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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“A legless Donald Trump, just wandering the empty streets of Horizon Worlds , selling commemorative coins.”
–
New York Times tech columnist
Kevin Roose , imagining the sad combination of Trump and the metaverse, in the aftermath of Meta reinstating the former U.S. President’s Facebook and Instagram accounts after a two-year ban
Nandita Kumar ’s solo exhibition “From Paradigm To Paradigm, Into the Biomic Time” opens at daadgalerie , Berlin. A deconstruction of the climate disinformation machine, Kumar’s titular news ticker regurgitates falsehoods as concrete poetry and a musical score. Using an algorithmic haiku generator, the Mauritian artist and 2022 DAAD Music & Sound Fellow translated 91 untrue statements into a 12-meter pianola loop that sonifies dissonance—“between the scientific community, political spheres, and the populace at large.”
“What Unsupervised insinuates, is that art history is just a bunch of random visual tics to be permuted, rather than an archive of symbol-making practices with social meanings.”
– Critic
Ben Davis , demystifying
Refik Anadol ’s AI “alternative-art-history simulator”
on view at MoMA . “The effect is pleasant—like an extremely intelligent lava lamp,” Davis writes. “What it is
not is anything like what MoMA says it is: an experience that ‘reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been.’”
“Cosmos,” a survey of kinetic and interactive sculptures by Björn Schülke blending “action and reaction, surveillance and performance,” opens at bitforms gallery San Francisco. Included are spacecraft- and rover-inspired assemblies, vision machines, a maquette of his Norman Y. Mineta San José Airport sculpture (2010), and sound art (image: Supersonic #3
“The whole apparatus has become extremely conservative in trying to encourage accountability and concrete results. We don’t want to do blue sky research.”
– Science journalist
William J. Broad , distilling the findings of “Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive over Time,”
a recent
Nature study by Michael Park, Erin Leahey, and Russell J. Funk that quantifies how scientific leaps forward are occurring less frequently with each passing decade
LuYang ’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, “LuYang Vibratory Field,” opens at Kunsthalle Basel. One of the most comprehensive surveys of the Shanghai-born artist’s work from the last decade, the show spawns entire universes from the “engrossing, fantastical, and sometimes grotesque techno-psychedelic videos, installations, and computer games” on view. In them, LuYang tackles major issues: life, death, reincarnation, and even global destruction.
“In his final book he argues that a new ‘ecological class’ must be assembled to replace the productivist working class of past socialist imaginaries; a class determined not by one’s position relative to the means of production but one’s position in a set of earthly interdependencies.”
– Political theorist
Alyssa Battistoni , on late French philosopher
Bruno Latour ’s turn to climate politics and his often vexed relationship with the left
“Data Garden,” an exhibition by Kyriaki Goni , opens at Blenheim Walk Gallery in Leeds, UK. In it, the Greek artist presents her eponymous ongoing series (image), which uses CGI and sculpture to chronicle Saxifraga depressa and Micromeria acropolitana , plant species native to the Dolomites mountain range and the Acropolis . Presenting plant DNA as a communication protocol that links communities, Goni centres “deep time, geological transformations, and plant history.”
“REVENANTS,” a show featuring Kelly Richardson , Nicholas Sassoon & Rick Silva , opens at the Rectangle artist-run space in Brussels. Addressing notions of scale and the geological, Richardson’s Origin Stories asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and Sassoon’s lava rock-inspired The Prophet (Tanaga 1) (2023, image) evokes what exhibition essayist Alexandra Crouwers describes as “the unimaginable turmoil that is in a constant grind beneath our feet.”
“I’m always trying to destabilize not only the perception of whether something is made by hand or machine but also destabilize how we assign value once we know.”
– American artist
Laura Splan , on her commitment to a hands-on process of computation. “I very much insist that anything I do on the computer is done ‘by hand,’ whether writing code, unfolding proteins, or manipulating vector waveforms with a stylus pen,” she tells writer Anna Mikaela Ekstrand.
OUT NOW :
Mindy Seu
Cyberfeminism Index
From the writings of Donna Haraway, to VNS Matrix’s games and poetry, to the biohacks of Mary Maggic—the 700 entry-strong hard copy of Seu’s eponymous
online archive compiles an anti-canonical guide to cyberfeminism’s long-ignored origins and expansive legacy.
“What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past.”
– Singer-songwriter
Nick Cave , expressing revulsion at the lyrics of a song written by ChatGPT ‘in the style of Nick Cave.’ “Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing,” he concludes.
“Holding Up The Sky,” a solo show by Caroline Monnet , opens at the Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB) in Ontario, Canada. Foregrounding her interests in indigenous geometry and the figure of the cube (image: It Cracks with Light The Room (2023), a 3 square metre assembly of inscribed styrofoam. The installation, and another made of PVC pipes and conduits, rebukes “prescriptive colonial architecture … the urge to square and compartmentalize.“
“Our analysis shows that ExxonMobil’s own data contradicted its public statements, which included exaggerating uncertainties, criticizing climate models, mythologizing global cooling, and feigning ignorance about human-caused global warming.”
– A team of American and German researchers, delivering proof that the oil giant predicted global warming “correctly and skillfully” since the late 1970s
”I’m not an anti-progress, back-to-the-Stone-Age guy. But we must regulate ourselves or something will come and regulate us against our will.”
– American screenwriter and film director
Craig Mazin , on the fungal apocalypse at the heart of his new HBO videogame adaption
The Last of Us (2023): fuelled by climate change, highly parasitic
Cordyceps infect the world’s population. “I think the thread underneath it is: You don’t want to be too successful on planet Earth,” Mazin says.
Marco Barotti ‘s solo exhibition “Rituals of Wasted Technology” opens at silent green, Berlin, presenting two mythical techno-species in defiance of obsolescence: As tower-mounted APES (recycled Wi-Fi sector antennas) perform ”quasi-rituals” from data input—Facebook likes, Google searches, tinder swipes—SWANS (used satellite dishes) float about, propelled by sound. Barotti’s show is part of “Speaking to Ancestors ,” a two-year series on ritual curated by Pauline Doutreluingne and Keumhwa Kim.
Creative economy thinker and entrepreneur Yancey Strickler shares his vision for metalabels , a new model for cultural production “like indie record labels for all forms of creative output.” Following a release proof-of-concept (a ‘record’ in his nomenclature), the Kickstarter co-founder maps creativity after platform capitalism. It entails a move away from lone creator-entrepreneurs to teams, protocol-driven compensation and ownership, and audiences that prioritize context over ‘content.’
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