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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“I think there should be no such thing as billionaires and that Space is a commons and a place for the public good, where civilization at large does its work through its governments to try to protect Earth’s biosphere … it doesn’t work, to make a profit in space.”
True to form: after a tweet by Youtube celebrity Vsauce sporting one of David OReilly ’s meme shirts spawned countless fakes, the CGI artist trolls back with a special commemorative shirt
“I’m trying to draw a parallel between the way data is understood and how artists who made landscape images in the nineteenth century were selective—and omissive—in order to propagandize notions of progress and ‘greatness.’”
Joanie Lemercier ’s “Lightscapes” opens at Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Madrid. The video mapping connoisseur’s first major solo exhibition in Spain lays out a path through seven audiovisual installations, including classics like Eyjafjallajökull and Fuji , part of Lemercier’s 2010 volcano series, as well as three new pieces. The video projection The Hambach Forest and the Technological Sublime , for example, captures harrowing scenes of environmental crimes perpetrated at Europe’s largest coal mine and how climate activists are fighting back.
“The glint in Cyberpunk 2077 , then, is not simply a lighting effect but an opportunity to relish the sheer quantity of unseen micro-temporal computations, supply chains, research, and labor required to produce it.”
–
Hank Gerba , on the elusive gleam reflecting off so many surfaces in ads—and in videogames
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A Bestiary of the Anthropocene
An illustrated field guide for a post-natural world of plastiglomerates, surveillance robot dogs, and antenna trees featuring 100+ collages as well as texts by Aliens in Green, Benjamin H. Bratton, Anna Tsing, and others
“He enthusiastically asked whether the system might be used to arrange hundreds of thousands of people all across the United States, to make a heart that would be visible from space!”
“We can experiment with scenarios and discuss them at a level that we couldn’t 50 years ago. But our models for governing are still what we had 50 years ago.”
Examining the post-truth moving image, the online program “True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films” launches. Programmed by Lukas Brasiskis , the series includes historically signicant works exploring “unstable boundaries between fact and fiction, nature and artifice, objectivity and subjectivity.” The program features Sondra Perry , Laura Poitras , Forensic Architecture , and other key figures (image: Harun Farocki ’s Parallel II and Parallel III , part of his 2014 survey of ‘open world’ games). A total of five thematic programs—20 films in total—will be available sequentially through Apr 19.
DOSSIER :
“If I have any allegiance with respect to the future of the planet it is not particularly with humans—it is with the manifold ways in which life produces intelligence, beauty, and sociality.”
– Scholar
Geoffrey C. Bowker , on human exceptionalism and our “impoverished language for thinking about interconnections” that ignores that symbiosis occurs across all life
“I was front row to a fungal safari. There were invisible exchanges—infestations—happening without my knowledge or consent.”
–
Zoë Schlanger , journalist and science writer, on the wonders of at-home mycology (i.e. growing oyster mushrooms in her kitchen) and why “watching something busily transform trash into fleshy, sculptural fruit is a comfort”
“A broadly told story is that Kante was rankled over a daily paper article by a Lebanese correspondent comparing African dialects to ‘those of the birds, impossible to transcribe’.”
– Designer
Tapiwanashe S. Garikayi , on the origins of the
N’Ko writing system Solomon Kante invented in 1949 and that Garikayi is currently reconstructing as an OpenType font
“Stranger Dreams” opens at Mains d’Œuvres, Saint-Ouen, Paris, presenting works by 13 media artists including Memo Akten , Caroline Delieutraz , Dasha Ilina , and Sabrina Ratté that explore how nascent technologies feed the subconsciousness—all “while we slowly slide into dystopia.” Ilina’s pillowcase embroidery, for example, asks Do Humans Dream of Online Connection? (2021, image) and was created especially for the exhibition during a residency.
“We will always choose a lesser home-brewed tool tailored specifically to our own needs, over a better generic tool that we have not built and do not understand.”
– Nomadic programmers
Hundred Rabbits , describing the DIY ethos behind their software (image: the duo’s livecoding “procedural sequencer”
Orca )
“It’s not just anxiety that shows up when we’re waking up to the climate crisis. It’s dread, it’s grief, it’s fear.”
– Canadian author, researcher, and science broadcaster
Britt Wray , on the rise of eco-distress and how to combat it. “What’s really important is we start normalizing this,” Wray states. “Not only to help people who are dealing with this very reasonable distress, but also because allowing those transformations to happen is hugely energizing for actionable climate movement.”
Software engineer and electronics hacker Ian Hanschen shares his vast bitmap font collection that he pulled from various demoscene archives over the years. The catalog includes hundreds of glorious pixel letterform sheets created on the Commodore 64, Atari, and Amiga home computers in the late 1980s and early ’90s. “I don’t remember where much of this collection came from,” Hanschen writes about the missing metadata. “I just thought after finding a few of these [archives] had died that I should make it available.”
DOSSIER :
“[At the start of the pandemic] governments were quick to talk about bailing out cruise operators and airlines, what does it say about art’s value to society that we didn’t move as swiftly or generously to bail out artists, too?”
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Matthew Braga , asking why the arts are never deemed ‘too big to fail’
“After the Phantom Dream Car bust through the wall, four hundred spectators rushed forward to further demolish the smoldering cabinets and cathode-rays.”
– Writer and video artist
Theodora Walsh , on the enduring impact of
Ant Farm ’s classic video art stunt
Media Burn (1975)
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