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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“The harms caused by this widespread, unregulated corporate surveillance pose a direct threat to the public at large, especially for Black and brown people most often criminalized using surveillance.”
– A coalition of 48 civil rights and advocacy groups organized by
Athena , demanding the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to ban “corporate use of facial surveillance technology, ban continuous surveillance in places of public accommodation, and stop industry-wide data abuse”
Ali Eslami and Mathilde Renault add a new online component to their mixed-reality exhibition “Eclipse” at Tetem, Enschede (NL). Renault’s physical entry point to Eslami’s virtual world opened weeks ago; now remote visitors can book access to “discover the extent of their physicality … [and] interactions with one another.” An offshoot of Eslami’s ongoing VR experiments , this browser-based iteration allows users to inhabit an avian avatar, and interact with more corporeal forms that are only accessible on-site.
“My idealistic read of Hic et Nunc peaked during the platform’s first hackathon in May, when 150 artists and developers came together to work towards improving the platform. On June 28th, the momentum came to a halt.”
–
Clara Peh , on how a hack of the open source alt NFT marketplace revealed the vulnerability of its model. “
Hic et Nunc is essentially developer Rafael Lima’s passion project,” writes Peh, “and he is assisted by hardworking and generous enthusiasts who share a similar vision.”
Analysing the “John Karel window phenomenon”—creators minting tributes to the CGI artist ’s popular NFT window series—Sterling Crispin considers a hypothetical profit sharing model. “As of June 20th the movement produced 2,329 transactions totalling 5,496.91 Tez in sales,” writes Sterling. In his model, the highest earners would help reward the movement’s instigators. “I think that a network of artists profit sharing could encourage experimentation, and be a more equitable way of fostering emergent online communities.”
“Like all our favourite artists on Art Blocks, Sol LeWitt wrote an algorithm that can be followed to create an infinite number of variations on the same artwork. The main difference is that LeWitt’s Wall drawings are written in plain English and executed by a team of gallery installers, rather than written in code and executed by a web browser.”
– Artist
Mitchell F. Chan , linking the legacy of conceptual art with blockchain-based generative art
Confronting the posthuman head-on, “From Creatures to Creators” opens at Kunsthaus Hamburg. Collecting works “going beyond the finite, conceiving the superhuman” artists including Ed Fornieles , Mary Maggic , and Tabita Rezaire contribute provocative, unsettling visions of life not as we know it, through installation, video, and VR. Pakui Hardware ’s Thrivers (image, 2019), for example, presents glass forms as “porous hosts of life,” that fuse elements of flora and fauna lifeforms into chimeric experiments.
“Arguably, one of the most consistent, historically reliable, widely accepted system of ethics in existence belongs to the Catholic Church. You want to base a responsible AI on that?”
– Novelist
Stephen Marche , on the impossible task of determining a reliable metric of human values, when “caste and gender are baked into every word.” Where can AI engineers working with natural language models turn to, Marche asks. “Humanities departments? Critical theory? Academic institutions change their values systems all the time.”
Directed by digital artist Ryoichi Kurokawa for Buffalo Daughter , the “ET (Densha)” music video premieres on the band’s YouTube channel. Known for his clincial deconstruction of natural forms, here Kurokawa ‘explodes’ flowers into point clouds, which waft and dissipate in sync with the central bass hook and guitar feedback. Founded in 1993, Buffalo Daughter is a key player in Japan’s “cut-and-paste” rock Shibuya-kei movement. “ET (Densha)” is the lead single from their upcoming album We Are The Times .
“At first, he was impressed by the software’s ability to mimic the real Jessica Pereira. Within 15 minutes, he found himself confiding in the chatbot. After a few hours, he broke down in tears.”
–
Chronicle staff writer
Jason Fagone , contemplating “love and loss in the age of AI” in a (moving) recount of how one
GPT-3 chatbot, created with
Project December , helped writer Joshua Barbeau find closure eight years after the death of his fiancé
“It’s a face I know and don’t know.”
