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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“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.”
OUT NOW :
Manaugh & Twilley
Until Proven Safe
Journalists
Geoff Manaugh and
Nicola Twilley explore the history
and future of quarantine—from the Black Death to big data
TK Smith reviews “The Dirty South ,” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, for Art in America . Scanning works spanning landscape illustration to a literal manifestation of slab culture , Smith parses the character and affect of the American South. Of note: the discussion of Paul Stephen Benjamin ’s Summer Breeze (2018, image), which blends Billie Holiday and Jill Scott song and spoken word with archival footage “creating a second meaning for Holiday’s phrase, juxtaposing the legacy of lynching with the fact of survival and Black joy.”
“Their only products are infection vectors. They’re not security products. They’re not providing any kind of protection, any kind of prophylactic. They don’t make vaccines—the only thing they sell is the virus.”
– NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden , on for-profit malware developer NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance company whose business dealings with authoritarian governments recently
leaked to the press . “Commercialising vulnerabilities in widely used mobile phone models is an industry that should not exist.”
A window into the Jonas Lund Token On This Day ” opens in König Galerie’s virtual showroom on Decentraland. JLT (2018–) is a distributed autonomous artistic practice where shareholders get to invest and participate in the Swedish artist’s career. 50 chairs are reserved for selected JLT shareholders (meetings to be announced!), while 3D animals—JLT collectibles—watch Lund’s avatar reminisce over photo memory tokens on the wall.
Authorities in the city of Miri in Sarawak, Malaysia seized 1,069 rigs from Bitcoin miners alleged to have stolen $2 million USD worth of electricity. “The electricity theft for mining Bitcoin activities has caused frequent power outages, and in 2021, three houses were razed due to illegal electricity supply connections,” explains Miri police chief ACP Hakemal Hawari. Six individuals were arrested, fined, and jailed in the sting; the police then proceeded to crush the hardware, worth an estimated $1.25 million USD, with a steamroller.
“In the art world it was quite shambolic—the worst and most monopolistic actors immediately colonized the space and started extracting labour from precarious workers. For me, NFTs are the equivalent of toxic masculinity as a medium, because they take up way too much attention and use up all the oxygen in the room.”
Instigated by artist Rosa Menkman and featuring works by Memo Akten , Sophie Dyer & Sasha Engelmann , Susan Schuppli , UCNV , Alan Warburton , and others, “im/possible images” opens at Lothringer 13 Halle , Munich. The exhibition extends out of Menkman’s research into digital image infrastructures and kicks off a two-month summer school exploring the conditions of image making today: “How do resolutions shape images? How has the field of computer simulation expanded the rules and functioning of our imagery? Can one listen to an image?”
“In a world of computer simulations and deepfakes, a dead man’s voice speaking his own words of despair is hardly the most dystopian application of the technology. But the seamlessness of the effect is eerie. ”
– Writer
Helen Rosner , on the computer-generated voice of Anthony Bourdain in the new documentary
Roadrunner . “There were three quotes there I wanted his voice for that there were no recordings of,” the film’s director Morgan Neville tells Rosner. So “I created an AI model of his voice.”
Developed by researchers at Italy’s new-technologies agency ENEA to determine the “attraction value” for specific works of art, project ShareArt begins a trial period at the reopened Istituzione Bologna Musei . 14 camera devices (image) have been positioned near artworks to soak up data on the number of observers and their behavior as they look at a painting, sculpture, or artifact. “Thanks to AI and big data applications,” the system could help improve museum layouts and exhibit scheduling, state the researchers.
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