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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Counting 3,158 submissions “despite a pandemic and a temporary shutdown of the art world,” Ars Electronica announces the winners of this year’s Prix Awards. Golden Nicas go to Forensic Architecture ’s airborne violence analysis Cloud Studies (image), Alexander Schubert ’s AI ensemble Convergence , and Guangli Liu ’s When the Sea Sends Forth a Forest , a CGI lesson in Cambodian “lost history” under Khmer Rouge rule. In addition to the three main prizes, the jury also granted six awards of distinction and 36 honorary mentions.
“Our findings suggest that language loss will be even more critical to the extinction of medicinal knowledge than biodiversity loss.”
– Researchers
Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and
Jordi Bascompte , examining the “high uniqueness in indigenous knowledge and strong coupling with threatened languages” in a recent
PNAS paper . “Each indigenous language is a unique reservoir of medicinal knowledge,” they write, ”a Rosetta stone for unravelling and conserving nature’s contributions to people.”
Curated by Alice Russotti, Meg Webster ’s ”Wave” opens at the Upper Gallery at The Arts Center on Governors Island in New York. Beyond environmental studies spanning sound and video like Nearest Virgin Forest (1987) and Waterfall (1996), the solo show includes new pieces (re)engaging foundational Webster motifs including Moss Mound (building on the 1986 work Moss Bed , image), and Pollinating Garden , for which viewers trek 1 km southwest to a GrowNYC site to take in a durational piece—a plot recently seeded by the artist.
A shrine to IBM’s midcentury corporate aesthetic, Rayyan Tabet’s “Deep Blues” opens at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Illuminated by the melancholic glow of IBM’s 10 shades of blue, the installation references Eero Saarinen’s IBM Rochester design and Charles and Ray Eames work for the multinational—a matrix of their chairs hang overhead. Tabet’s nods to IBM’s design patronage coupled with AI-trained text-to-speech narration foreground the affect of knowledge work, and of a singular corporate identity.
Seoul-based light artists Kimchi and Chips install Halo at the local National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) as part of the institution’s “Multiverse” marathon. In the piece, 99 robotic mirrors follow the Sun’s movement and focus its light into a glistening halo within a cloud of fine water mist. First shown at London’s Somerset House in 2018, the MMCA edition features a new ‘solar farm’ system that uses machine learning for tracking and calibration.
“Payment terms, usage rights—the things bundled into an NFT were already possible through contracts. Now what’s fascinating to me is the way the NFT hype might force Christie’s to rethink how they handle secondary markets, and for artists to demand residual rights.”
–
Artengine Artistic Director
Ryan Stec , in conversation with Remco Volmer, Susan Johhnston, and Dan Monafu about the collision of NFT platform capitalism and the commercial art market [quote edited]
Curated by Sabine Schaschl und Eliza Lips, Bernese sound artist Zimoun opens two immersive installations at Zurich’s Haus Konstruktiv, his biggest solo show in a Swiss museum yet. 295 prepared dc-motors, 39 kg wood and 825 cardboard boxes 35 x 32.5 x 32.5 cm comprise architectural configurations of myriad motorised components of everyday materials. Once activated, they “immerse the observer in a delightful monotony that is repetitive and multifaceted at the same time.”
DOSSIER :
“You just can’t make decisions without identifying who you and who your mentors are, not necessarily elders, but people who are already doing what you’re doing in a good way, and then you can begin to identify need.”
– DEL Resident
Suzanne Kite , on how her
Artist’s Almanac project to compile resources for marginalized artists was, first and foremost, a process of consultation
Most recently shown at “METAMORPHOSIS ” at Hyundai Motor Studio Seoul last year, Matthew Biederman ’s Serial Mutations (z-axis) v04 (2019) opens at Montreal’s ELEKTRA Gallery. Emerging from the vein of Biederman’s work that pushes at the limits of geometry and perception, it deploys the Necker cube optical illusion as the basis of an indeterminate shifting field that reconfigures itself ad infinitum, outside of perspectival space. Installed in ELEKTRA Gallery’s window vitrine, the animation will be displayed through June 19.
“These categories of art and technology and artists and engineers are dynamic, they are historically contingent and change over time. So, sure, you can go into MoMA and see video or a light and sound piece—but in 1965 the context was entirely different, the art world struggled to accept this work.”
OUT NOW :
Eva & Franco Mattes
Dear Imaginary Audience
A survey of the
artist duo ’s investigation of internet culture that accompanies the
eponymous exhibition at Fotomuseum Winterthur and features texts by Cory Arcangle, Jodi Dean, Clément Chéroux, and others
“Leading p5.js is like tending a garden. The p5 garden is the warm gathering space my younger self imagined, where people are welcomed to meet, chat, learn, and exchange ideas.”
–
Qianqian (Q) Ye , artist, technologist, and new
p5.js co-lead at
Processing Foundation , on nurturing the programming language’s community. “I’d love to invite more gardeners to join the p5.garden, no matter how much gardening knowledge they have right now,” Ye writes on Medium. “Bring your seeds, let’s plant together.”
A celebration of “Swiss Media Art,” HeK Basel opens three solo exhibitions presenting new works by Studer/van den Berg , Maria Guta , and Simone C Niquille , all winners of the 2020 Pax Art Award . From Studer/van den Berg’s fictional worlds created in digital space (Palace for an Entity of Unknown Status , image), to Maria Guta’s reflections on identity and self-expression in social media, to Simone C Niquille’s critical engagement with digital datasets, the three artists “address themes that are as diverse as they are essential,” states HeK.
“It’s the ultimate hyperobject. The hyperobject of our age. It’s literally inside us.”
– Philosopher
Timothy Morton , on whether COVID-19 qualifies as one of the ”vast, unknowable things that are bigger than ourselves” he described in
Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (2013)
“Museum visitors are invited to touch and feel the code.”
“The closer the research started getting to search and ads, the more resistance there was. Those are the oldest and most entrenched organizations with the most power.”
– A Google employee with experience of the company’s research review process on the rejection of
Timnit Gebru ’s critique of natural language models (“
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots ”) that ultimately led to her firing. Writer
Tom Simonite traces the career of the former Google Ethical AI researcher and pieces together what
really happened when the company forced her out.
Sam Durant’s Untitled (drone) High Line Plinth , a space for public art in Manhattan’s iconic rail-line park. Sitting atop a 25-foot pole, the life-sized fibreglass sculpture of a Predator drone appears to hover over 10th Avenue, “reminding the public that drones and surveillance are a tragic and pervasive presence in the daily lives of many living outside—and within—the United States,” says Durant. The piece is the second Plinth commission selected from over 50 submissions in 2016. It will be on view through August 2022.
“We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, ‘Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls,’ invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet.”
– AI researcher
Kate Crawford , on the very real materiality of AI. “It is made from natural resources,“ she tells interviewer Zoë Corbyn. “We’ve got a long way to go before this is green technology.”
OUT NOW :
Caroline Sinders
Architectures of Violence
A collection of essays, interviews, and projects by the
artist and researcher exploring how digital platforms inflict harm—from YouTube’s algorithms to Gamergate
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