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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“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.”
“We heard a loud sound, a loud bang outside the control room. We started to see the eventual downfall of the observatory.”
– Ángel Vázquez, Arecibo’s chief of telescope operations, on the collapse of the 900-tonne telescope platform that hung above the radio dish. After two broken cables put the platform in “
danger of catastrophic failure ,” it gave away at 8 am local time, falling 140 meters into the iconic structure below.
“Dedicated to showcasing the best of international contemporary video and digital art” Daata Fair Miami has launched, and runs through Dec 13. Fusing online destination and limited edition distribution hub, the platform strikes a curious balance between an open access online exhibition and red velvet rope gallerist for artists including Petra Cortright & Jeremy Couillard , Rosa Menkman , and Alex McLeod (image: McLeod’s 2018 piece Endless Runner (NPC Cycles) ).
“If art is the human-friendly glove for touching transcendent reality—reality beyond our known beliefs and limits—then engineering is the bloodied hand that makes first contact.”
– Simulation artist
Ian Cheng , on
Crew Dragon Demo-2 , the first crewed test flight of SpaceX’s reusable spacecraft that carried two NASA astronauts to the ISS on May 30—the event that according to Artforum’s survey most memorably caught Cheng’s attention in 2020
“Every human in the supply chain—from crane drivers up to the captain of the ship I was on—was constantly receiving instructions from unseen, distant, management algorithms.”
–
Tim Maughan , on the invisible networks that control container ships—and the world—in the first entry to his new column aptly titled
No One’s Driving
Google AI offshoot DeepMind announces a major breakthrough in solving what biologists call the “protein folding problem”—determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence. Considered one of the field’s grand challenges due to myriad possible configurations, DeepMind’s AI system AlphaFold has demonstrated it can predict protein structures with high accuracy, vastly outperforming other more laborious, costly techniques. “It’s a game-changer,” says Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany. “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything.”
“He knew as little as I did about how to make the computer draw. But he trusted me, his student. Throughout my academic career, I tried to follow Prof. Knödel’s example—trusting students rather than mistrusting them. Isn’t this what teaching is all about?”
–
Frieder Nake , on the 1963 assignment that got him into making computer art—writing software for the University of Stuttgart’s brand-new drawing machine, the
Zuse Z64 Graphomat [quote edited]
OUT NOW :
The New Normal
Emerging from a 3-year
research program initiated by Moscow’s Strelka Institute, editors Benjamin H. Bratton, Nicolay Boyadjiev, Nick Axel, and a host of collaborators consider the impact of planetary-scale computation on urban futures.
“I… can’t vacuum… because US-East-1 is down.”
– LinkedIn information security officer Geoff Belknap, tweeting about how an
Amazon Web Services outage temporarily ‘bricked’ his Roomba
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