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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“We’re using this very powerful tool that is able to take information and integrate it in a way that no human mind is able to do, for better or for worse.”
– Stanford climate scientist
Noah Diffenbaugh , on using machine learning to model anthropocentric warming. In
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , his team’s model predicts we’ll blast past agreed-upon climate thresholds. As Brown University researcher
Kim Cobb put it: “This paper may be the beginning of the end of the 1.5C target.”
The latest in a series of posts elaborating on their Digital Art & Design collection , V&A curators publish a concise history of 3D printing. From locating the roots of additive manufacturing in the XY plotter and stereolithography , through collected bio art and furniture design provocations by Heather Dewey-Hagborg (image: Radical Love Front Design , they reconcile the gap between the “futuristic dream” promised by the medium and the questions of ethics and utility its use has raised.
“Rap Research Lab,” an exhibition showcasing Tahir Hemphill ’s eponymous studio and education initiative, opens at the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture (CADVC) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (US). Presented works interpreting hip hop lyrics as datasets include Picasso, Baby! Maximum Distance. Minimum Displacement. (2014, image), which maps geography in lyrics of MCs including Jay Z and Missy Elliot.
“AI images don’t glitch, they gloop. They streak and striate. It’s the result of how these systems seek out images from the fuzzy noise they start with. While noise is an end state of a bad television broadcast, it’s the start state of AI images.”
– Systems design researcher and artist
Eryk Salvaggio , on the origins of “blobby” GAN aesthetics (as seen in the “smeary smorgasbord” that is Refik Anadol’s MoMA installation
Unsupervised ).
“They found a 95% similarity between the Madonnas in the two paintings and an 86% similarity in the Child.”
Rhea Myers ’ solo exhibition “The Ego, and It’s 0wned” opens at Nagel Draxler’s Crypto Kiosk in Berlin, offering blockchain-based “symbolic forms” that ponder property, representation, identity, and secrecy. In the titular piece (2023), for example, the British artist and hacker tokenizes her brain wave recordings while Type Opposite Images Vaporwave tropes. Also on view: new NFT editions of iconic Ethereum works that Myers created in 2014.
“From Body to Code,” a retrospective of pioneering Brazilian choreographer Analívia Cordeiro, opens at ZKM Karlsruhe. Included is her iconic video art piece »M 3×3« Nota-Anna , the movement notation system she developed with Nilton Lobo in the 1980s. Collectively, the assembled works underscore what curator Claudia Giannetti describes as a “singular computerized method combined with a subtle and poetic language.”
“The Technate,” an exhibition by Peter Behrbohm and Markus Bühler that “follows the wires” of North American internet infrastructure, opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. The show centres their eponymous research project (2023, image), a reenactment of a 1947 road trip (from California to British Columbia) promoting the technocracy movement . In it, the duo cosplay as technicians (with a robot dog), and visit technoculture hotspots including Internet Archive and Noisebridge .
“Eat mace, die-cast 4-bit-computer-controlled dragon.”
– Pseudonymous microcomputer researcher
ClassicHasClass , concluding a teardown of
Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game (1980), an electronic board game that used a Texas Instruments printed circuit board (PCB) to generate procedural dungeons, adversaries, and treasure
“A legless Donald Trump, just wandering the empty streets of Horizon Worlds , selling commemorative coins.”
–
New York Times tech columnist
Kevin Roose , imagining the sad combination of Trump and the metaverse, in the aftermath of Meta reinstating the former U.S. President’s Facebook and Instagram accounts after a two-year ban
Nandita Kumar ’s solo exhibition “From Paradigm To Paradigm, Into the Biomic Time” opens at daadgalerie , Berlin. A deconstruction of the climate disinformation machine, Kumar’s titular news ticker regurgitates falsehoods as concrete poetry and a musical score. Using an algorithmic haiku generator, the Mauritian artist and 2022 DAAD Music & Sound Fellow translated 91 untrue statements into a 12-meter pianola loop that sonifies dissonance—“between the scientific community, political spheres, and the populace at large.”
“What Unsupervised insinuates, is that art history is just a bunch of random visual tics to be permuted, rather than an archive of symbol-making practices with social meanings.”
– Critic
Ben Davis , demystifying
Refik Anadol ’s AI “alternative-art-history simulator”
on view at MoMA . “The effect is pleasant—like an extremely intelligent lava lamp,” Davis writes. “What it is
not is anything like what MoMA says it is: an experience that ‘reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been.’”
“Cosmos,” a survey of kinetic and interactive sculptures by Björn Schülke blending “action and reaction, surveillance and performance,” opens at bitforms gallery San Francisco. Included are spacecraft- and rover-inspired assemblies, vision machines, a maquette of his Norman Y. Mineta San José Airport sculpture (2010), and sound art (image: Supersonic #3
“The whole apparatus has become extremely conservative in trying to encourage accountability and concrete results. We don’t want to do blue sky research.”
– Science journalist
William J. Broad , distilling the findings of “Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive over Time,”
a recent
Nature study by Michael Park, Erin Leahey, and Russell J. Funk that quantifies how scientific leaps forward are occurring less frequently with each passing decade
LuYang ’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, “LuYang Vibratory Field,” opens at Kunsthalle Basel. One of the most comprehensive surveys of the Shanghai-born artist’s work from the last decade, the show spawns entire universes from the “engrossing, fantastical, and sometimes grotesque techno-psychedelic videos, installations, and computer games” on view. In them, LuYang tackles major issues: life, death, reincarnation, and even global destruction.
“In his final book he argues that a new ‘ecological class’ must be assembled to replace the productivist working class of past socialist imaginaries; a class determined not by one’s position relative to the means of production but one’s position in a set of earthly interdependencies.”
– Political theorist
Alyssa Battistoni , on late French philosopher
Bruno Latour ’s turn to climate politics and his often vexed relationship with the left
“Data Garden,” an exhibition by Kyriaki Goni , opens at Blenheim Walk Gallery in Leeds, UK. In it, the Greek artist presents her eponymous ongoing series (image), which uses CGI and sculpture to chronicle Saxifraga depressa and Micromeria acropolitana , plant species native to the Dolomites mountain range and the Acropolis . Presenting plant DNA as a communication protocol that links communities, Goni centres “deep time, geological transformations, and plant history.”
“REVENANTS,” a show featuring Kelly Richardson , Nicholas Sassoon & Rick Silva , opens at the Rectangle artist-run space in Brussels. Addressing notions of scale and the geological, Richardson’s Origin Stories asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and Sassoon’s lava rock-inspired The Prophet (Tanaga 1) (2023, image) evokes what exhibition essayist Alexandra Crouwers describes as “the unimaginable turmoil that is in a constant grind beneath our feet.”
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