1,369 days, 2,175 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 the real world, DAOs have hit two major problems. The first is that coding is hard, and the second is that most things you would actually want to do in the world today still don’t exist on the blockchain.”
– TechScape columnist
Alex Hearn , on DAOs’ stumbling blocks. While cynical (“they are a perfect vehicle for newly minted millionaires … to throw their influence into the real world”), Hearn concedes
decentralized autonomous organizations will capture the public imagination in the coming months.
“Siren: Composers of the Sea” opens at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), offering a “true meeting of intelligences—humpback whale, human, and artificial.” Created by composer Annie Lewandowski , digital artist Kyle McDonald , and set designer Amy Rubin, the immersive sound installation celebrates the beauty and conservation legacy of the 1970 multi-platinum record Songs of the Humpback Whale
“You are meant to be a good little Homo economicus and behave in accordance with profit maximization.”
“Radical Curiosity: In the Orbit of Buckminster Fuller” opens at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum . A reconsideration of the American architect ’s legacy, it assesses his designs, which include the Dymaxion car and geodesic domes (image), in a moment of rising tides and strained infrastructure. Fuller’s focus on interdependence and systems let him “foresee the world’s problems and establish priorities,” note curators Rosa Pera and José Luis de Vicente.
“Transatlantic Visions,” an exhibition showcasing Juliette Lusven ’s doctoral research on internet infrastructure, opens at Montréal’s ELEKTRA gallery. Its single installation Sonder (le monde) (2022, image) presents a visualization of the undersea cables that span the Atlantic Ocean and real-time geographic data, fusing topographic and satellite views with “microscopic captures of technological residues, sediments, and microfossils from the ocean floor.”
“And, like some kind of bear after a bad-trip hibernation, tech art crawled out of its cave wearing a ‘Have Fun Being Poor’ t-shirt and forgetting the last ten years entirely.”
– Canadian data artist
Jer Thorp , on how NFT mania validates his
2018 critique of artistic complicity in hyper-capitalist schemes. “The worst people in the world are constructing the least equitable, most destructive futures and their ideas and politics are being validated and advanced by artists,” laments Thorp.
“Digital Combines” opens at Honor Fraser gallery in LA. Named after her proposed term for a new genre that joins a tangible object with its virtual equivalent, American artist Claudia Hart invited eight friends including Gretta Louw , LoVid , Sara Ludy , and Daniel Temkin (image: Right-Triangular Dither 1, 68% Grey , 2021) to explore binding materials with NFTs. The token’s instructional metadata, developed with specialist Regina Harsanyi , “is a poetic proposition that represents a profound ontological shift in our cultural imagination.”
Artist collective Keiken ’s immersive installation Player of Cosmic Realms The Life Game is an interactive CGI film series that explores gamification, digital assets, and “finding oneself” in the metaverse; while the abdomenal orbs of Bet(a) Bodies “stimulate empathy and a physical simulation of the experience of pregnancy.”
“I’m just terrified of the idea that people are giving us all these compliments because they don’t want to miss out on this NFT thing, when in reality they’re just looking at it from a business perspective.”
–
Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon (aka Snowfro), on questioning motives during the fine art world’s (gold) rush into the NFT space
“We therefore call for immediate political action from governments, the United Nations and other actors to prevent the normalisation of solar geoengineering as a climate policy option.”
– 60 policy experts in an
open letter published in
WIREs Climate Change . The group argues that the injection of sulphur particles into the atmosphere—the most hotly debated plan to cool Earth—could do more harm than good, as deployment “cannot be governed globally in a fair, inclusive and effective manner.”
What comes after platform capitalism? An assemblage called ‘hyperstructures,’ according to Jacob Horne. In an essay published on his website, the co-founder of the NFT marketplace aggregator Zora outlines the frameworks he sees emerging around crypto protocols. Inspired by the utopian architecture of Paolo Soleri , Horne argues the permissionless nature of hyperstructures generates low-friction exchange, yielding more equitable outcomes for participants (versus web 2.0 platforms where the user is the product ). Is this the frothy rhetoric we’ll hear as money flows into web3? Yes, but Zora’s manifesto claim that “platforms hold our audiences and content hostage” is not wrong.
“One and Zero Makes Two,” a solo show by Cem Sonel, opens at Anna Laudel Istanbul. Surveying the breadth of the Turkish artist’s practice, it juxtaposes whimsical street art with austere cellular automata . Produced under the moniker Code of Conquer , the latter body of work features dense red and green dot arrays splashed across MDF and LED displays (image), rejecting the notion that “absence refers to a deficiency in existence,” and breathing life into binary logic.
“Conceptually, working with NFTs has inspired me to continue evolving my hypothesis that poetry is a technology, a durable, adaptive data storage system for preserving humanity’s most valuable information—poetry as the original blockchain.”
– Poet, artist, and AI researcher
Sasha Stiles , on embracing Web3 with her own work and the crypto poetry gallery
theVERSEverse she co-founded with Ana Maria Caballero and Kalen Iwamoto in late 2021
“These dichotomies abound: are you a wage slave or an entrepreneur? In the casino economy of NFTs and crypto, are you a high roller or are you a mark? In the Web3 space, are you a grifter or a useful idiot?”
“I was thinking okay, so what if green screens are actually spaces where there are possibilities embedded in them; but also, warnings about what it means for groups of people to do things in tandem.”
DOSSIER :
HOLO 3 guest editor
Nora N. Khan reveals the forth and final chapter of the forthcoming print edition. “AI ethicists and activists frequently argue that once the black boxes of AI are opened, users will have more agency,” notes Khan. “But what if we don’t understand the explanation?” Contributors
Ingrid Burrington ,
Ryan Kuo , Sera Schwarz, and
Jenna Sutela are tasked to answer.
“An entire major museum dedicated to disability-related work from 41 international artists and collaboratives is a big deal; as far as I know, on this scale it’s unprecedented.”
– Writer
Kenny Fries , on “
Crip Time ,” a Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt) exhibition presenting the lived experience of disability. Despite Fries’ acknowledgement that it’s precedent-setting, he concludes the show falls short, likening it to “an anesthetized hospital” that “fails to understand what crip time actually is.”
“Unruly Archives,” an exhibition surfacing traces of “the global footprint of warfare and organized violence,” opens at The Blackwood in Mississauga, Canada. Curated by Amin Alsaden , conflict-focused works by Emily Jacir , Walid Raad , and Zineb Sedira are included. Iraqi artist Ali Eyal’s contribution 6×9 doesn’t fit everything
“The fact that, after 11 years, Vorspiel is still here and now numbers an incredible 65+ venues, is a testimony to the staying power of this non-institution of Berlin’s diverse and transdisciplinary culture scene.”
– transmediale’s former artistic director
Kristoffer Gansing , revisiting the origins of the community-based event series that leads up to transmediale and CTM Festival every year
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