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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“I don’t want Liyla to be relevant anymore. I want this game to be a part of history, not a part of the present time.”
– Palestinian software engineer
Rasheed Abueideh , on the timeliness of
Liyla and the Shadows of War , his 2016 videogame about a father’s (futile) attempts to protect his daughter during the 2014 bombings of the Gaza Strip. “In this game, even if you think that you have a choice, you don’t,” he says. “You’re powerless and weak. I wanted the players to get a glimpse of that feeling.”
Currently Unidentified Leaf Abbotsford Convent (2021), an instance of sound artist Dylan Martorell ’s series translating leaves into musical scores
“At any time, the finance industry could have suggested or demanded design changes. It didn’t. Artists did,” writes Charlotte Kent in an op-ed on how NFT creators force a debate about blockchain tech and the environment. Surveying key works including Memo Akten ’s Cryptoart.wtf and John Gerrard ’s Crystalline Work (Arctic) (image), Kent rejects the notion that crypto art is beholden to an (energy-intensive) Ethereum- and Bitcoin-rich collector class. “Diversifying is in the spirit of the distributed ledger.”
“It’s true that they have a format problem, and yet, in the name of human priorities, I still feel compelled to advocate for their existence.”
– Writer
Laura McLean-Ferris , on the works in
Trevor Paglen ’s 2015
solo exhibition at Metro Pictures, New York. First published on Oct 7, 2015, the review muses “whether this is all just brilliant rigorous journalistic research which has, for some reason, taken the form of an art object.” McLean-Ferris praises Paglen for leveraging art for activism. “Still, this only works when it either transforms the material, or transforms the space around it.”
Collaborating with bioengineers at Rice University, generative design studio Nervous System creates complex blood vessel networks using custom software and 3D-printed sugar. “After printing, these sugar templates are cast in a mixture of living cells and gel,” they write on their blog. “When the gel has set, the sugar is dissolved, leaving the intricate branching network that serves as blood vessels for the living cells.” According to their paper in Nature , the cells can be kept alive for two weeks.
DOSSIER :
“We’re not reporters, exactly; we’re recorders. But like journalists of another century, we will be cutting, pasting, arranging and re-arranging, until something new emerges from the noise.”
– Writer and musician
Claire L. Evans , on parsing this year’s MUTEK Forum through daily broadcasts and a sustained publishing sprint
Logged through daily broadcasts and a sustained publishing sprint, writer and musician Claire L. Evans ‘records’ the 2021 MUTEK Forum, sharing knowledge and research methods from selected guests.
PSA: HOLO Readers enjoy a 30% discount on *all* MUTEK passes—join us!
“To stand in these places is to stand in a place where desire was met. Where for a moment, something that was yours was carved out of the ugly body of online corporate games culture. Like building a fort in the woods between the highway and the mall.”
– Software artist
Everest Pipkin , on the seven billion worlds users (the majority of them children) created in
Roblox , the “lush, blocky, user-design nightmare” that is “one of the biggest games in the world”
OUT NOW :
Shannon Mattern
A City Is Not a Computer
A sustained analysis of the ‘smart city’ metaphor that has shaped conversations about urbanism in the 21st century—and critique of where it falls short
Curated by Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing) researcher Iris Long , “The Long Cut” launches on Feral File . The forth show on the NFT exhibition and marketplace features seven born-digital works that “investigate the remote, latent, and liminal space of technologies” by, among others, Cao Shu , He Zike , Studio Above&Below , In_K , and Shi Zheng (image: Free Fall Study III ). In aggregate, the works look for “alternative pathways and maps for our shared technological reality,” writes Long.
“Settler futurity is constantly erasing the past, caught up in a future with its own endless return. It is a futurity filled with a desire to swallow the world into its underlying values—of appropriation, of private property, of confronting its challenges through privatization, of drawing boundaries.”
