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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“As each patron stepped up and withdrew from the ATM, their picture was taken, ranking them based on the amount of money left in their wallet. For the opulent at Basel Miami, is was the perfect piece to feed your hubris.”
– Critic
Seth Hawkins , reflecting on Brooklyn collective
MSCHF ’s Art Basel Miami Beach
intervention , and its lingering crypto winter significance
Videogame experimenter Michael Birkin demonstrates that Tetris Tetris to Turing machines and back,” he details how the game’s block organization grammar can be translated to binary (image), construct logic gates, perform functions, allocate random-access memory (RAM), and create a virtual machine. The programmer’s triumphant finish : an “implementation of Tetris running on a computer created inside of Tetris .”
“You can see that there’s a genealogy here that results in a TikTok-dancing murder robot named M3GAN. This is fundamentally some old, old stuff.”
– Choreographer
Sydney Skybetter , on how the impossibly slick dance moves of horror film
M3GAN ’s titular dancing robot tap into deep-seated anxieties about nonhuman movement (e.g. the creepy marching of Boston Dynamics’
Spot )
Noemi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto, aka NONOTAK , unveal their latest kinetic light installation, SORA (2023), at Amsterdam’s Gashouder. A suspended architecture of rotating LED tubes performs a hypnotic choreography high above visitors’ heads in what the Paris-based light and sound art duo describes as an experiment in perpetual motion that interprets the sky. On view for a month, SORA also serves as the backdrop for a series of NONOTAK’s audiovisual live performances.
“It’s like saying ‘we had knives before, so what’s the difference if we have a submachine gun?’ Well, a submachine gun is just more efficient at what it does.”
– Psychologist and AI scholar
Gary Marcus , arguing ChatGPT and other large language models will be used as “misinformation submachine guns” based on recent election meddling and public sphere manipulation
For Quanta , science journalist Anil Ananthaswamy traces the backstory of AI image generation. In his telling, a probabilistic model (image) proposed in a 2015 paper by Jascha Sohl-Dickstein set the stage for a subsequent denoising technique now used in DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and other models. The technique reconciles the gap between generated images and training images, helping generative models provide lucid responses to whimsical prompts like “goldfish slurping Coca-Cola on a beach.”
“By attempting to shield consumers from high prices, governments will only encourage consumption via lower prices, prolonging the energy crisis.”
– Oxford Institute for Energy Studies Senior Research Fellow
Adi Imsirovic , advising
against governments deploying “subsidies, retail price caps, and tax reductions” to placate cash-strapped consumers. “Such actions only support the rich,” encourage fossil fuel use, and stifle innovation, he argues.
“Much within me is indeed worm, as I lie facedown, fused to my smartphone, in my blanket cocoon of proto-singularity.”
– Writer
Adina Glickstein , ringing in 2023 with a meditation on Nietzsche, transhumanism, and ‘goblin mode.’ The latter, Oxford’s
word of the year 2022 , is defined as ‘unapologetic self-indulgence’—not unlike the singularity, that Glickstein describes as “existential goblin mode, disembodied and self-indulgent to the max.”
Hugs on Tape (Gene/Susan) , the most recent iteration of an ongoing series by video aficionados LoVid , opens at Ryan Lee in New York. Displayed in the gallery’s window, duo Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus’ animation loops two figures mid-embrace, “a spontaneous and genuine interaction between the subjects” richly abstracted with video feedback. Parallel to the series, they share new tapestries, exploring the same visual language—but mediated by the constraints of hand-stitching.
“No currency, no collectors, no cashing out. Just having fun swapping and chatting about work that we made and loved.”
–
Kyle McDonald , on the joys of trading digital art
before the NFT boom. In 2019, McDonald and a few dozen peers joined
a2p , a speculative blockchain-based exchange run by artists
Casey Reas ,
Addie Wagenknecht ,
Rick Silva , and
exonemo . “It’s an artist-to-artist system to build and curate a collection,” Reas wrote in the platform’s
brief . “It’s a performance, but also a way to think about what happens to the work after it’s made.”
“We were each fighting a version of ourself that looked similar but that was uncanny, twisted in a way to which we didn’t consent.”
– Cartoonist
Sarah Andersen , on the similarities between troll- and AI-generated “shadow selves.” First, the alt-right hijacked Anderson’s work to spread neo-Nazi ideology, then
Stable Diffusion allowed for easy imitation of her and concept artist
Greg Rutkowski ’s distinct styles.
Mexican-Canadian media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer commemorates the passing of Japanese architect Arata Isozaki , a post-modern giant who blended East and the West in his designs, with an anecdote. “I had the honour of meeting him twenty years ago when I staged Amodal Suspension YCAM in Yamaguchi,” writes Lozano-Hemmer. “He told me I could make any intervention I wanted except touch his building, so I made a switchboard of messages relayed by searchlights over it.”
“The watermark looks completely natural to those reading the text because the choice of words is mimicking the randomness of all the other words.”
– Search engine marketer
Roger Montti , describing forthcoming cryptographic watermarks that will make texts generated by language models like ChatGPT instantly detectable. Summarizing research computer scientist
Scott Aaronson is doing for
OpenAI , Montti considers both the utility and fallibility of the security measure.
“Multispecies Clouds,” the first of a trio of exhibitions exploring the vexing question ‘who owns nature?,’ opens at the Macalline Art Center in Beijing. Participating artists include Sheryl Cheung , Wu Chi-Yu , Rice Brewing Sisters Club , and 15 others. Contributed artworks, like Chilean artist Patricia Dominguez ’ video installation Matrix Vegetal (2021-2, image), engage nonhuman species and “translate them into images, poetry, and politics,” writes curator Yang Beichen .
“I watched old ladies cry and fall in the airport, and entire families with children. I was more heartbroken about the people around me.”
– Passenger Jessica Bienert, on the chaos at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport when Southwest Airlines’ antiquated scheduling software had a meltdown after an arctic storm forced 8,000 flight cancellations. As a result, tens of thousands of frustrated travellers were stranded across America.
Titanic: Honor and Glory RMS Titanic in Unreal Engine . Currently 30% complete, the most recent demo of its photorealistic luxurious cabins and common spaces (which inevitably flood after it strikes its fated iceberg) has left videogame journalist Phil Iwaniuk rattled. Not exactly a game and more of a preservation effort, “it’s as though you’re a ghost, displaced in time,” he writes of the eerie feeling he had while exploring the uninhabited CGI model.
“It almost doesn’t matter what the market is doing … if crypto’s down—great—everything’s on sale.”
– Pseudonymous NFT collector and
Waiting To Be Signed co-host
Trinity , opining that as the “generative art community starts to separate itself from Web3,” the Tezos NFT ecosystem will flourish (“because it’s such a non-financialized chain”)
“As the heat builds again in 2023, it is perfectly possible that we will touch or even exceed 1.5°C for the first time.”
– Earth science scholar and writer
Bill McGuire , forecasting the cataclysmic effects of the next
El Niño . The recurrent Pacific climate pattern is known to boost global temperatures and predicted to return in 2023. “When it does, the extreme weather that has rampaged across our planet in 2021 and 2022 will pale into insignificance,” McGuire writes.
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