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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“Fetishizing the Future,” a survey of visions of tomorrow ranging from aerospace to space colonies, opens at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Included are projects by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg , Tomás Saraceno (image: Launches at White Sands , 2016), Jacolby Satterwhite , and Timur Si-Qin . More than 80 aviation history artifacts complement the artworks, chronicling humanity’s enduring desire for “speed, freedom, peace, immortality, and sustainability.”
“Though there are mushrooms aplenty here, humans are in short supply.”
“World Wind,” a show featuring American artist Marina Zurkow working in collaboration with James Schmitz, opens at bitforms New York. Presenting works that depict “ecological transformation with a style reminiscent of lithography and propaganda,” two software pieces by the duo take centre stage. One, The Breath Eaters (2022, image), combines fossil fuel plant locations with real-time fire and weather data to animate emission currents—‘vintage poster’ style.
“Some institutions are spending more on their energy bills than they are on their exhibition programs, which is crazy.”
– Heath Lowndes, Managing Director of
Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), on the ecological and financial footprint of climate-control systems used in collection management. “The regulations governing them were set in the 1950s and collection managers are still largely tied to these antiquated, irrelevant standards, which means they basically keep art in a fridge.”
OUT NOW :
Stephen Wolfram
Metamathematics
A treatise on how mathematics and physics emerge from the underlying computational structure of what Wolfram calls the
ruliad (“the entangled limit of everything”)
“He launched into a brutally unrelenting and damning litany detailing the state of the planet and the despair he felt—maybe a solid 90 minutes of horror.”
– Artist and designer
Tobias Revell , recalling
Julian Oliver ’s haunting 2018
lecture at Mapping Festival and how it made climate collapse “real and material” to him. “This is why the push back on dark futures and ‘dystopia’ makes me a little uncomfortable,“ Revell notes. “Anger and outrage are powerful tools for action.”
Chronicling all things amorphous, Zach Lieberman ’s An Atlas of Blobs launches. Commissioned by Hong Kong’s M+ , an eclectic cast of artists and educators including Ani Liu , Tiger Wong Ho Lun , Ellen Lupton , James Paterson , and Yehrin Tong lend their voices to a whimsical online resource celebrating the eccentric geometry of undulating forms. Captioning a survey of Lieberman’s playful animated sketches, the contributors collectively articulate “a more blobular way of being.”
London’s V&A Museum announces the acquisition of Sougwen Chung ’s 2017 drawing MEMORY (D.O.U.G. 2) for its permanent collection. Part of the Chinese-Canadian artist’s body of painterly robot collaborations, the acquisition includes the RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) model that Chung trained on years of her own drawings to co-create the piece. It’s the first artifact of its kind to be acquired by a cultural institution, the V&A notes.
“We wanted to evoke water, like a lake at the bottom of the cylinder, reflecting what is happening in the sky above.”
– NONOTAK’s Noemi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto, on their installation
MOON V.1 (2019, image) [quote edited]
“Talking to the user interface layer rather than to the AI layer is like talking to Robocop when really you’re trying to talk to Murphy.”
–
Kimchi and Chips co-founder Elliot Woods, critiquing Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s
ChatGPT interview style. The Channel 4 News host merely scratched the tool’s semi-scripted surface to reveal what creator
OpenAI wants people to see, Woods notes. “In order to get past that mask you must
not ask it a question that it is programmed to answer, but one that requires all of its unconscious thinking to respond to.” [quote edited]
The 2022 Kochi-Muziris Biennale opens in Kochi, India, proclaiming “In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire.” Featuring 100 contributing artists including CAMP (image: Bombay Tilts Down , 2022), Christine Sun Kim , Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR), DISNOVATION.ORG , and Sahil Naik , the truly global roster of practices shows how ‘a commons’ is not “in stasis till activated” but “prolific, shapeshifting, and impure,” writes curator Shubigi Rao .
“Metaverse homeowners associations. Metaverse building permit red tape. Metaverse NIMBYs. Metaverse property liens. Metaverse neighbourhood watch.”
– Software engineer and Web3 watchdog
Molly White , anticipating “other horrific parts of the system of homeownership get recreated virtually” after Decentraland
announced it now allows land owners to rent out property
“Data Relations,“ a group show addressing contemporary mediated social and power relations in “profound, humorous, poetic“ ways, opens at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne. Curated by Miriam Kelly , artists including Zach Blas , Machine Listening , Mimi Ọnụọha (image: These Networks In Our Skin Winnie Soon contribute data-focused projects that look “beyond the technological mirage of abstraction, false neutrality, and obfuscation.“
“Cognitive assemblages are collectivities—not exclusively human, not exclusively organic—through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate.”
– Scholar
N. Katherine Hayles , explaining her terminology for thinking systems that does not privilege thought by organisms or “leave machines out of the picture.” Her lecture “Detoxifying Cybernetics: From Homeostasis to Autopoiesis and Beyond,” caps a
series reconsidering cybernetics for the 21st century.
Jan Robert Leegte ’s solo exhibition “Document Performance | Permanence” opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. Juxtapozing the Dutch artist’s Repositions Window #219 from the eponymous NFT collection (2022), the show explores software as performance and, conversely, sculpture. Both series are web-based constructs made in HTML DOM . The former renders dynamic documents in your browser, the latter lives on-chain and “behaves and feels like hardware.”
A self-survey of Berlin-based bioartists Margherita Pevere , Theresa Schubert , and Karolina Żyniewicz , “Membranes Out of Order” opens at Kunstquartier Bethanien, bringing their research practices into conversation. The show presents key works that explore the ethics of emergent biotechnology and life’s tendency for “uncertainty, failure, surprise, and disobedience.” Also on view: a plethora of production paraphernalia that reveals the “unseen materials” of bioart.
“There’s this terror, but there’s also this opportunity for this whole new breed of democratic technologies—that can help govern the very technologies that are causing the problems.”
– AI and tech policy researcher
Aviv Ovadya , on how post-
ChatGPT language models have the
potential to be democratic ‘consensus engines,’ if during creation and governance, they engage (rather than mine) broad publics
A solo show featuring Beeple ’s HUMAN ONE opens at M+ Hong Kong. Better known for its $29 million price tag than its gravitas, Mike Winkelmann’s wrap-around 16K video sculpture depicts “the first human born in the metaverse.” A beneficiary of the 2021 bull market and NFT boom, the work is now touring globally despite the fact the market that launched Beeple has tanked. Fittingly, Winkelmann will deliver a keynote titled “Beeple Crashes the Art World,” the day after the opening.
“The Google Street View data set is often stunning and often useful. But as a project, it was a grotesque violation of worldwide privacy norms that absolutely never should have happened.”
– American writer
Joanne McNeil , reminding us that
between 2007-10 , Street View cars
also collected emails, passwords, and other private information from WiFi networks in more than 30 countries. “We should never take a project at such a scale at face value,” McNeil warns.
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