– Designer and educator
Xiaowei R. Wang , in an unflinching analysis of the ‘landgrab tendencies’ of American counterculture and (techno) libertarian futures
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the very first release of Processing , the quintessential software sketchbook for visual artists (image: Pro55essing ALPHA, ca. 2003), developers Ben Fry and Casey Reas share the first beta of version 4.0. Feature highlights include Java 11 support, updated video and sound libraries, and direct export of MP4s and animated GIFs. The celebrations continue: over the coming days and weeks the Processing Foundation , universities, and cultural organisations will host a series of community events.
“This is the first major case of weaponizing personal data, shared by shady data brokers. I have been warning for years that there would be consequences for failing to protect Americans’ personal information.”
– U.S. Senator
Ron Wyden , sponsor of the “
Mind Your Own Business ” act, and other privacy-focused legislation, on the
recent outing of a high-ranking Catholic priest as a Gay bar patron based on Grindr location data obtained through a grey market reseller
German artist Hito Steyerl ’s iconic video installation Factory of the Sun opens at the San José Museum of Art (SJMA). Produced for the 2015 Venice Biennale , it’s a homecoming—the work was just aquired by SJMA along with L.A.’s Hammer Museum and MCA Chicago. In an e-flux dispatch , SJMA curator Kathryn Wade describes its central narrative about dance and routine becoming ‘pure light’ as “creating an imaginative reality where modern warfare, corporate culture, and anticapitalist resistance movements are played out.”
“In the metaverse Facebook envisions you are the Neopet, and your in-game activities may affect every sphere of life that Facebook already touches: careers, relationships, politics.”
– Writer
Kyle Chayka , on the looming “blue-and-gray virtual universe.” Chayka considers Zuckerberg’s plans for an “embodied Internet” by looking at its predecessors, including
Fortnite (2017),
Second Life (2003), and
Neopets (1999).
Showcasing seven artists from Japan and China “who are transforming existing narratives into new mythologies,” a screening series entitled “NeoMythos” kicks off at Gray Area , San Francisco. Over the course of three weekends, new media works by, among others, LuYang (image: DOKU , 2020), Shigetoshi Furutani , Yu Miao , and Wang Meng are being presented in large-scale cinema environments. “Together, these works imagine the possibility of human existence beyond current constructs of gender, environment, and aesthetics.”
Rafaël Rozendaal donates 50% of the proceeds (164 ETH, worth $430,000 USD) from his Endless Nameless Art Blocks platform on July 30th, Rozendaal’s 1,000-edition series of colourful subdivided squares saw individual NFTs going for upwards of 1 ETH. Acknowledging Rhizome’s legacy of valourizing and preserving internet-based art, the gift is the largest benefit donation in the organizations’ history. “The program and preservation teams are currently meeting to figure out how best to use this extraordinary gift with the aim to share initiatives big and small by next month,” writes Rhizome’s Zachary Kaplan. Giving back is in the air, apparently, as this (re)investment in culture comes shortly after fellow NFT artist Dmitri Cherniak’s generous donation to the Processing Foundation .
A durational performance with the sea, AnneMarie Maes ’ Theatrum Algaerium rises from the waves. Metal frames holding fluttering weeds and algae-carrying jars filling up with tidal water create “narratives woven from the threads of past, present, and future,” while a team of performers prepares and offers ocean delicacies. “The waves threaten to swallow up the lab,” the Belgian bio artist notes about the Oostende seaside ritual, “but in a repetitive action, structures, algae and jars are carried past the flood line.”
“A world is that which is inhabitable around a specific game; when the iterated playing of the game forces life support services to emerge around it.”
– CGI artist and AI worldbuilder
Ian Cheng , “testing” a new definition. He continues: “Worlding, then, is the art of picking the damn game, steering the emergent stuff around it to make it inhabitable, managing the ongoing balance of its chaos and order, setting it up for autonomy, and then exiting before your own finitude gets in its way.”
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