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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In “NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End Like This,” Glitch CEO Anil Dash reflects on how, in 2014, he and artist Kevin McCoy invented NFTs. Paired at Seven on Seven , Rhizome’s annual one-night hackathon in New York City, the two prototyped monetized graphics , a blockchain-backed technology of asserting ownership over an original digital work (photo ). “Our dream of empowering artists hasn’t yet come true,” Dash concludes disillusioned, “but it has yielded a lot of commercially exploitable hype.”
“The reason we use this metaphor of a baby is Spawn only has access to the information that we give her—we foster her with the data we feed her. We found this a way to not only talk about the importance of her daily diet, but the communal nature of raising a nascent intelligence.”
“It goes beyond scare tactics and overpriced face cream—this tool recommends needles and knives.”
–
Jennifer Strong , senior editor for
MIT Technology Review , on Shafee Hassan’s AI-powered beauty consultant
QUOVES that “will show you just how to nip and tuck your way to a better life”
TRANSFER and left.gallery teamed up to offer 49 “Pieces of Me” by, among others, Julieta Gil , Lawrence Lek , Sara Ludy , and Kim Laughton (image: Ascetic Chain , 2021) as commentary on the hype around NFTs. “This show is presented as a hopeful look towards a more thoughtful market beyond the one that arose too quickly, and without care,” write the curators. “There is no bidding—the artworks minted for this installation are unique tokens of appreciation, meant to be held and cherished, not flipped.”
“The problems NFTs purport to solve (authentication, provenance, scarcity) were never really problems, and they potentially introduce entirely new problems.”
– Anonymous collector, quoted in an email announcing the
And/Or Gallery online store. Future proof editions from A-list digital artists including
JODI ,
Olia Lialina , and
Brenna Murphy that
only cost several thousand USD—quite the bargain, in this moment of intense speculation.
Directed by Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala , the 13th Gwangju Biennale—“Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning”—opens, “challenging the divisions imposed upon corporeal, technological, and spiritual intelligence” with works by John Gerrard , Ana Prvački , Moon Kyungwon , Lynn Hershman Leeson , and others. Among the new commissions is Femke Herregraven ’s Twenty Birds Inside Her Chest (image), a choir of eight human larynx sculptures interpreting the “aquatic voice” of the haenyeo , a community of female freedivers on Jeju Island, Korea.
“These are the Maiara, flying witches commemorated in local mythology on Alicudi, a remote Italian island historically afflicted with ergot-poisoned rye crops that, when milled and made into bread, dosed the entire starving and impoverished local populace with LSD.”
–
Charlotte Gush , Senior Editor at Manchester International Festival (MFI), on the folklore that inspired artist Tai Shani’s contribution to MFI’s
Virtual Factory
Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani ’s first online artwork, The Neon Hieroglyph , premieres as part of Manchester International Festival’s Virtual Factory series. Drawing on her research into ergot , a grain fungus from which LSD is derived, Shani composed nine episodic films that explore psychedelics as a catalyst for change in what the curators describe as “a dreamlike CGI journey that takes us from the cellular to the galactic, from the forests to the subterranean, from the real to the almost unimaginable.”
“Everything—capitalism, the economy, politics, the internet, supply chains—has become a terrifying, complicated mess that we can’t understand. But we can understand a ship blocking a canal.”
– Sci-fi writer
Tim Maughan , on our fascination with the
Ever Given grinding world trade to a halt. “It’s a relief to be able to point at something and know that it’s wrong,“ writes Maughan. “It’s a huge, dumb, obvious object wedged into a place it shouldn’t be.”
OUT NOW :
Catherine Mason
A Computer in the Art Room
Originally published in 2008,
Catherine Mason ’s chronicle of the birth of UK computer art between 1950 and 1980 is now available as an e-book with an updated introduction
“I’ve spent a lifetime wondering why the Amiga ‘Insert Workbench’ boot image looked kinda wonky,” confides Panic Inc . co-founder Cabel Sasser on Twitter. ”I always assumed it was hand-drawn pixel art.” It turns out it’s vector art. A surprised Sasser reveals that just 412 bytes of vector drawing instructions were needed to render the iconic (Sheryl Knowles-created) hand-held floppy disk. “Incredible!” Meanwhile, media artist Golan Levin verified the 1985 vector data with a “quick-and-dirty” Processing sketch .
“Technologies aren’t for anything. They emerge and are socially constructed as a mix of opportunity, problem-solving and chance, not some inevitable building block in the myth of progress.”
–
Tobias Revell , on the assumption “that crypto technologies have some sort of teleology—a preordained role in an inevitable story of humanity.” “Crypto still doesn’t have its shibboleth, its narrative monument, its imaginary—and if it does have one now it’s probably, unfortunately, Beeple.”
Opening at Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt, Germany, Daniel Canogar ’s solo show “Latencies” explores a world of transient, fleeting memories, shifting media and continuously increasing data streams. Next to signature works from the artist’s Small Data and Echo Series , the show features five pieces from the new Latencies Series (image: Monocle ), for which Canogar mapped discarded parts like lenses, heat sinks, and shredded aluminium onto animated screens.
“The ‘softwalk’ has long been the artist’s designation for the way avatars in 1990s simulation games traverse their fictional universe: an even, smooth step, unperturbed by the specificities of the environments they cross.”
Gerhard Mantz
Famous for his dystopian landscapes, German CGI artist
Gerhard Mantz dies at the age of 71 in Berlin. A successful sculptor before embracing 3D modelling software in the 1990s, Mantz’ renders showed at MIT, MoMA, and the LA Center for Digital Art. He was also one of five artists exhibited at HaW’s “Natürlich Künstlich” in 2001, one of the first digital art shows in Berlin.
“How many people do you need to put together a Manhattan Project? The relevant question is: how large of a population do you need to draw from in order to recruit enough scientists to staff such an effort?”
– Sci-fi writer
Ted Chiang , on why people and not AI, are the key to the fabled
intelligence explosion . “This is how recursive self-improvement takes place—not at the level of individuals but at the level of human civilization as a whole.”
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