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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“I find virtual studio visits most successful when I get a tour of artists’ hard drives—having their desktop appear on my own creates an interesting new form of shared space.”
American digital artist Casey Reas and German composer Jan St. Werner (of Mouse on Mars fame) get “Alchemical” at New York’s bitforms gallery. The show presents Reas’ experiments with machine learning techniques as image-making instruments in which he mobilized generative adversarial networks (GANs) trained on feature films. On view: a series of haunting Untitled Film Stills (2021) and five Compressed Cinema
OUT NOW :
Nicolas Nova & Anaïs Boch
Dr. Smartphone
An ethnography of (Swiss) mobile phone repair shops drawing connections across anthropology, science and technology studies, and design.
“For me, the striking thing about so many of these images of rioters in the Capitol is that what they’re doing–all of them–is creating content for social media. At least in their minds, the true seat of power is not actually in that building. It’s online.”
– Freelance journalist Elise Thomas, tweeting about the selfie-taking, livestreaming mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol Building today
Digital artist and ASCII aficionado Andreas Gysin (of Gysin & Vanetti fame) releases a browser-based live-coding “playground” that allows you to render stunning imagery with text. A self-professed exercise in extreme reduction, the tool comes with ~40 examples and demos, a live-code editor, a manual, and many text and ASCII art-related resources. “It is born from the joy and pleasure ASCII and text-based art can give,” writes Gysin. “It is a homage to all the artists, poets and designers which used and use text as their medium.”
“I thought I would have at least 10 years left to prepare for the future where everyone has their instant anything digital on demand at home. Looks to me like it’s down to something like five years now.”
– German AI artist
Mario Klingemann , on the arrival of OpenAI’s
DALL-E , a powerful neural network that creates images from text. “The only thing that prevents the internet from overflowing in strange new memes is that there is no open access to this yet,” writes Klingemann.
“The police must be given the tools to bring criminals to justice … especially in very serious cases where lives are at stake, it is not reasonable for us to say that certain classes of data should be out of reach of the police.”
– Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, reneging on previous promises that data collected by the nation’s robust contact tracing smartphone app
TraceTogether (used by 78% of its population) would be off-limits to police
“We argue that total containment is, in principle, impossible, due to fundamental limits inherent to computing itself.“
– AI researchers, concluding that a super-intelligent AI cannot be controlled. Containment of an advanced AI that’s far beyond human comprehension would require simulation, “something theoretically (and practically) impossible,” they write in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR).
Sophie Haigney profiles interactive experience wunderkinds teamLab , with a particular focus on the ascendent studio’s scale, organization, and business model. As per other recent analysis equating swarming crowds, long queues, and ticket sales (strike that: ticketed experiences !) with the democratization of the museum/art world, the burgeoning collective catalyze timely conversations about life after the auteur and the rarified viewer, and the fine line between immersion and spectacle.
OUT NOW :
Dan of Earth
EQUIVOCATOR
A “zero-player adventure” noise release on an
Atari 2600 game cartridge where two characters bumble around a 5×8
Game of Life implementation, generating a harsh evolving soundscape
“We must prioritize the wellbeing of society and the environment over maximizing profits. Alphabet’s guiding principle used to be ‘Don’t be evil.’ Help us be Alphabet’s conscience.”
– Founding Executive Council of the fledgling Alphabet Workers Union, in announcing their advocacy for workers’ rights within Alphabet and Google
ONWARDS! Refresh, reload, but not repeat. We hope you and yours aren’t stuck in a loop–let’s move forward together in 2021!
<3 from team HOLO
GIF created with NaN’s Glyph Filters , a powerful (and free) procedural font toolkit
“It was a historical moment! It was like, what was happening in the French Revolution?”
–
Miltos Manetas , on cybersquatting the 2002 Whitney Biennial with a
net art counter-show realised in Adobe Flash (on the snatched whitneybiennial.com domain) during Rhizome’s Flash Sunset telethon. Part of the organisation’s Flash preservation campaign, the live stream commemorated Adobe’s final day of Flash support by celebrating the software’s artistic legacy with selected guests.
Adobe ends support for Flash player. Launched by Macromedia in 1996, the software platform ushered in an era of animation and multimedia on the Web, enabling internet milestones like Joshua Davis’ Praystation distributing martin World of Awe Rhizome , Wick , and Internet Archive .
DOSSIER :
“I can’t even begin to fathom how liberating it would feel for my basic needs to be met without the obligations of [a day job on top of my art practice]. It would free up untold energy and time…”
– Digital artist and DEL resident
Emmanuel Madan , in response to the tantalizing notion of a full-time art practice being his
only job
David Medalla
Kinetic art pioneer and self-described “poet who celebrates physics” David Medalla dies in Manila at the age of 82. Best known for his “auto-creative” Cloud Canyons —a series of organic, shifting foam sculptures begun in the 1960s—the Filipino innovator also co-founded London’s influential Signals gallery in 1964 and the London Biennale in 1998.
“Undisturbed, and drawing with a soft pencil on greenish-colored, varnished paper, Ransonnet could use a tin box to send up to the surface his finished pictures, which he later painted over in oils: the first depictions of the seascape executed by an artist under the sea.”
– The Public Domain Review writers, on the astonishing underwater landscapes 19th-century artist Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez sketched inside a diving bell
Drawing on insights from Brian Eno, Stephen Wolfram, and Melanie Mitchell—music, computer science, complexity studies—author and science journalist Siobhan Roberts considers the enduring influence of John Conway ‘s game of life, in the aftermath of the mathematician’s recent passing. Sporting vertiginous fractal GIFs, and artwork by Kjetil Golid (image: Golid’s Crosshatch Automata ), Roberts provides an introduction to cellular automata and artificial life, and gives (surprisingly generous) air time to the computational and generative art practices it inspired.
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