin-coated sheet, the same material as used in touch screen devices.
“My Future is not a Dream,” a show presenting Cao Fei ’s early works opens at Espace Louis Vuitton München. Dealing with the virtualization of place, labour, and leisure, selections include RMB CITY: A Second Life City Planning Imbalance 257
“Complex systems seek equilibrium. When they are pushed too far out of one equilibrium state, they can flip suddenly into another.”
– Writer and
Guardian columnist
George Monbiot , on the dangers of climate tipping points. “Just as one continental plate might push beneath another in sudden fits and starts, our atmospheric systems will absorb the stress for a while, then suddenly shift,” he writes. “Yet, everywhere, the programs designed to avert it are linear, smooth, and gradual.”
MIT researchers announce a breakthrough in magnet technology that paves the way to green fusion power . “On Sep 5, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field ever created,” MIT News reports. The new magnet allows far better control of fusion plasma inside a much smaller reactor—a watershed moment for the technology. “None of us are trying to win trophies at this point,” notes MIT’s Maria Zuber. “We’re trying to keep the planet livable.”
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