1,182 days, 1,855 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“Founders, investors, futurists and executives have all tried to stake their claim in the metaverse, expounding on its potential for social connection, experimentation, entertainment and, crucially, profit.”
– Technology journalists
John Herrman &
Kellen Browning , in “What is the Metaverse?,” a general audience friendly primer on that most nebulous of terms
A computational resurrection of Berlin’s swampy origins, Jakob Kudsk Steensen ’s “Berl-Berl”—‘Berl’ being the ancient Slavic word for swamp—turns Halle am Berghain into a luminous wetland. Large-scale projections invite visitors into an “immersive, absolute landscape” composed of macro photogrammetry of the region’s remaining wetlands. “Berl-Berl is a song for the swamp, a place for the undefinable—morphing, liminal and mystical,” says the Danish CGI artist. “Berl-Berl mourns what is lost and embraces what is new.”
OUT NOW :
New Models
NM CODEX Y2K20
Editors
Caroline Busta , Daniel Keller, and
LIL INTERNET marshal the New Models community yielding a “collective distillation” of the madness of 2020
“The Phillipines are a great test market for games, because there is a high level of English knowledge and the cost of labour is quite cheap.”
–
Sky Mavis co-founder Aleksander Larsen, on how
Axie Infinity was rolled out and tested in Southeast Asia. With its governance token surging 400% (to $18 USD) in recent weeks alongside the game’s expontential growth, Filipino workers are
capitalizing on its increasingly lucurative “play to earn” NFT economy, echoing
World of Warcraft -era
gold farming in the Global South.
Ten years after Secret Service agents raided his apartment following People Staring at Computers Kyle McDonald releases the investigators’ report obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The 100-page file reveals “scrawled notes on the phone with Apple, descriptions of a Special Agent scrolling through my social media, justifications for a search warrant,” and “boards of profile pics .”
DOSSIER :
“My Research Partner would have to pose a real challenge to my own thinking. They’d sit outside of the inertia that can set in, as a field of inquiry and a mode of practice becomes known well, lauded, praised. This is when I thought of Peli Grietzer.”
–
Nora N. Khan , on selecting the “brilliant scholar, writer, theorist, and philosopher” as foil for her work on the upcoming
HOLO Annual
For the New York Times , Sabrina Imbler chronicles the quest to understand the fractal forms of romanesco broccoli and cauliflower. Focusing on Irnia researcher Christopher Godin and plant biologist François Parcy’s work modelling “nested spirals and logarithmic chartreuse fractals” of the vegetables over 15 years, she details both missteps and breakthroughs. While their work is far from complete, the duo have honed in on the meristem region of plant tissue, “a stem with no inhibition,” as a source of the eccentric geometries.
DOSSIER :
“I’ve got nothing against the hustle, nothing against the start-up world. It’s when those moral positions become hegemonic for everywhere else and start to define everything, like access to water and knowledge—then they become problematic.”
– DEL Resident
Jerrold McGrath , on how the rhetoric of productivity and the “scarcity mindset” can be dangerous
In the aftermath of “Yacht Metaphor ,” an online and Bard College -hosted solo exhibition, Jenson Leonard delves into his process with curator Georgie Payne . During the exchange Leonard details his work as @CoryIntheAbyss , where he has embraced internet vernacular—‘poor’ images, virality—since 2015. Notably, he describes the exhibition’s “meme schematic” feature, which gives the viewer something they never get on everyday social media: an opportunity to “look under the hood” of his images via a didactic explanation of the references at play.
Two years after Flemish Minister-President Jan Jambon caused outrage for playing Angry Birds during a policy discussion, Belgian media artist Dries Depoorter launches The Flemish Scrollers , an AI bot that monitors the livestreams of the region’s government meetings for politicians who are on their phones. Once the system’s facial recognition detects a distracted lawmaker, it will call them out in public: a video clip is posted to Instagram and Twitter , tagging the official’s social media handle with the request to “pls stay focused!”
“It’s not the type of show where you just roll in as an art world figure. You have to embrace what the building has been as a nightclub, and what it might become, without alienating its history and existing community, without appearing to gentrify yet another space in a city that used to have all this energy.”
“Composed,” a joint show between Robert Bean and Barbara Lounder opens at Hermes Gallery in Halifax, Canada. Combining the pair’s interest in text and encoding, the show collects recent inscription, writing machine, score and diagram work by Bean, and debuts a composition by Lounder. Performed on a 1967 Smith Corona Super Sterling portable typewriter (image) at intervals throughout the show’s run, Super Sterling features Lounder translating fiction and walk transcriptions—live in-gallery—into visual scores.
“Governance challenges arise in similar ways to those already existing around the internet, only to be enhanced by the invasive and intimate nature of this immersive technology with sensors and devices connected close to the body.”
– Videogame policy researcher
Micaela Mantegna , on the looming quagmire of new, more intimate iterations of familiar surveillance, data privacy, and (lack of) regulation problems in the Metaverse
In wiring a vintage Commodore 1541 floppy drive directly to a CRT monitor, German software engineer and demoscener Matthias Kramm releases Freespin Gubbdata , Sweden. Working wonders with the drive’s I/O chips and a hacked serial cable, Kramm sets 16 visual effects including scrollers, plasma, and raster bars to beats generated by the drive’s stepper motor. A C64 is only used to install code on the 1541, explains Kramm in the demonstration video—“I’ll now remove it because it is not needed anymore.”
“Zeroes and Ones” opens at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Connecting zeitgeist theme ‘the algorithm’ with conceptual art, its works span contemporary installation to early-Modernist furniture design. Highlights include Tishan Hsu ’s uncanny health care object Biocube (1988, image), Carolyn Lazard ’s noise machine array A Conspiracy (2017), and Lee Lozano ’s didactic A Boring Drawing (1963–9). The common thread: “scripting, scoring, coding” are “complicated through lived experience,” write the curators.
“Dave is a sort of rubbery fuck boy, eloquent in his melancholy but easily deflated. He resembles both the owner of a sex doll and the doll itself.”
– Critic
Lucy Ives , on ‘Dave’ the CGI protagonist of Ed Atkins’
Ribbons (2014). Ives further describes the character as “an abject white guy who drinks, smokes, and croons self-pitying ditties through a computer-generated haze replete with lens flares and dust particles” in a consideration of Atkins aesthetic and tone relative to post-internet art canon
OUT NOW :
The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 61-62
An examination of the “changing ontology of the image” from AI to Iconomics, edited by Jacob Lund, and featuring Claire Fontaine, Jussi Parikka, Cecilia Sjöholm, Eyal Weizman, and others
“It’s over. Medialab-Prado closed its doors for the last time. Gone are the efforts to make this space a welcoming and lively place and a lot of wonderful and incredible projects for the city proposed by its inhabitants. It remains an empty space without a project.”
–
Medialab-Prado ’s Raúl González, shutting down Madrid’s iconic cultural space and citizen lab for good [translation via deepl]
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