1,182 days, 1,855 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“Normally, good parties have people in them. The smells of sweat, the sticky limbs, the flânerie, the dopamine just gushing.”
– Critic
Shiv Kotecha , on
Party/After-Party at New York state‘s Dia Beacon. Authored by Detroit techno luminary
Carl Craig , the installation lays bare the symbiosis between electronic music and empty postindustrial space.
“The networks that determine artistic success are largely invisible to practitioners—even insiders see only specific segments of it. We relied on big data to map these networks out and remarkably, we find artistic success highly predictable.”
While many express outrage over the environmental impact of Non-Fungible Token (NFT)-based art, Memo Akten shows you the receipts. Building on an impassioned Twitter thread and Medium post , Akten has created a web app that calculates the ecological cost of tracking sales and bids on the blockchain for individual pieces of art distributed through SuperRare . Fire up the site, a random artwork is selected, and you’ll see its environmental impact as measured in number of flights or weeks of an average EU resident’s electricity consumption.
DOSSIER :
“TRANSFER is operating on a different timescale than most galleries trying to turn a profit to keep their doors open. The gallery exists to help bring artworks into the world, but our motivation is never around selling work in the short-term.”
– Gallerist
Kelanie Nichole , on how focusing on emerging mediums is an exercise in patience and cultivation
“UNINVITED brings to life a new being, born of the combination of surveillance data with the hallucinatory state experienced by many device systems when infected with a virus.”
The Society for Non-Trivial Pursuits (S4NTP , affiliated with UdK Berlin’s Generative Art class) launches “Future Voices,” a one-year-long radio broadcast generated from people’s “hopes, fears, and dreams,” uploaded as audio recordings from around the world. Commissioned for Berlin’s CTM Festival , the project hopes to amplify “voices that would otherwise remain unheard within an attention economy that favours loudness, provocation, and conspiracy theories.”
“Although it felt a little creepy engineering a drug-resistant strain of E. coli in my kitchen, there was also a sense of achievement, so much so that I decided to move on to the second project in the kit: inserting a jellyfish gene into yeast in order to make it glow.”
–
Elizabeth Kolbert , author of
The Sixth Mass Extinction (2014), on CRISPR as a commodity that could help revive—or finish—threatened species
“Twitter and Facebook and other platforms are now trying to put the genie back in the bottle. They could have done something long before, but they chickened out. And they created a monster.”
– Longtime
Anti-Racist Canada blogger Kurt Phillips, on how the QAnon mythos that “the world is controlled by pedophile child-eating Satanists“ festered in Silicon Valley’s privatized echo chembers
Tony Longson
British computer art pioneer
Tony Longson dies in Los Angeles. A 1980 Artist in Residence at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and credited for setting up Cal State LA’s computer animation program shortly after, Longson was a SIGGRAPH mainstay and exhibited internationally at, for example, The Hague’s Gemeente Museum, New York City’s bitforms gallery, and the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology in Lisbon.
“To be truly countercultural in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self.”
– Cultural critic
Caroline Busta , on the (seeming) invisibility of counterculture within the platform economy
“What distinguishes workmanship, craft, and making from industry is uncertainty. There’s a ‘risk’ in the process that resolves between the maker’s discernment and dexterity.”
“What if satellites were art?” asks critic Régine Debatty in her review of Trevor Paglen’s (temporarily closed) solo exhibition “Unseen Stars ” at OGR Torino, Italy. Revisiting his spacefaring sculpture Orbital Reflector
“I hope to inspire people like me to use their skillset for political purposes—hacking is political.”
– Hacker donk_enby, on scraping more than 56.7 terabytes of data from the far-right social network Parler before Amazon Web Services, Google, and Apple pulled its plug. Instrumental in organizing the Jan 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the network’s data dump might help reconstruct the events, donk_enby explains: “I hope that it can be used to hold people accountable and to prevent more death.”
Visual artist David Shrigley “fucks all your devices” with unabashed tech cynicism (and rare earth metals)
DOSSIER :
“It’s important to move away from the idea of energy as a metaphor ‘tinged with virtue’ and towards a concept of energy as a ‘scientific entity’ with a material imprint. This, I would argue, is where artists come in.”
–
Chloe Stead , exploring “new ways of thinking about, valuing, and inhabiting energy systems” (as laid out by political scientist Cara New Daggett) and how artists may give shape to them
Inspired by how SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) is used to ferment kombucha, MIT and Imperial College London researchers have produced several proof of concept living materials. Drawing on the flexibility of lab-grown yeast, Timothy Lu (MIT) and Tom Ellis (Imperial College) have produced microbe cultures that detect environmental pollutants, and glow in the dark when exposed to certain hues of light. “We foresee a future where diverse materials could be grown at home or in local production facilities, using biology rather than resource-intensive centralized manufacturing,” says Lu.
“What you’re offering by [encoding digital data as DNA] inside the cell is the machinery the cell has to protect its DNA.”
–
Harris Wang , system biologist at Columbia University, on successfully inserting binary code for “hello world!” into the DNA of living E. coli bacteria using CRISPR. In their
paper , Wang and team claim that, compared to other DNA-based data-storage methods that rely on in vitro synthesis, in-cell encoding can maintain information over many generations in natural open environments.
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