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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Hailed as a “landmark digital media auction” of 28 screen-based works, Sotheby’s opens “Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale.” Working with crypto artist Robert Alice , the American fine art trader prides itself in bringing together NFT trailblazers like Larva Labs and XCOPY with genre stars like Addie Wagenknecht , Casey Reas , Simon Denny , Anna Ridler , and Ryoji Ikeda (A Single Number That Has 10,000,086 Digits , image crop). The 28 works are on display at Sotheby’s galleries in New York City through auction end on June 10.
“What is in and what is out? Is the architecture of a commercial gallery a factor in your reception of its exhibition? Are the protestors in the museum’s lobby? What if the security guards have prevented the protestors from entering, but their chants filter in through a window?”
– The Art-agenda editorial team, in an incisive short text that cites quantum physics and a bronze sculpture of a cat to provoke readers to evaluate their measures of where the reading of an artwork starts and ends
Hijacking the media’s engagement economy for climate action, Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne launch Synthetic Messenger , a botnet boost for climate news. Commissioned by Eindhoven’s STRP Festival , the botnet artificially inflates the value of articles on climate change with advertisement clicks. It’s a “second-order climate engineering scheme” that manipulates the algorithmic systems that shape narratives, state the artists. “What if media itself were a form of climate engineering, a space where narrative becomes ecology?”
“I had almost given up thinking anyone would see my physical and digital sculptures on equal footing. But right now, the digital ones are more important, and after twenty years of seeing digital art sidelined, I find that exciting and very welcome!”
–
Auriea Harvey , on how NFTs have energized her artistic practice. “They’re an opportunity to say something in a louder way,” she tells
Charlotte Kent . “Now that people are looking and listening, I want to do something with that attention.”
While researching the CO2 footprint of the Ethereum (ETH) cryptocurrency chain, media artist Kyle McDonald discovered ‘graffiti’ early miners left in ETH blocks using the “extraData” field. “One miner operating in 2016 decided to tell a story: one word per block, over 2.5 months,” McDonald writes on Twitter. “Maybe one of the slowest monologues ever” was mined over 129 blocks for 648 ETH and had a happy ending: “it looks like they cashed out early this year, for around half a million USD.”
“A suggestive allegory for how personal memories, past lives, and documentation intersect on the plane of individual psychology, Gysin’s The Last Museum could not have anticipated the spatial and temporal bardo that is the World Wide Web.”
A vision of a post-anthropocentric kinship future, Superflux ’s immersive installation Invocation for Hope premieres at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Vienna, as part of the Biennale for Change . Set to sounds by Cosmo Sheldrake , the London-based speculative design studio charts a path through a burnt forest destroyed by wildfire so that visitors may experience its restoration as they walk towards the centre. Here, a pool invites reflection, “as part of the planet, not masters of it.”
DOSSIER :
“There’s a kinship with some of my collaborative art projects, where users inhabit these extremely technical and often quite sterile, even hostile, environments like a phone interface. ‘Push 1 if X, push 2 if Y, push 3 if Z’ —one of the most hated technological inventions of our age.”
Featuring three new browser-based works by Mary Maggic (Estroworld Now: Quarantine Edition , image), Luiza Prado de O. Martins , and Sissel Marie Tonn , “Toxicity’s Reach” launches as part of AND 2021. Channelling the history of industrial pollution of the River Mersey in Liverpool—this year’s home of the nomadic festival—the Dani Admiss -curated online exhibition asks how “contaminants of emerging concern (CECs)” such as microplastics, fertilizers, and pharmaceuticals in our waterways affect us biologically, socially, and ideologically.
SAMSUNG MEANS REBIRTH premieres, as part of the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale . Squarely focused on South Korea’s most prominent technology multinational, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries ’ seven-episode video series offers an unflinching look at Samsung’s fervent corporate ethos and poses related questions of labour and value. In the first episode “The Executive,” tales of obedience and overreach are spelled out in big punchy typography—bleak narratives of corporatized death and devotion, synchronized with a jazzy score.
“They use memes and laser eyes and are hooked on the inevitability of their vindication; this curiously masculine trait of just believing that if you can convince yourself that something is real, everyone else will believe you, and many men my age do.”
–
Tobias Revell , on encountering “crypto theologians” on Twitter, “a slightly less bad version of 4chan trolls but legitimised because they’ve read James C. Scott and get invited to speak at tech conferences.”
International researchers have compiled an atlas of microorganisms residing in subways (or mass transit) in major urban centres. Building on enthusiasm for geneticist Christopher Mason ’s 2015 research on microbes in New York City’s subway system, this study dispatched teams of scientists and volunteers to swab turnstiles, railings, ticket kiosks, and benches inside transit stations and subway cars in 60 cities. Their findings, published in Cell
“Our stories, especially our deep stories, are the algorithms that instruct us how to be in the world.”
–
Stephanie Dinkins , on
Secret Garden , her immersive web experience that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The culmination of residency with Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), Dinkins’ floral estate invites visitors to explore oral histories spanning generations of Black women. Contemplating this and other Dinkins works, writer Alex Estorick concludes “her ultimate achievement is to defeat epistemic violence by envisioning deep understanding.”
Seoul-based artist duo Kimchi and Chips transforms a pedestrian bridge in Gwanmyeong, Gyeonggi-do province, South Korea, into a dynamic op-art display by adding a kinetic light artwork as a permanent outdoor fixture. Optical Rail
OUT NOW :
Christian Stiegler
The 360° Gaze
Reconsidering notions of immersion in media, in light of developments including binge-watching, rabbit holing, rabid fandom, and ‘extended’ reality
“Thousands of Berliners had waited in line to see the Neues Museum reopen to the public but Egyptians had waited almost a century for her return.”
– Historian
Sarah E. Bond , on the century-plus saga of cultural plunder that began with the excavation and depatriation of the
Nefertiti bust in 1912. In an article that
starts as a chronicle of cultural colonialism, Bond uses
Nora Al-Badri and
Jan Nikolai Nelle ’s 2015 3D-scan of the bust to raise broader questions of heritage and sovereignty.
Curated by Hashim Sarkis , dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture opens, asking “How Will We Live Together?” Among the 112 participants are Ani Liu (A. I. Toys ), Dani Ploeger (A Space War Monument ), Pinar Yoldas (Hollow Ocean ), and Superflux (Refuge for Resurgence ), offering evocative visions of planetary restoration. “At this moment, we are tired of dystopias,” Sarkis told Architectural Record
“A raven is seated on a high perch next to a mushroom; a rat has a wasp and a fox as neighbours. Each setting at the table has been carefully tailored to fit its occupant—a walnut on a slice of bread for one, a chunk of tasty wood for another.”
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