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
Year 2023 2022 2021 2020 Show All
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”God damnit, Tensorflow”
– Dan Woods, software engineer and author, illustrating the absurdity of Trump-era politics by sharing a snapshot of the popular
machine learning library misidentifying the fly that landed—and stayed—on Mike Pence’s head during the 2020 US vice presidential debate
“Private collectors operate under no such restrictions. They could sell parts of Stan to other collectors and split up the skeleton, or store it in a way that could lead to Stan being damaged.”
– Palaeontologist Adam Larson, lamenting the sale of
Stan , one of the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons in the world. The only non-art item in Christie’s
20th Century Evening Sale went to an undisclosed bidder for $31.8 million, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at an auction.
After 205 days of closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic, London’s Wellcome Collection re-opens with a most fitting of exhibitions: “Being Human.” Aligning visitor safety with visions of wellness, the show featuring work by artists including Mary Beth Heffernan, Kia LaBeija, and Yinka Shonibare, and examines our “hopes and fears about new forms of medical knowledge, and our changing relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world.”
“To recruit they need to do stuff in public … including a presence online, and on the other hand they want to do stuff that’s illegal—so they need to keep that secret. There’s always that structural problem.”
– Journalist
Jason Wilson , on how far right groups like the Proud Boys have a fundamental infosec problem, and can be easily monitored through platforms like Facebook and Telegram
Visual artist Joanie Lemercier joins 3,000 activists near Neurath, Germany, to protest the Hambach surface mine , Europe’s largest coal extraction site. Organized by Ende Gelände , a German civil disobedience movement known to occupy coal mines in the name of climate justice, the protestors took over a coal bunker while Lemercier amplified the movement’s message with (stunning) laser projections.
OUT NOW :
Adrian Hon
A New History of the Future in 100 Objects
Game designer Adrian Hon assumes the role of a 2082 curator and chronicles the twenty-first century from the perspective of “ankle monitors, deliverbots,” and 98 other objects.
“Google’s ‘Universal Texture’ facilitates an endless consumption of the earth, like the escalator carrying shoppers frictionlessly through a mall.”
– Writer and design researcher
Lara Chapman , on how the ‘smoothness’ of Google Earth’s mapping technology airbrushes history and conceals a planet in crisis
“We’re all flat earthers on the Internet.”
–
Julian Oliver , artist and critical engineer, on the myth of digital immateriality during a NODE20 panel discussion with Ingrid Burrington, Joana Moll, Chris Adams, and Kris De Decker
Calling all pessimist-futurists: join us for science fiction author
Tim Maughan ’s critical futures workshop “WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?” at Digital Cultures 2020. Taking place on Oct 23, you will learn how to dim the shiny tech futures promised by uncritical science and technology headlines. It’s free, online, and enrolment is limited.
With “Palms Palms Palms” the first major retrospective of London-based artists Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen opens in the new wing of Z33, House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture in Hasselt, Belgium. Curated by Christina Li and running through Jan 3, 2021, the show features a decade of work alongside new commissions Exhaustion Blue Roan The Odds (Part 1)
Artist and activist Paolo Cirio is forced to take down his latest online artwork Capture Capture aims to reverse the asymmetry of surveillance and profiling power. An installation version (image) is set to open at Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing, France, on Oct 15. The artwork is part of Cirio’s ongoing campaign to get facial recognition banned in Europe.
DOSSIER :
“If there’s one good thing to come out of this year’s global pandemic, it’s that a lot of people are suddenly talking about universal basic income. What was once a relatively fringe concept is now very much mainstream.”
– Digital Economies Reader lead writer Matthew Braga, on shifts in societal notions of ‘support’
Ahead of the Guggenheim reopening, Artists for Workers (AFW) and The Illuminator activists protest the museum’s exploitative practices with series of projected messages. Slogans like “Open for Exploitation” signal support for the institution’s unionized workers and the employees at the Abu Dhabi outpost. “Our aim is to put pressure on the museum to understand these are not isolated instances but are related through modes of racial oppression and exploitation of workers.”
“I see a girl taking a selfie in the mirror.”
After Twitter users exposed the racial bias of the platform’s image auto-cropping AI (the algorithm demonstrably preferred US Senator Mitch McConnell over former President Barack Obama), senior research scientist David Ayman Shamma digs deep into the failed technology: “Equity and fairness is a challenging problem because AI systems are layers of AI systems,” he writes on Medium. “Here, we see Twitter using DeepGaze II, built on VGG-19, trained on ImageNet.”
OUT NOW :
Legacy Russell
Glitch Feminism
Writer and curator
Legacy Russell explores gender, technology, and identity in the aftermath of the digital and real world melting into one another.
“Standard Lithium had a virtual ribbon-cutting for its new extraction demonstration plant in El Dorado, Arkansas (pronounced doh-ray-doh , not doh-rah-doh ), on YouTube. It is exactly as awkward as you expect it would be.”
–
Ingrid Burrington , in the “Rocks Reads Roundup, 9/27” edition of her new-ish Substack
On the Rocks (which you should totally subscribe to)
“The digital re-rendering of rock samples is but another form of technicity, built upon earlier stratification.”
–
Elise Hunchuck and
Jussi Parikka , on
CORES (2020), a series of digital animations featuring 3D-scanned rocks by artists and
SIGNALS collaborators Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva
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