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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“We already live in a society which is very heavily gendered and very visually gendered. What these technologies are doing is making those decisions a lot more efficient, a lot more automatic, and a lot more difficult to challenge.”
– Data ethics researcher
Os Keyes , on algorithmic detection of gender and sexual orientation in the wake of a
new campaign to ban these applications in the EU
From “Cybernetic Serendipity” (1968), to the first Ars Electronica (1979), to SFMOMA’s “010101: Art in Technological Times” (2001)—Wolf Lieser’s Digital Art Museum website adds a neat event timeline that lets visitors scroll through a genre chronology. The feature is one of several additions (see the essay section ) since the site’s major overhaul in 2020. Launched in 2000, the online museum (that precedes Lieser’s eponymous Berlin gallery) is one of the first internet resources on the history of digital art.
“It seems as if we’ve successfully found a structure for the ‘machine code’ of the universe—the lowest-level processes from which all the richness of physics and everything else emerges.”
–
Stephen Wolfram , British-American computer scientist, physicist, and Wolfram Research CEO, on the 1-year-anniversary of the
Wolfram Physics Project , a daring initiative to find the fundamental theory of physics through computation
“Unmanned aircraft were seen as popular because U.S. soldiers didn’t have to go to the battlefield. But what about the casualties in the countries that were attacked by our drones?“ American artist Sam Durant asks in a wide-ranging interview about his new public artwork Untitled (drone) . “The idea was to bring this conversation home to America.” Originally conceived in 2016, Durant’s life-sized fiberglass sculpture of a Predator drone will be installed atop a 25-foot-tall pole on New York’s High Line in May.
“When invited to make temporary pieces for exhibitions, she would sculpt them so well they’d be impossible to dismantle. And then she’d refuse to gift them to the institution.”
– Writer
Dale Berning Sawa , on the determination of late land and conceptual artist
Nancy Holt . In a genre that “appears as an almost perfect distillation of the art world’s history of male privilege,” (critic Megan O’Grady), Holt was making sure that her voice was there to stay.
Software artist Everest Pipkin launches an exhaustive directory of 600+ open-source tools for building games, websites, and interactive projects. Supported by the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and the Clinic for Open Source Arts (COSA), Pipkin’s list includes anything from quirky single-purpose utilities (ASCII PAINT ) to major applications (Blender ). “The goal is to enable making entirely outside of closed production ecosystems or walled software gardens,” writes Pipkin.
“I for one enjoy watching Mercedes Benz simulate the Autobahn. It’s the Kraftwerk in me.”
–
Peter Kirn , musician and creative technologist, on NVIDIA’s
GTC 2021 keynote , in which the GPU giant demonstrated how, for example, car manufacturers are training AIs for future robotic factories in the company’s simulation platform
Omniverse . On his blog
CDM , Kirn explains why these advanced enterprise applications are relevant for artists, too
OUT NOW :
Rewired #3
(Anti)Trust
An examination of tech cynicism and ways to create “a digital future we can all have faith in,” featuring contributions by
Harith Khawaja , Angela Lee, Hannah Scott, and other Stanford undergrads and postdocs
“That’s never felt good to me, having to live in San Francisco and see the physical manifestation of capitalism’s inequality engine in geographical form. And today, with the pandemic and the economic crisis, the number of tents has exploded around here.”
–
Abolish Silicon Valley author
Wendy Liu , on living in Big Tech’s ‘belly of the beast’ and routinely being confronted by the jarring mix of obscene wealth and extreme poverty
“Using steganography, I have hidden the whole essay inside the JPEG. Yes, you’re looking at a conceptual artwork that is currently explaining itself to you.”
–
Matthew Plummer-Fernandez , demonstrating how artists are broadening what NFTs could be on the burgeoning artist-led marketplace
Hic Et Nunc . “NFTs may liberate artists not only technically, but conceptually,” he writes. ”As the certificate becomes widely accepted as the transferable commodity, the associated artwork is free to be an idea, an essay, or a gift.”
Artists Ben Rubin and Brian House’s “Terminal Moraine” opens at Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Taking a meta-historical approach, its lone eponymous work models the local impact of the Laurentide ice sheet . Approximately 18,000 years ago, the 600 metre wall of ice flowed down the Hudson Valley and shaped the landscape—Rubin and House simulate the glacial retreat and forest growth that followed. In their sonification “cells expand and branch while crystalline structures gradually break apart,” helping listeners contemplate the deep time of history.
“This is a time not only to ask how to resurface differently, but to ask what foundations to urgently sink—to recognise that it’s not enough to abandon, but that we have a role to abolish normal devices.”
– Luke Moody, new director of AND (Abandon Normal Devices) Festival, on the upcoming 2021 edition
A collaboration between sound designer Yuri Suzuki and musical artist and composer Miyu Hosoi , Crowd Cloud is unveiled at Haneda Airport, Japan. The site-specific installation distils the vowels of the Japanese language, sung by Hosoi, creating a unique composition that emanates from a choir of dozens of standing horns that converse with each other like people. Crowd Cloud is part of the Paola Antonelli-curated “Culture Gate” exhibition that sees artists offer fresh interpretations of Japan’s diverse culture in airports across the country.
DOSSIER :
“Myths unfold in real-time alongside critical ‘reveals,’ unveilings, and clarifications. Cultural gaps between the humanities and the sciences expand even as artists and interdisciplinary practitioners work to collapse them.”
–
Nora N. Khan , on the confusion arising around computation. With her at the helm, the
HOLO Annual will “engage with the new responsibilities that critics, theorists, programmers, technologists, and artists have to make sense of the mess.”
With “Take Me to Another World,” the first-ever Charlotte Johannesson retrospective opens at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Named after a computer graphic the Swedish artist created in the 1980s, the survey traces 60 years of Johannesson’s image-making between craft and technology. A textile artist who turned to computer programming (in 1978, the autodidact swapped her loom for an Apple II Plus), Johannesson’s political tapestries are inwoven with 1960s counterculture, punk, and feminism.
“I see artists erasing their own URLs from Twitter bios and replacing them with links to cryptoart platform pages, and turning their Twitter feeds into very noisy adverts for platforms, talking about bids, drops, sales.”
–
Ben Grosser , on why he created
Tokenize This , an NFT-critical artwork that—of course—can not be tokenized: the website containing a uniquely generated digital object can only be viewed once. “It’s resistant to being commodified,” states Grosser. “It says, ‘I don’t want to participate.’”
A reimagination of Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic triptych for the digital age, Carla Gannis ’ The Garden of Emoji Delights opens at Stockholm’s Fotografiska. In her 2014 collage, the American artist explores how Bosch’s visual world from 500 years ago matches our emoji dictionary, circa now. “There is humour, darkness, and absurdity,” state the curators. “Earthly, cosmological, and technological conditions are combined,” revealing ideologies and social constructs that have remained unchanged for centuries.
“Stan VanDerBeek coined the phrase ‘expanded cinema.’ But it was Gene Youngblood who put it on the cover of a book, filled it with rocket fuel, and sent it buzzing through the late-1960s art world like a heat-seeking missile.”
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