1,575 days, 2,408 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“The internet was loaded with earnest content and search engines proved vital to indexing and recalling every last morsel of it. There was a sense of abundance: you could read about anything and research everything.”
– Writer
Michelle Santiago Cortés , reminiscing about when the internet was still legible. Recalling a simpler era of Tumblr and
Vice , Cortés laments how Google and other search engines are increasingly useless given “the thickening muck of junk websites vying for programmatic ad money.”
“The works certainly carry historical significance, but in their new ‘commonplace’ state, they become fossils through contemporary eyes.”
– Critic Matthew Sturt-Scobie, assessing some of the older works featured in “
REBOOT ,” a survey of four decades of Dutch media art at Rotterdam’s
Nieuwe Instituut . “It highlights what the dated works now lack in impact or affect,” he writes of his mild dissatisfaction that show organizers LI-MA don’t quite situate the aging work clearly enough.
“Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025,” a show by researchers Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler opens at Fondazione Prada Osservatorio in Milan. Picking up where their collaboration Anatomy of an AI System (2018) left off, the duo maps how “empires of past centuries are echoed in the technology companies of today.” Exhibited is a cabinet of curiosities, a map room, and ephemera related to data and control spanning six centuries.
“Not having one theme imposed by a curator but multiple curators contributing their unique concepts and artist selections to the same event was unheard of at the time and remains uncommon today, even after a decade.”
–
The Wrong Biennale founder
David Quiles Guilló , on the “radical inclusiveness” that is at the core of the thriving online (and increasingly hybrid) art show he launched in 2013. “It’s like a costume party, and you decide to let all costumes join in,” Guilló tells
Fakewhale . “It surely becomes a great party.”
“Screensavers are wild and showed all kinds of other possibilities with computation. Pipes? Flying toasters? Lissajous figures? As a kid the computer was most interesting when you didn’t touch it.”
– Software artist
Zach Lieberman , defending the humble screensaver. A decades-old clichéd criticism of digital art (“it’s just a screensaver”), the tired trope resurfaced recently when critic Jerry Saltz
sniped at Refik Anadol’s
Unsupervised (2022), describing it as “mediocre spectacle” and “a banal screensaver.”
Documenting a half-century of DIY publishing, “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines” opens at the Brooklyn Museum. A tremendous undertaking, more than one thousand artists’ zines and publications emerging from the unruly 1970-2020 North American punk and queer underground are featured. Artist-publishers including Tom Jennings and Mimi Thi Nguyen present their Xerox handiwork and an online archive of selected zines opens access to the rich collection.
Exploring sound across the ages (and over the Atlantic Ocean), “Resonaciones. An embrace to awake” opens at IFA Gallery Stuttgart. Inspired by the ancient Peruvian whistling vessels in the Linden Museum collection, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen presents art and environments by artists and culture workers Carolina Arévalo , Francisca Gili , Nicole L’Huillier , and Bettina Korintenberg that weigh the impact of colonialism and how soundscapes function as “a living and permanently changing archive.”
Debrief :
New Art City Virtualizes The Gallery, Abolishes Gatekeepers, and Increases Access
The duo behind the California-based artist-run virtual space discuss their yearly showcase “MEMORY CARD,” and the politics and aesthetics of online exhibitions
Drawing on manar (the Arabic word for lighthouse), the inaugural edition of Manar Abu Dhabi opens in the UAE. Featured are light-based works by Middle Eastern artists (Asma Belhamar , Latifa Saeed , and others) and international figures, including Carsten Höller and teamLab . Rafael Lozano-Hemmer contributes “Translation Island ,” a site-specific retrospective featuring ten works, including Dune Ringers (2023, image), which transforms nocturnal desert topography into “travelling waves of light and sound.”
“Would anyone feel safer in autonomous vehicle technology on the road, knowing how often someone is, in fact, interacting and perhaps intervening? Does that make anyone feel safe? I certainly don’t.”
– American writer
Joanne McNeil , reminding us that the ‘autonomous’ in autonomous vehicle is sometimes bolstered by human intervention. In conversation about her
debut novel , McNeil discusses her field research hailing robotaxis in Phoenix and the empty utterances of tech billionaires.
OUT NOW :
Joanne McNeil
Wrong Way
Erudite tech critic
Joanne McNeil debuts as a novelist, exploring Silicon Valley hubris, self-driving cars, and the “treacherous gaps between the working and middle classes wrought by the age of AI.”
“They serve no positive function for society. They’re like mustard gas, polystyrene, lead in gasoline—all these crappy ideas we had to get rid of.”
– British conservationist and development researcher
Peter Howson , on the corrosiveness of cryptocurrencies. In his new book,
Let Them Eat Crypto (2023), Howson rescinds his initial blockchain advocacy, declaring the technology “industrial scale scumbaggery” that ought to be banned.
Coinciding with the 8th edition of the ACT Festival, “Planetary Pulse,” a showcase of the Asia Culture Center’s (ACC) residency program opens in Gwangju (KR). Featured are artists including Ahram Jeong , Su Jin Bae and Jonathan Lemke , Kim Joon , Matt Gingold (image: The Absent Orkestra , 2023), and Inhwa Yeom , who were selected from a pool of 340 applicants from 46 countries. Presented in conjunction with the ACC Sound Lab, the show focuses on soundscape and a “postcolonial analysis of the notion of listening.”
“My theory is that the glitches are very similar to our subconscious. There is too much or too little wanted from us, and we react with psychosomatic problems. When our body glitches, it’s telling us we have to make a decision or change something.”
– Artist
Pipilotti Rist , connecting the glitches in her early video art with embodied knowledge. “Analog glitches and mistakes are much nicer than digital ones. They are more physical,” she elaborates.
“Situated Listening,” an exhibition by Hong Kong-based composer and sound artist Samson Young , opens at Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover (DE). Featured are The Travelers and the Listeners (2023), a collage of musical films inspired by a Walter de la Mare poem, and Variations of 96 Chords in Space (2023, image), a video installation in which a palette of 96 colours (each linked to a chord played by violist William Lane ) blur across screens “in endless combinations, largely systematic, partly arbitrary.”
OUT NOW :
Joy Buolamwini
Unmasking AI
Emerging from her influential Masters and PhD research at the
MIT Media Lab , activist
Buolamwini challenges the ‘defaults’ in algorithmic culture and makes the case for ethics and equity in automated system design.
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