1,576 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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Shortly after liftoff from a French Guiana spaceport, the James Webb Space Telescope departs Earth’s atmosphere. Outfitted with sophisticated infrared sensors, it’s en route to a distant solar orbit where it will study residual heat from stars and galaxies that appeared 13.7 billion years ago. Beyond the bevy of sensors, its 6.5 m primary mirror is seven times more effective at light gathering—it will see further into the past—than the long-ailing Hubble Telescope .
“Servers are places, vessels, townships. This feeling of leaving an old home is profound.”
– Media artist and critical engineer
Julian Oliver , after leaving a server he deployed for
Extinction Rebellion “2 years and 364 days” ago. “After migrating the last of its many open source platforms to a new dedicated server, one far more capable, I’m left with a ghost town,” Oliver writes on Twitter. “Attacked day and night, I watched a global environmental movement bloom on it to 10s of 1000s of accounts, a thriving hub of action, community, and ideas.”
Psychologist Eiko Fried points out the curious path pattern 800 unsteered bicycles create when pushed in Matthew Cook ’s 2004 computer simulation. In his paper “It Takes Two Neurons To Ride a Bicycle ,” the CalTech mathematician and computer scientist demonstrated that a two-neuron network can learn how to cycle, displaying human characteristics: “Just as when a person rides a bicycle, the network is very accurate for long range goals, but in the short run stability issues dominate the behavior.”
“Between 2006 and 2010, Second Life was the place to be for a vibrant art scene—despite the ugly graphics, the commodification, the unregulated, capitalist economy.”
– Critic and curator
Domenico Quaranta , contemplating NFTs and similarly conflicting precedents. In the wake of his
Feral File exhibition , Quaranta sorts pros and cons but remains crypto-curious: “As an art critic and curator, I feel compelled to follow the artists wherever they may go.”
ENCOUNTER :
Creating (dis)order with computers for five decades, the Hungarian pioneer zigzagged a path from mid-century painterly abstraction to a new generative art.
Critic Andrew Russeth offers incisive analysis of Liz Larner ’s “rare and admirable” restlessness. While known as an innovative sculptor, Russeth argues Larner’s passage through other fields warrants serious attention. Several 1980s works are discussed, including a microorganism decomposition study (image: Orchid, Buttermilk, Penny , 1987), and a kinetic device that rebuffed Survival Research Laboratories ’ “outrageously macho robots.”
“Canada is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. We can’t sit idly by when we have the opportunity to shape our collective future.”
– Philanthropist Allan Shiff, funder of the world’s first climate change curator position at the
Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). Shiff and his late wife’s $1.5M endowment has supported the ROM in hiring
liminologist -turned-curator Soren Brothers. “[Global Warming] needs to be treated as seriously as 19th-century Canadian art, or mammals and whales,” observes ROM Director Josh Basseches.
“NFTs seem to me just a way for artists to get a little piece of the action from global capitalism, our own cute little version of financialization. How sweet—now artists can become little capitalist assholes as well.”
– Art and music icon
Brian Eno , not feeling crypto art. “I can understand why the people who’ve done well from NFTs are pleased,” he explains in
The Crypto Syllabus . “It’s natural enough in a libertarian world to believe that something that benefits you must automatically be ‘right’ for the whole world.”
“BioMedia: The Age of Media with Life-like Behavior” opens at ZKM Karlsruhe, exploring synthesis, emergence, and biophilia. Over 60 artists including Refik Anadol , Anna Dumitriu , Libby Heaney , Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg , Jakob Kudsk Steensen , Harm van den Dorpel , and Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield (image: Artificial Nature , 2007-) present artificial agents in hybrid ecosystems that demonstrate interdependency. “The sympoetic community of the future will welcome artificial beings […] as a responsibility to life itself.”
“Butterflies Frolicking on the Mud: Engendering Sensible Capital,” the Thailand Biennale 2021 opens in Korat. Featuring 54 artists exploring the “capital of hope emerging from uncertainty,” its works include David OReilly’s meta-videogame Everything (2017), and a new interactive sculpture version of Keiken’s Wisdoms for Love 3.0 (2021, image) which positions NFT exchange as knowledge sharing (not commerce).
“S v Z,” a hometown solo show by San Francisco native Tauba Auerbach opens at SFMOMA. Documenting Auerbach’s study of how “structure, pattern, and gesture function at intricate and vast scales,” it offers a core sample of her voluminous output spanning painting and drawing, sculpture and installation, including her playful collaboration with Cameron Mesirow (image: Auerglass Organ , 2009), which provides the show’s soundtrack.
“Tech companies, enterprises, anyone writing software is dependent on open source. Now there is a recognition at the highest levels of government that this is a big risk.”
–
Chris Wysopal , chief technology officer at the security firm
Veracode , on the lessons from the
Log4J security crisis and how the underfunding of open source projects (Log4J maintainers work for free) poses a “systemic risk to the United States, to critical infrastructure, to banking, to finance.”
Multimedia and sound artist Kat Austen ’s research on the effects of microplastics on plants is published in the journal “Science of The Total Environment.” In a pilot study done as part of her artwork Stranger to the Trees (2020-21, image: WRO Media Art Biennale ), Austen and colleagues demonstrate that woody plants like silver birches uptake and ‘store’ microplastics in their root tissue, effectively cleaning contaminated soil.
“FOR YOUR INFORMATION
WE NEVER MADE AN NFT OF A PRINT
AND DO NOT SUPPORT THIS !!!”
– Joan Heemskerk, one half of the Dutch net art collective
JODI , denouncing the artnet auction “
ArtNFT: The Beginnings ” that includes their 2010 inkjet print
GeoGoo.net (Screenshot) . “JODI was not informed to be in this show and the print came with a book about digital art 10 years ago,” explains Heemskerk, also noting various errors in the auction text. “Who ever put this in there should be ashamed.”
Wired senior writer Kate Knibbs meets avatar artist LaTurbo Avedon (image), “a cross between the Japanese hologram pop idol Hatsune Miku and the pseudonymous British street artist Banksy,” in Second Life to chat digital mirrors, the metaverse, and NFTs. “There’s no separating the art from the artist,” Knibbs muses, after attempts to get Avedon to break character fail. “The artist is the art project, a sprightly-looking, nonbinary virtual being untethered from a human body.”
“How do we make room for extra limbs when the brain is already fully occupied with controlling the limbs we already have? Extra fingers and hands may actually end up harming the very bodies they’re designed to augment.”
– Writer and musician
Claire L. Evans , exploring the possibilities—and pitfalls—of prosthetics. In talking to
Plasticity Lab ’s Dr. Tamar Makin, Evans reveals cognitive failsafes that may prevent us from ever becoming cyborgs.
Exploring machine gaze resistance and “posthuman human vision,” the Domenico Quaranta -curated NFT exhibition “For Your Eyes Only” opens on Feral File. 13 artists including Morehshin Allahyari , Petra Cortright (image: smoking-vase-1 ), Jonas Lund , and Lev Manovich , submitted works, or “proofs,” in response to Quaranta’s thematic inquiry. “They can be paraphrased, explained, and described, but no description will ever exhaust them,” writes Quaranta.
“The ‘offline world’ and the ‘wilderness’ function as vessels for our frustrations with contemporary life: They are defined by what they don’t contain, rather than what they do .”
– Writer
Lauren Collee , examining the long and problematic history of the “offline” mega-narrative. “True disconnection, like true wilderness, is an empty goal,” she writes. “The internet does not cease to exist as a driving force, any more than ecological systems cease to shape our lives the minute we reach the end of the forest trail and hop back in the car.”
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