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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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.
DOSSIER :
“I see the pretext of our exhibitions and other activities as centrifuges of scientific knowledge, allowing us to assemble otherwise unlikely constellations of specialists around urgent concerns.”
– Media artist and DISNOVATION.ORG collaborator
Baruch Gottlieb , on how the collective “integrates the pure sciences on their own terms”
“Refocusing on the Medium: The Rise of East Asia Video Art” opens at OCAT Shanghai, featuring 25 iconic works by Nam June Paik , Ellen Pau , Yoko Ono , Park Hyunki (image: Untitled (TV & Stone) , 1984), and other pioneers. “As a new technology and experimental artistic medium with distinct characteristics, video art arrived with no cultural traditions,” writes curator Kim Machan . The exhibition, she explains, looks at how artists from Japan, Korea, and China explored this “new global medium.”
“My images didn’t get lost, kidnapped, or turned around in the grimy back alleys of a digital network. They weren’t harassed and harangued by disruptive ecosystems.”
American media artist Kyle McDonald posts a lengthy rumination on his latest project Facework Cheese
A raftload of private Sackler family WhatsApp chats reveal the heirs of the Purdue Pharma fortune sought the help of artworld institutions in clearing the family’s tarnished name. Embroiled in a federal lawsuit that charged Purdue—maker of OxyContin, the pill that sparked America’s opioid crisis—with fraud and regulatory violations, family members suggested museums that had received hefty donations could provide “short positive statements” about their philanthropic efforts. Among those discussed were the American Museum of Natural History, the Dia Art Foundation, the Guggenheim, and MoMA (all in New York), as well as the Tate and the V&A (in London). In October, the Sacklers pleaded guilty and settled for an unprecedented $8.3B fine.
“There is no comparable asset to Bitcoin. You have another category, let’s call it ‘unicorns.’ I’d put Ethereum in there, it’s a unicorn like Airbnb or Uber, it’s big … it’s complicated and compelling, there are a lot of people enthusiastic about it.”
–
Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor, explaining how Bitcoin is the perfect treasury asset whereas Ethereum and “the other 10,000 cryptocurrencies” are competing for space in the cultural imagination
“Is there a grand unified theory for communication?” In his Quanta guest column “How Claude Shannon Invented the Future,” Stanford Professor of Engineering David Tse relates how the American mathematician’s 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” birthed information theory. “Shannon’s genius lay in his observation that the key to communication is uncertainty,” writes Tse. His concept of the information ‘bit’ (short for binary digit) as the “basic unit of uncertainty” introduced probabilistic data modelling and signal processing, heralding the coming of the Information Age.
DOSSIER :
“The reality is that the art world is rife with wealthy corporate donors and philanthropists who make their millions, even billions, from work that many might consider morally or ethically fraught.”
–
Matthew Braga , on how patronage in the arts is often a Faustian bargain
OUT NOW :
Liz W. Faber
The Computer’s Voice
An analysis of computing and culture that asks ‘what is the significance of HAL having a male voice while Siri is female?,’ and other related questions of gender and embodiement
“Gnau, Dosher! gnau, Danser! gnau, Rancher und Victim! Ahn! Commack, ahn! Cupit, ahn! Dunder und Platonists.”
– Generative artist
Kate Compton , tweeting proudly about the self-described ‘best thing she’s ever written with a computer,’ which uses phonetic similarity vectors to thoroughly discombobulate Clement Clarke Moore’s classic 1823 Christmas poem “
A Visit from St. Nicholas ”
Zachęta National Gallery of Art curator Anna Maria Leśniewska and chief restorer Anna Olszewska demo a fully functional Senster Sapporo International Art Festival (SIAF). The 2018 reassembly of Edward Ihnatowicz’ long-lost robotic sculpture was scheduled to make its Asia debut at this year’s SIAF. Due to COVID-19, it remained in Warsaw and will show at Zachęta’s “Sculpture in Search of Place ,” opening on Dec 28, instead.
OUT NOW :
Liam Young
Planet City
Commissioned for the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2020 Triennial, the Australian film director and speculative architect’s latest short imagines a world collapsed into a single city—an aspirational new home for 10 billion people—so that the rest of the globe may heal.
“Cyberpunk 2077 was a behemoth of the game industry, and it didn’t even exist. Now it looks like it’s taking a long, hard fall—like one of the cars in the game, toppling off the map, no longer running on hype.”
– Journalist Sydney Halleman, on the highly anticipated, much delayed, and ultimately disastrous launch of what might have been the game of the decade
OUT NOW :
Matt Nish-Lapidus
Work, Life, Balance
An mammoth artist book containing every possible permutation of a poetic motif in which a hammer is repurposed in thousands of ways “exploring what it means to make and destroy through the logic of computational loops and iterations.”
DOSSIER :
“I fund my art by siphoning off parts of artist fees from gigs, grants, scholarships, and fellowships to live and make art in the margins of research, academia, and project funding.”
– Artist and composer
Suzanne Kite , on how to sustain an art practice
The culmination of a year of exploring emergent letterforms through machine learning and computation, Berlin-based type practice (and HOLO collaborator) NaN releases a collection of 28 procedurally generated display fonts and the codebase that was used to create them. Free-to-use and free-to-modify, the expressive set demonstrates that “scripting designs in this fashion can be both a creative and production tool,” writes NaN’s Luke Prowse. “There’s no reason why these scripts can’t be applied to icons, lettering or any other vectors either.”
“This is 22,935 birds, counted in Brooklyn in 2001 by intrepid birders for NYC Audubon.”
“$4,100 (+242%)”
– @BitcoinStimulus on what a $1,200 U.S. stimulus cheque invested into Bitcoin on Apr 15 is now worth, as the cryptocurrency hits a $23,000 USD all time high propelled by looming inflation anxiety and a surge of institutional investment
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