– Critic
Jason Farago , on
Ed Atkins ’ CGI visage in
The Worm (2021). Profiling the British artist for his
New Museum show, he teases out the themes of melancholy and mortality that run through Atkins’ work. His 3D avatars ”have no names, no back-stories, no motivations,” he writes.
“I think of it as a kind of sanitizing of art, and it will most negatively affect artists who are pushing the envelope.”
– Artist
Clarity Haynes , quoted in
Valentina Di Liscia ’s reporting on Instagram’s new ‘
sensitive content‘ filter which (because prudishness)
may screen out works by LGBTQIA+ artists, artists of colour, and feminist artists. “Decorative art that is not challenging will be fine,” Haynes wryly notes.
OUT NOW :
Science Gallery Dublin
SYSTEMS
A COVID-adapted exhibition-in-a-box “untangling the many complex systems, both visible and invisible, that surround us” through the work of artists and researchers like
Ingrid Burrington , Vukašin Nedeljković,
Julian Oliver and
Tega Brain
“Facebook’s problems today are not the product of a company that lost its way. Instead they are part of its very design, built atop Zuckerberg’s narrow worldview, and the careless privacy culture he cultivated.”
– Senior editor
Karen Hao , in her review of Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang’s new book
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination. “Between the lines, the message is loud and clear,” Hao concludes: ”Facebook will never fix itself.”
Kei Kreutler answers the question of the moment: what is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)? Linking think tanks , libertarians , and MMORPG Guilds , she maps a prehistory of emergent governance, to contextualize (post-crypto) community tokenization. Noteworthy DAOs, both active and defunct get air time, as do tools and protocols; ultimately Kreutler schematizes DAOs as “tokens, teams, and missions” (image), and “compelling environments players want to inhabit, recognizing narratives, aesthetics, and goals held in common.”
“The objective of Extractor for the player is to achieve world domination as the ultimate data capitalist. The work is a fictionalised attempt to find a visual language to articulate complex invisible power structures.”
– Curator
Anna Briers , on
Simon Denny ’s 2019 board game, that “gamifies the dynamics of the data mining industry.”
Extractor is a “pivotal work” in the forthcoming “
Don’t Be Evil ” exhibition Briers curated for the University of Queensland (UQ) Art Museum.
An ode to the cosmos’ hidden mysteries, Ryoji Ikeda ’s The Universe within the Universe opens as part of THE INFINITE, an immersive environment inspired by NASA missions. Created by Felix & Paul Studios and PHI at Montréal’s Arsenal , the 12,500 square-feet XR experience sends visitors on a journey to the International Space Station. Along the way, they encounter Ikeda’s audiovisual installation: a pitch black room with an LED ceiling and mirrored floor, designed to create “the feeling of weightlessness and even vertigo.”
Gijs Gieskes releases Insolventunclesam , the squelchiest critique of late capitalism ever. Inspired by money printer go BRRR economic stimulus, the Dutch artist created a signal path that models inflation. “The landscape line represents the S&P500, where the stock price goes down and the FED comes to the rescue,” Gieskes writes. He further describes the FED chairman oscillator, three more for household investors, and the ‘ELECT’ button “where the decisions can be influenced.” True to form, the price of each synth sold increases by 2%.
“As of the second quarter of 2021, governments around the world have allocated around USD 380 billion on clean energy measures as part of their economic response to the Covid-19 crisis. This is around 2% of the total fiscal support in response to Covid-19.”
– International Energy Agency (IEA) analysts in their Sustainable Recovery Tracker, in which they estimate CO2 emissions will climb “to record levels in 2023 continuing to rise thereafter”
In the wake of Jeff Bezos riding a ‘giant phallus ’ to space, art historian Michael Lobel reminds his Twitter followers of The Moon Museum Forrest Myers in collaboration with scientists from Bell Laboratories, the tile includes a sketch by Andy Warhol “that can be interpreted as a penis or a rocket ship.”
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