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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“You cannot escape the fact that it’s humans all the way down and that humans are now being used as that connective tissue to make those systems work.”
“If we foreclose the potential of art to aid in this work of healing and remediation, we do so at our own peril.”
“China is rolling its own cryptocurrency and has every incentive to have as little competition as possible. I think we will see miners leaving China and relocate where there is spare or cheap energy.”
–
Cryptohopper CEO Ruud Feltkamp, on how the
Digital Yuan —not green energy targets—is driving China’s crackdown on bitcoin mining, which is prompting operations to relocate to
Kazakhstan and Texas , and other more hospitable regions
Constructed from a dismantled radio tower and motorised antenna speakers, Fragmentin ’s Paraboles ulx-56834 begins ‘broadcasting’ inside Lausanne’s St-François church . To help make tangible the invisible presence of electromagnetic fields, the Swiss collective invited researchers, poets, and artists including Nicolas Nova , Francine Carrillo , and Yves Citton to contribute sound. “These decentralised audio layers sculpt the air,” write the artists, “offering multiple viewpoints on the theme of breath and waves.”
“Pakui Hardware’s work was timely pre-pandemic; it is in no need of conceptual frills to emerge as a strong indictment of our relationship to technology and the pervasive toxicity permeating contemporary methods of care.”
Taking over a former Stasi HQ in Halle, Germany, Werkleitz Festival kicks off three weekends of “new world dis/order,” curated by Sandra Naumann and Daniela Silvestrin . As artists and theorists including Benjamin Bratton , Joana Moll , James Bridle , and DISNOVATION.ORG discuss planetary crises in the conference program, 12 installed artworks by Anna Ridler , Clusterduck , Martin Nadal , RYBN.ORG and others, all realised within EMAP , invite visitors to engage the festival theme on-site.
“The plant learned to grow there and, as far as anyone knew, only there. There were no competitors for that toxic soil. Until, that is, the lithium mine.”
–
Wired staff writer
Gregory Barber , on
Eriogonum tiehmii , or Tiehm’s buckwheat, a wildflower endemic to the lithium deposits of Rhyolite Ridge, Nevada, that the
Ioneer mining company estimates could power 400,000 electric car batteries. The current dispute between miners and conservationists forces a moral equation, writes Barber: “What is the value of the mine versus the value of the plant?”
British CGI artist and researcher Alan Warburton releases RGBFAQ , the video essay centrepiece of his eponymous 2020 solo exhibition at London’s arebyte gallery. A 27-minute deep-dive into the complicated history of computer graphics “which harnessed the technologies of war and used them to simulate new, immersive worlds,” Warburton explores how “CGI exploded the image, fragmenting it into colourful, data-rich elements that have since infiltrated all kinds of imaging technology.”
Picking up where The Stack Benjamin Bratton sketches a future of computation for Noema . Building on ideas from Marshall McLuhan and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, he articulates how “planetary sapience” pushes previous understandings of collective intelligence, computing power, and globalization into unsettling new territory—and takes stock of the implications. If The Stack articulated the end of sovereign nations driving a global agenda, this essay reads as a roadmap for life after Silicon Valley (and China’s tech stack). Looking beyond our current wasteful use of computing power—surveillance capitalism—Bratton imagines how and why we might use the sprawling computational infrastructure (the “smart exoskeleton”) we’ve built to enact planetary techno-solidarity.
OUT NOW :
Baser, Coupland, and Obrist
The Extreme Self
A new kind of graphic novel featuring visuals from over 70 artists, photographers, technologists, and musicians, showing “how you’ve been morphing into something else”
“This is a depressing yet somehow fitting development, reflecting how far the Web has drifted from its original ideals. From a place to share with everyone for free to a space for selling any and every thing. What’s next: Apache, Linux?”
As part of an Inke Arns -curated show on Galerie Barbara Thumm’s New Viewings online platform, exhibiting artist Aram Bartholl installs the first-ever USB-C Dead Drop
ENCOUNTER :
“We just accept that as a truth, that estrogen produces femininity and we don’t question it. For me, the best strategy as citizens is to reject these categories and to create room for more definitions, for more subjectivities.”
Artist and biohacker
Mary Maggic , on how they use hormones—a key material in their practice—to challenge monolithic conceptions of gender and biopower
ENCOUNTER :
Packing a lab in a suitcase and treating hormones as material, the Chinese-American artist brings punk rock energy and radical gender politics to biohacking and citizen science.
DOSSIER :
“As we are trawled within these wildly enmeshed algorithmic nets, how do we draw on these patterns, of mystification and predictive capture, to see the next ship approaching?”
–
Nora N. Khan , on the struggle for autonomy and legibility within the uncharted waters of Big Tech. In this year’s
HOLO Annual , she and a list of invited contributors will plot paths forward.
“When we talk about the practice of worldbuilding, particularly in videogames, one significant strategy when we choose to use these pre-existing worlds is that the game space forms its own poetic architecture for a critique of the present.”
– Artist and writer
Alice Bucknell , parsing the potency of (alternate) videogame realities during the opening session of “Reassemble: Weaving With Worlds,” a two-year laboratory for imagining desirable more-than-human futures hosted by
FIBER Festival
Life After BOB: The Chalice Study , Ian Cheng ’s latest AI narrative, premieres at LUMA Arles in France. Continuing his work with BOB (Bag of Beliefs) usual coming-of-age story, Cheng describes it as offering ”new archetypal characters for our ever-weirdening times.” In Arles for the summer, Life After BOB will show at The Shed in New York this fall.
“We pivot from Disney Prince to a Jesus Christ Superstar rock anthem to Star Trek scenes, film noir, and shady outer space. And all of a sudden, Elon has gone from being an optimistic dreamer, to an idealistic radical, to a scheming villain.”
– Sound designer and music director
Liam Bellman-Sharpe , on the genres and tropes he referenced in his score for
Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars , a musical staged at the
Yale Cabaret last year
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