1,185 days, 1,864 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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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.”
“Despite its size, the project is only capable of removing less than one percent of the annual emissions of a single coal-fired power plant. That’s the same amount of greenhouse gas emitted by around 870 cars each year.”
–
Vice ’s
Audrey Carleton , on the world’s largest carbon capture facility,
Orca , coming online in Iceland. Operated by the Swiss engineering startup
Climeworks , the ‘direct air capture’ plant filters CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it deep underground.
OUT NOW :
Proof of Art
A survey of NFTs and their progenitors—from Rhea Myers to Nam June Paik—expanding on
OÖ Landes-Kultur ’s eponymous exhibition at Francisco Carolinum Linz
Focusing on stewardship, eco-aesthetics, and inter-species communication, “gREen” opens at Munich’s Muffatwerk . Curated by Jens Hauser and featuring Adam Brown , Thomas Feuerstein , and Agnes Meyer-Brandis , the show is presented as a garden, foregrounding climate politics in the art-science space. Meyer-Brandis’ ONE TREE ID Volatile Organic Compound signature and, once scented, engage in biochemical conversation with plants.
For the New York Times , James Gorman profiles a geneticist team led by Christopher B. Kaelin and their recent findings in cat coat pattern formation. An instance of reaction diffusion (formulated in Alan Turing’s 1952 paper “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis ”), embryonic analysis of 200 kitten litters identified Dkk4, the gene that acts as an inhibitor to create “spots, stripes, and everything in between,” and how tissues lay the groundwork for those patterns—before hair or hair follicles appear.
“English is the sharpest of all instruments of control in a world where narratives are the building blocks of history and history is weaponized by hegemonic powers.”
– Translator
Sophie Hughes on what is lost to the global anglophone publishing machine. “We need writing translated,” she writes, “Yet, in a world dominated by the English language and anglophone culture, translating into English increases the risk of original works being not just transformed, but traduced.”
Alex Schweder ’s “The Sound and the Future” opens at Clifford Gallery in Hamilton, New York. Its name borrowed from its lone work, the exhibition offers a fun glimpse into Schweder’s world of “performnace architecture”—dynamic architectural and sculptural forms. Here, a made-to-order very Detroit installation, first shown at Wasserman Projects (2016, image) sways again; a homage to Motor City’s dance music genre, silvery nylon inflatables undulate, animated by blown air, to a slowed down techno soundtrack.
A phoenix rising from literal ashes, the 34th Bienal de São Paulo kicks off. As described in an e-flux 2018 fire that burnt Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro to the ground. Drawing on an artifact pulled from the museum’s ruins completely intact, the 2 metric ton Santa Luzia iron meteorite has become a de facto biennale mascot, and it sits prominently at the entrace to the flagship exhibition “Though it’s dark, still I sing.”
“I really see Larva Labs as having defined the form—they made the Citizen Kane . But they made it three or four years ago and there hasn’t been a project that’s pushed the state of the art since.”
– Pseudonymous NFT collector
4156 , tipping his hat to
Larva Labs and citing
Cryptopunks (2017) as
the precedent for his recent
Nouns DAO project, which rethinks the governance, economy, and duration mechanics of on-chain avatar communities
Canadian software artist Sarah Friend hatches her latest blockchain-based social experiment called Lifeforms , a series of NFT-based entities that, “like any living thing, need regular care in order to thrive.” If not given away within 90 days of receiving it, a lifeforms will die and no longer appear in wallets. The first batch is currently in foster care at Kunstverein Hamburg as part of the “Proof of Stake ” group exhibition. “After this, these lifeforms will continue their perilous journey through many hands.”
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