1,369 days, 2,175 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“Leaving your mark can also be acting responsibly and making contributions to our environment which have not necessarily got great big signatures written all over them.”
– British architect
David Chipperfield , on his firm’s 6-year renovation of the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed
Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (due to reopen on Aug 22). “We live in a society that is obsessed with the new,” he tells
Chloe Stead . “I think the next stage of our civilization is going to be defined as much by us knowing how to protect things while we develop.”
In an interview conducted in the wake of her current solo show, “Twisted ,” at New York’s New Museum, American media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson reflects on five decades of interrogating emerging technologies. Known for making poignant statements about surveillance, bioengineering, and AI (image: Seduction of a Cyborg , 1994), Leeson notes that “every single advancement in technology had its base in warfare. There’s an inherent strand in the DNA of these inventions that leads them to assault. We have to cure that.”
“It’s probably not a coincidence that three of the largest social networks in the world all announced a raft of child-safety features in the summer of 2021. So what could have prompted the changes?”
– Technology Editor
Alex Hearn , noting a string of changes to how Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok engage young users (e.g. the latter will no longer send push notifications to teens after 9 or 10pm)
just as the UK begins enforcing the
Age-Appropriate Design Code of Practice , guidelines spun out of the EU’s
GDPR data protection law
OUT NOW :
Ruben Pater
CAPS LOCK
A rigorous examination of the inextricable links between graphic design and capitalism that details how “design is locked in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources”
“I’m stunned that they forced the removal of our ‘solidarity with Palestine’ statement which forms part of our exhibition. That they did so following the pressure from a lobbying group known to platform the extreme-right settler movement in Israel is an affront to human rights, in Palestine and elsewhere.”
“Spirits Roaming on the Earth,” the first major survey show of American artist Jacolby Satterwhite opens at Pittsburgh’s Miller ICA. Providing a chronology of the artist’s signature fusion of world building, mythology, and Queer theory, and interpretations of his Mother’s drawings, in mixed-media works spanning installation to VR and CGI (image: Black Luncheon , 2020), Satterwhite “transforms existential uncertainty into a generative engine of resilience, reinvention, and celebration.”
“You want to be able to manage the risk you’re taking on. You don’t want to have one hundred percent of your net worth invested in the profile picture project of the week—it’s not a tenable position to be in.”
– Pseudonymous cryptocurrency pundit
DCinvΞstor , unironically advising NFT buyers against putting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into post-
CryptoPunks collectible avatar projects, in the current overheating market that has been christened “JPEG Summer”
“Error & Power” opens at Artcore Gallery, Derby (UK), presenting the output of Naho Matsuda and Neale Willis ’ residency. For nearly a year, the two artists explored “spaces of chance” and “the potential for mistakes and errors to shape their work,” writes curator Aisling Ward. Matsuda’s Blue Girl Obedience Experiment , while Willis’ placement of .JPG and Untitled computer equipment (image) manifests symbols of cybernetic serendipity.
“I’m surrounded by emojis and eyeball wallpaper, tiny caricatures of our collective human experience, and I am told that every single one of my emotions is, or already has been, for sale. I am not in control. Still, I am complicit.”
–
Saira Ansari , on the Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist-curated “
Age of You ” exhibition at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai. “The show hints at being democratic with fear and rage,“ Ansari observes in her ambivalent review. “It’s successful with the former, lax with the latter.”
Showcasing artists including Chim↑Pom , Hasan Elahi , and Eisa Jocson , “Adorable Big Brother: On Never Being Able to be Alone Again” opens at the ACC in Gwangju (KR). Ambivalent in tone, the exhibition explores surveillance “from production to consumption, control to exclusion.” Zheng Mahler’s 3D animation The Master Algorithm
“I don’t want Liyla to be relevant anymore. I want this game to be a part of history, not a part of the present time.”
– Palestinian software engineer
Rasheed Abueideh , on the timeliness of
Liyla and the Shadows of War , his 2016 videogame about a father’s (futile) attempts to protect his daughter during the 2014 bombings of the Gaza Strip. “In this game, even if you think that you have a choice, you don’t,” he says. “You’re powerless and weak. I wanted the players to get a glimpse of that feeling.”
Currently Unidentified Leaf Abbotsford Convent (2021), an instance of sound artist Dylan Martorell ’s series translating leaves into musical scores
“At any time, the finance industry could have suggested or demanded design changes. It didn’t. Artists did,” writes Charlotte Kent in an op-ed on how NFT creators force a debate about blockchain tech and the environment. Surveying key works including Memo Akten ’s Cryptoart.wtf and John Gerrard ’s Crystalline Work (Arctic) (image), Kent rejects the notion that crypto art is beholden to an (energy-intensive) Ethereum- and Bitcoin-rich collector class. “Diversifying is in the spirit of the distributed ledger.”
“It’s true that they have a format problem, and yet, in the name of human priorities, I still feel compelled to advocate for their existence.”
– Writer
Laura McLean-Ferris , on the works in
Trevor Paglen ’s 2015
solo exhibition at Metro Pictures, New York. First published on Oct 7, 2015, the review muses “whether this is all just brilliant rigorous journalistic research which has, for some reason, taken the form of an art object.” McLean-Ferris praises Paglen for leveraging art for activism. “Still, this only works when it either transforms the material, or transforms the space around it.”
Collaborating with bioengineers at Rice University, generative design studio Nervous System creates complex blood vessel networks using custom software and 3D-printed sugar. “After printing, these sugar templates are cast in a mixture of living cells and gel,” they write on their blog. “When the gel has set, the sugar is dissolved, leaving the intricate branching network that serves as blood vessels for the living cells.” According to their paper in Nature , the cells can be kept alive for two weeks.
DOSSIER :
“We’re not reporters, exactly; we’re recorders. But like journalists of another century, we will be cutting, pasting, arranging and re-arranging, until something new emerges from the noise.”
– Writer and musician
Claire L. Evans , on parsing this year’s MUTEK Forum through daily broadcasts and a sustained publishing sprint
Logged through daily broadcasts and a sustained publishing sprint, writer and musician Claire L. Evans ‘records’ the 2021 MUTEK Forum, sharing knowledge and research methods from selected guests.
PSA: HOLO Readers enjoy a 30% discount on *all* MUTEK passes—join us!
“To stand in these places is to stand in a place where desire was met. Where for a moment, something that was yours was carved out of the ugly body of online corporate games culture. Like building a fort in the woods between the highway and the mall.”
– Software artist
Everest Pipkin , on the seven billion worlds users (the majority of them children) created in
Roblox , the “lush, blocky, user-design nightmare” that is “one of the biggest games in the world”
OUT NOW :
Shannon Mattern
A City Is Not a Computer
A sustained analysis of the ‘smart city’ metaphor that has shaped conversations about urbanism in the 21st century—and critique of where it falls short
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