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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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.”
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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.”
“It turns the picture into a puzzle—an enigma in a way,” says Jean-Jacques Calbayrac , one of five Game Boy Camera enthusiasts writer Raymond Wong interviewed about the allure of taking 128 x 112-pixel photos in the Instagram age. “It’s like going back in time, back to the birth of digital photography.”
“A series of time-traveling children books by Rush Limbaugh; a Carroll-esque fantasy story featuring a young Baron Trump written in 1885; a comic depicting Kanye West and Trump aboard a Space Force starship.”
– Researcher and book curator
Oscar Salguero , on media hatched within his
Presidential Libraries project, which imagined publications to capture the tenor of the Trump era
After months of lockdown, Basel’s HeK reopens with “Shaping the Invisible World,” a group exhibition that explores digital cartography as an instrument of knowledge. Curated by Boris Magrini and Christine Schranz , the show unfolds “spectacular panoramas and virtual scenarios” by James Bridle , Lukács & Broersen (image: Forest on Location , 2018), Trevor Paglen , Fei Jun , and others, that subvert contemporary cartographic practices to ask pressing questions about privacy, authorship, economic interests, and data aggregation.
“Tactical finance and tokenization is not just an act of resistance against financial institutions—I refused to get into NFTs, and yet my work and name have entered the blockchain, where they will now reside indefinitely.”
– Artist
Rosa Menkman , on discovering four of her works were co-opted and traded on NFT marketplaces [quote edited]
OUT NOW :
Whitney Phillips & Ryan M. Milner
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A post-truth roadmap for navigating the strange terrain of “polarized speech, conspiracy theories, and our polluted media landscape.”
“We hope this will accelerate the transition towards more durable and repairable product design … it is crucial, both in terms of environmental and consumer protection, to be able to repair and keep devices for as long as possible.”
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iFixit Communications Manager Dorothea Kessler, on new laws stipulating that new washing machines, hairdryers, refrigerators, and displays and televisions sold within the EU must be repairable for a decade. Her next target: smartphones and laptops.
LaTurbo Avedon ’s Morning Mirror / Evening Mirror (2020) takes over the Whitney website twice a day as part of the museum’s “Sunrise/Sunset ” series of net art interventions. The avatar artist created 14 videos depicting digital flythroughs of a 3D apartment within the frame of a virtual mirror overlay. “The mirror functions as both a surface for reflection and a window into a different world,” writes Avedon, “showing nature flourishing across living rooms as well as green screens and stage lights consuming the home studio.”
“In times of pandemics, NFTs and cryptocurrencies are as much about buying certainty as they are about buying assets. They allow you to be hopeful about the future while being pessimistic about the present.”
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Addie Wagenknecht , artist and researcher, on the psychology of the current crypto art craze. “It’s a new energy, but largely the same people,” she tells host
Hrag Vartanian . “They disrupt flawed systems only to recreate them in the virtual space.”
It’s refreshing to read commentary outside the “this will catch on/fizzle out” VR binary, or that dotes on headset sales figures, so this survey by Filippo Lorenzin is appreciated. For Hyperallergic , the Italian curator provides a very Italian reading of the pre-history of the medium: relative to linear perspective. Bypassing William Gibson and more or less igoring Palmer Luckey, Lorenzin goes way back—Brunelleschi 15th century back—connecting VR to “a point of no return for Western art” and later 360-degree paintings in considering the production and consumption of 3D space.
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