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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The third edition of Cairo’s media art festival, Cairotronica , kicks off a week-long exploration of “Data Fiction” at Tahrir Cultural Center. Between the exhibition, symposium, and performance program, director Haytham Nawar gathers more than 50 regional and international artists including Amira Hanafi , Anna Ridler , Morehshin Allahyari , Liam Young , Nora Al-Badri , and Francois Knoetzke . The latter’s installation Core Dump (2018-, image) situates a series of films that “emerged from the dystopian landfills of consumer culture.”
“Orchid enthusiasts and orchid enemies, please download the orchid collector guide to play along.” Thus posts Fantasia Malware to the sidebar chat, as Orchid Collector commences. Drawing on interests in “magical, corrupt, and chaotic software” the performance blurs lines between gaming livestream and scarcity rumination. Replete with banal narration (“I see now, a dark blue orchid!”), the trio rush to collect flowers, their mad scramble interrupted by news that the price of orchids has crashed.
“In Roblox, you can choose your gender. Go in as female and no one knows you’re biologically male. As soon as I got on the computer, I just knew myself as Hannah.”
– A 20-year old
Roblox user, in
Tom Faber ’s piece on how the popular online gaming platform provides a safe space for teenagers exploring their gender identity. “I spoke to almost 30 trans gamers, aged 13 to 30, for this article,” writes Faber, “and each emphasised the important role that games played in helping them to come to terms with their real-world selves.”
“Touching on the historical need of humankind to control and tame nature,” Jesper Just ’s film-based installation “Seminarium” opens at Gammel Holtegaard in Holte, Denmark. Drawing on the history of the site’s 18th-century gardens , which were landscaped as a “Danish mini-Versailles,” his precision engineered environment foregrounds flora in direct conversation with oblique facetted displays, showing closely cropped footage of human anatomy.
“I would not make ClickMine today. I think it’s important to not build dystopian things. The world is making dystopias faster than I can imagine them.”
– Software artist
Sarah Friend , on her 2017
browser game that parodies cryptocurrency mining. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, players can continuously click to generate
ERC20 tokens, which quickly ravages a landscape shown in the background. “It’s satire,” says Friend while teasing her upcoming NFT project as a hopeful one.
Harm van den Dorpel ’s “Mutant Garden” opens at Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam, surveying the artist’s research into evolutionary algorithms. The show, like van den Dorpel’s eponymous software , is divided into a “garden” for breeding artwork (image: Mutant Garden Autobreeder , 2021) and a “lab” for sharing process. “The tension between simplicity of computational rules and complexity in outcome, holds the key to understanding life, and by extension, our aesthetic appreciation of it.”
“Any vision of building a less centralized, more equitable internet has to ultimately account for ownership of all the physical stuff—the means —that makes the internet as we know it.”
– Writer and educator
Ingrid Burrington , on how the (common) conflation of the terms technology and infrastructure conceals who owns and governs the means of computation, connection, and production
Leading climate scientists James Dyke , Robert Watson , and Wolfgang Knorr are sounding an alarm that net zero carbon emissions is a flawed vision. For The Conversation , they trace how the idea of mitigating emissions while continuing to burn fossil fuels took hold in the 1980s, evolved in the Ryo summit and Kyoto Protocol , and reified in The Paris Agreement . They argue for immediate, drastic action, as a market-like economy of offsets, inadequate capture and storage methods and unrealistic reforestation models are magical thinking “driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate.”
In celebration of Earth Day, Yoko Ono declares “I LOVE YOU EARTH” across billboards in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and other cities in the UK. The message, set in stark black and white, is a call for climate action and a nod to Ono’s eponymous 1985 song and text piece, which includes the lyrics: “I love you, earth (…) I know I never said it to you / But I wanna say it now.” The two-week action is part of Serpentine Galleries’ multi-year project “Back to Earth ,” which has 60+ artists respond to the environmental crisis.
ENCOUNTER :
“Changing the colour of your Twitter picture is the digital equivalent of wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt. You’re not an agent of change, you’re just drawing attention to it.”
CGI provocateur
David OReilly , on the performative nature of social media activism. “Things that happen on the internet have a perceived influence, but when it comes down to it, they don’t translate to reality, to policy.”
ENCOUNTER :
Fuelled by a low poly aesthetic, mastery of all things glitch, and playful IDGAF irreverence, the Irish animator turned CGI artist has conquered Hollywood and the internet.
“If I can be a bit emotional: Die With Me has changed my life.”
– Belgian media artist
Dries Depoorter , on the “low battery conversations” app that put his practice on the map. Released in 2017 and an instant viral hit,
Die With Me allows users to chat with one another as their phone batteries go from 5% to zero. Three years later, the existentialist experience has not lost any steam: “Today, it’s #12 in the Top Charts on iOS,” notes Depoorter.
An output of curators Peter Kirn and Anna Titovets plus partner Kotä , “Experimental Music and Art” Expo opens at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA). !Mediengruppe Bitnik , Sara Culmann , Mikhail Myasoedov , and other participants’ expertise spans hard sciences, installation, and sound. The thematic: a search for new forms in a moment of crisis, as evidenced by Byrke Lou ’s postdigital materials research (image: CODE_xi {isbtm}•{~} 2014-).
“These NFT sites are victim factories, and it’s not just naïve tech investors that are the victims—it’s artists since every artist selling work on these platforms is now an Ether investor too.”
– Artist
Kimberly Parker , on the “headless Ponzi scheme” that are Ethereum-based NFT marketplaces. Digging deep into the sales data of major platforms, Parker reveals what happens when the value of artwork is tied to the speculative value of the currency. “This feudalist system quickly turns artists into crypto recruiters, desperate to bring even more people into the fold.”
An effort to encourage NFT artists and collectors to transition to greener blockchains, curator Juliette Bibasse and visual artist Joanie Lemercier kick off a series of coordinated cryptoart releases on Hic et Nunc , an indie marketplace on the energy-efficient Tezos chain. Named “The FEN” (image: generative type by Mike Brondbjerg ), the campaign launches with pieces by Dave Whyte , Zai Divecha , and Auriea Harvey . Drops from more than 30 other artists will follow in the coming weeks.
“The employer in an anti-union campaign is running a psychological terror operation, so that no worker in that facility ever considers the question of a union again. Amazon was sending a message to its workers across the United States.”
– Labour organizer
Jane McAlevey , on Bessemer, Alabama Amazon workers’ recent
failed unionization bid —and how inept media coverage of the doomed campaign
supported the company’s PR goals [quote edited]
“Last year, we created a new artwork Time Synthesizer . It was seen by almost no one. It doesn’t feel that it fully exists yet.”
–
Evelina Domnitch , sharing
documentation of her and Dmitry Gelfand’s latest installation. Visualizing water turbulences via laser-illuminated hydrogen bubbles,
Time Synthesizer premiered at Le Fresnoy’s “
Panorama 22 ” in Tourcoing, France during the October lockdown.
“The aesthetic of the glitch reveals the intrinsic mechanisms of a digital environment—a fleeting moment in which the interruption of fluidity becomes a symbol of new awareness and possibility of choice.”
Mario Santamaría ’s installation Unfixed Infrastructures and Rabbit Holes (2020) opens at Aksioma, Ljubljana, articulating invisible data flows. The Spanish artist programmed a “rabbit hole” network to cycle signals through different geolocations, seeking the maximum possible route allowed by network protocols. The delay—a measure of the materiality of digital time—is visualised by two screens video-streaming a Foucault pendulum, one connected to the gallery WiFi, the other to the “rabbit hole” network.
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