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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In protest of the (digital) opening of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum , a new museum embroiled in colonial controversy , artist Aram Bartholl releases a site-specific Instagram filter. Part of “Owned by Others ,” an artist initiative that examines the problematic narratives, places, and artifacts from, around, and on Berlin’s Museum Island, the filter ‘rekindles’ the fire that ravaged the south portal of the $700M edifice in April.
“This is a story about infrastructural work through which we’ve let the world become unlivable.”
–
Anna L. Tsing , anthropologist and author of
The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), on the recent launch of
Feral Atlas , a five-year curatorial project and online platform that maps the un-designed—‘feral’—effects human infrastructure has on the world
OUT NOW :
More-Than-Human
Co-published by Het Nieuwe Instituut, Office for Political Innovation, General Ecology Project at Serpentine Galleries and Manifesta Foundation, More-Than-Human compiles 34 essential texts by post-anthropocentric luminaries including Donna Haraway, Anna L. Tsing, and Octavia Butler.
“The AI itself, dubbed ARTUµ in an apparent Star Wars reference, is based on open-source software algorithms and adapted to the plane’s computer systems at the U-2 Federal Laboratory.”
–
Washington Post business reporter
Aaron Gregg , on the first (known) AI onboard a U.S. military aircraft. Controlling sensor and navigation systems on a U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane, the AI system was deliberately designed without a manual override to “provoke thought and learning in the test environment,” Air Force spokesman Josh Benedetti told Gregg over email.
DOSSIER :
“What a difference 20 years and a global pandemic makes. Where once only dictators and movie villains celebrated genocide, now gap year hippies and grumpy uncles are getting in on the act too.”
–
Chloe Stead , on climate cynicism and why, contrary to popular belief, population growth is
not to blame for the environmental crisis
Perhaps an example of the crypto art we deserve rather than want or need, CGI artist Beeple sells $582,000 of open edition non-fungible tokens (NFT)-based art in 5 minutes. The Nifty Gateway platform windfall builds on Crypto is Bullshit (image), his bombasticly glib first foray into NFT art in late October, which he framed on his website as “i just learned wtf an NFT is like two weeks ago, not gonna act like i have a ton of intelligent shit to say here.”
“How did Big Boy Art react to this apparently completely new thing called the internet? By creating a JPG and selling this newly-minted real estate for a lot of money.”
– German media artist and filmmaker
Hito Steyerl , mocking online art fairs as part of the ‘10 worst things in 2020,’ during “Digital PTSD: The Practice of Art and Its Impact on Digital Trauma” (Steyerl’s talk at 3:10:00 mark)
Spearheaded by Toronto’s Trinity Square Video , “Moving Ether Way,” an online exhibition featuring the work of Camille Rojas , Dallas Fellini , Hiba Ali , and sarah koekkoek opens. Curated by Holly Chang and Karina Iskandarsjah and up through Jan 30, the whip-smart show capitalizes on the intersection of dance and 360° video, and features performers responding to the stock market, the Italian piazza, wetlands ailing from a sewage leak, and the notion of a world without Amazon (image: Ali’s workers liberation as environmental justice ).
“If you have millions of these texts in your possession, you can, on the level of words, phrases and keywords, trace various terms—how they emerge and how they migrate.”
–
Lev Manovich , new media scholar and researcher, on his current project Everywhere. A database of 4.3 million events—and their descriptions—in 200 countries that took place between 2003 and 2019, “it allows tracing the route of ideas through the world—and beyond the traditional centres.”
“Our stuff can be broken down into ingredients, of which concrete and aggregates take a gargantuan share…. Then come bricks, asphalt and metals. On this scale, plastics are a minor ingredient—yet their mass is still greater, now, than that of all animals on Earth.”
Better late than never: the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 48 states file lawsuits in Federal District Court against Facebook alleging its systematic aquisition of competitors is monopolistic. If the antitrust case forces the ‘breaking off’ of core platforms Instagram and Whatsapp from Facebook into separate businesses, it could have serious repercussions for Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and would-be Silicon Valley giants.
DOSSIER :
“My optimism is not necessarily for traditional institutions, it’s for the racialized artists out there making these demands—that right now there’s a sense of a deeper agency in shifting things.”
– Curator and OCADU Professor
Andrea Fatona , on how Black Lives Matter has forced a reckoning in the cultural sector
“These are not grainy overhead black-and-white cameras with green monospace text overlays and red bounding boxes. Today, surveillance is beautiful. It is vibrant, high res, bathed in cool filters.”
– Kyle McDonald, on the aesthetics of
Vibe Check , his latest collaboration with
Lauren Lee McCarthy . Commissioned for HeK’s “
Real Feelings ,” the installation appropriates surveillance tech to catalog the emotional effect exhibition visitors have on one another.
“An ordinary national flag on Earth would not survive the severe lunar environment.”
–
CNSA scientist Cheng Chang, on the ultra durable Chinese flag that was flown on the Moon during the
Chang’e 5 robotic mission today. Capable of maintaining its ‘true colours’ across +/-150℃ temperature range, it joins 6 U.S. flags that were raised during the Apollo missions.
A spoof of 2019’s This Person Does Not Exist , the endless stream of AI-generated portraits by Philip Wang, software developer and journalist Vincent Woo launches This Person Exists . Created to “celebrate the actual humans who have served as the coal that we’ve shoveled into the AI GAN engine,” as Woo writes on Twitter , the website cycles through a collection of 70,000 photographs that have been used to train Nvidia’s StyleGAN, the same framework used by Wang.
“It’s perhaps even stranger to gather now, since his passing somehow pins the beginning of times that to me will always be markedly post-Pohflepp—the pandemic, Epstein, water on the Moon. Sascha’s commentary on all of these things has been missed by so many of us.”
– Stephanie Sherman, opening “Pohflepp in Practice,” a celebration of the life and work of German artist and designer
Sascha Pohflepp (1978-2019)
OUT NOW :
Goto80
808642
An unlikely marriage between the Commodore 64 and the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer yields a 1980s computing megamix extravaganza.
“Silencing marginalized voices like this is the opposite of the NAUWU [Nothing About Us Without Us] principles which we discussed. And doing this in the context of ‘responsible AI’ adds so much salt to the wounds.”
–
Timnit Gebru , computer scientist and Google’s star AI ethics researcher, in an internal email criticising the company’s treatment of minority employees that led to her abrupt firing
TIME magazine recognizes 15-year-old scientist and inventor Gitanjali Rao as its first ever U.S. Kid of the Year. “Rao not only researches scientific tools such as artificial intelligence and carbon nanotube sensor technology and applies them to problems she sees in everyday life, like cyberbullying and water contamination,” TIME writes. “She also shows other kids how to tap into their curiosity, aspiring to create a generation of innovators.”
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