1,182 days, 1,854 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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With “Cao Fei: Staging the Era,” the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, opens a major retrospective of the trailblazing Chinese multimedia artist —the first in her home country. For over two decades, Fei has harnessed nascent formats (film, video, MMOs, VR, etc.) to surreally depict the dramatic social changes of a globalizing China. Years in the making, the show is realised as an IRL parkour of her many virtual worlds, where works bleed into one another to create “a sense of belonging to this particular here and now—a stage for our era.”
“The poetry arises from the arbitrary creation of music, as if a ghost sat at the bench tapping the keys.”
“I have more of a desire to hear than a rootedness in listening—listening is aspirational. I hope that I can listen, but I have a desire to hear, which is more overwhelming, suffocating, and loud.”
– Performance artist and composer
Suzanne Kite , in conversation with Riel Bellow about the “cornerstone of her psychological reality as an artist”
Appropriating escape room conventions, Roos Groothuizen ’s installation I want to delete it all, but not now opens at Enschede, Netherlands’ Tetem . The space challenges players to explain the dissapearance of missing international student Rosa Aringa by solving digital and physical challenges spanning her room and computer. A “deliberately endless quest” and commentary on our digital footprint, its players confront ”their own dilemmas about online addiction, privacy, and responsibility” while sleuthing.
“Poor images like Beeple’s, or the $1.54 million ape in a fedora, or most everything in the stream, are lessons in why we can’t stay locked down forever. Can’t just stare into our screens until death.”
– Spike Editor
Dean Kissick , searching for a shred of meaning in the work of
Beeple and
KAWS , in a moment when ”artworks have begun to look more like memes, while memes have begun to look more like artworks”
A project linking the ISM , MESS , the Moogseum and 50+ museums and cultural organizations, “Music, Makers & Machines” launches. The Google Arts and Culture online exhibition offers “a brief history of electronic music“ through an innovative archival interface; visitors can explore nightlife oral histories, inventor biographies, music technology timelines, and musician influence maps (image: Daphne Oram , of BBC Radiophonic Workshop fame) as a way to sidestep histories of genre, and blur the lines between music making and engineering.
“In 2011, Trifonov reviewed 123 definitions of life. Each was different, but the same words showed up again and again … he concluded that all the definitions agreed on one thing: life is self‐reproduction with variations.”
– Science writer
Carl Zimmer , on geneticist
Edward Trifonov ’s search for a holistic definition of life, in an excerpt from his new book
Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
OUT NOW :
Carl Zimmer
Life’s Edge
An eccentric survey spanning “protocells to brains … zygotes to pandemic viruses” that asks where exactly life begins (and ends)
”Most of these offerings look extremely similar to Clubhouse—as well as each other—even including details like the ‘leave quietly’ button. Some even borrow the name: I’ve come across Clubhorse, Clubchat, and Clubtalk.”
– Hong Kong-based technology journalist
Zheping Huang , on the myriad
Clubhouse clones he’s encountered since the Chinese government blocked access to the popular audio chat app in February
Adding several new works to his body of perceptual hacks, Olafur Eliasson ’s “Your Ocular Relief” opens at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. The show’s eponymous centerpiece is an evocative light show generated by an orchestra of lenses, prisms, mirrors, and colour-effect filters carefully configured behind a curved screen. “We live in an age of the proliferation of lenses,” says Eliasson, “not only in the surveillance cameras that pepper our urban space but also in the hands of activists who are aiming them back at the instruments of power.”
“We started last May, initially tokenizing physical art and goods—which, it turns out, is not an amazing business model in the middle of a pandemic.”
–
Lindsay Howard , independent curator and
Foundation ’s Head of Community, on the origins of the now prominent crypto art marketplace. “We launched three weeks ago. Since then, 1,500 NFTs have been minted, generating over $1.5 million in sales.”
“In the science of optics, a flare is like the waste product, light not being used for what it’s supposed to be used. I thought that’s a nice narrative because it’s so exceptionally beautiful, but it’s a little bit like homeless light.”
–
Olafur Eliasson , expanding on his newest lense and mirror-driven installation
Your Ocular Relief in a conversation with Devorah Lauter
Her first solo show with Steven Sacks’ digital art imprint, Auriea Harvey ’s “Year Zero” opens at bitforms gallery, New York. Alongside samples from the net artist’s long collaborative career, “Year Zero” introduces a new body of mixed-media sculptural work. Amalgamations of 3D body scans, 3D models of her clay sculptures, and historic museum artifacts, these digital and 3D-printed objects are hybrid products, made in Western Europe but borrowing from its colonies. “My sculptures are born broken,” states Harvey. “It is up to me to mend them.”
“Executives generally spin these bots as being good for everyone, ‘streamlining operations’ while ‘liberating workers’ from mundane and repetitive tasks. But they are also liberating plenty of people from their jobs.”
– Technology journalist Kevin Roose, on how bots and automation are deskilling (once irreplaceable) white-collar workers
“Solar Mountains and Broken Hearts,” a solo show by Israeli multidisicplinary artist Maya Attoun opens at Tel Aviv’s Magasin III Jaffa . Putting her favoured motifs—knots, hands and digits, tarot and alchemical esoterica—into dialogue with solar panels and terrestrial projections, Attoun offers an oblique meditation on catastrophe and futurity. Entirely devoid of humans, the mixed media works evoke “a gothic tradition that does not distinguish the beautiful from the terrifying,” notes Karmit Galili in her curatorial essay.
“Digital artists have media that can proliferate over a network and be held by many people at once without cheapening or breaking the aura of a first-hand experience. It is the one true benefit to working in digital space.”
–
Everest Pipkin , dismissing the concept of artificial digital scarcity. In a fiery op-ed, the artist rebuts a whole slate of arguments presented by crypto art advocates. “The value system a fully functioning NFT marketplace creates is reprehensible,” asserts Pipkin. “The only viable option is total moral rejection.”
“We refer to these attacks as typographic attacks . They’re far from simply an academic concern.”
–
OpenAI researchers, on the ‘blindspots’ of the lab’s latest computer vision model
CLIP . While CLIP shows remarkable capacity for abstraction—its multimodal neurons respond to literal, symbolic, and conceptual representations—it is also easily fooled: “when we put a label saying ‘iPod’ on this Granny Smith apple, the model erroneously classifies it as an iPod.”
DOSSIER :
“When one of our clients manages to sell their first work or discover that their work in another medium is financially viable after years of stress and confusion, that motivates us to keep going.”
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