1,571 days, 2,407 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“I’m not even selling the source code. I’m selling a picture that I made, with a Python programme that I wrote myself, of what the source code would look like if it was stuck on the wall and signed by me.”
–
Tim Berners-Lee , creator of the World Wide Web, defending Sotheby’s
NFT auction of a representation of the Web’s source code he wrote in 1989. “If [people] felt that me selling an NFT of a poster is inappropriate, then what about me selling a book?”
First unveiled in March, the Bank of England’s newly-designed £50 note featuring the portrait of Alan Turing enters circulation. Coinciding with what would have been his birthday, the note celebrates the computer pioneer and wartime codebreaker who helped accelerate Allied efforts to read German Naval messages enciphered with the Enigma machine , shortening World War II. The note also promotes diversity, recognising Turing’s appalling treatment by the state for being gay. After being arrested and convicted for gross indecency, he committed suicide in 1954.
“Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems … humans cannot.”
– The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a leaked draft of this year’s landmark report due for publication at
COP26 , the UN climate talks taking place in November in Glasgow. The 4,000-page indictment of humanity’s stewardship of the planet was obtained by the Agence France-Presse (AFP) and warns of a series of thresholds beyond which recovery from climate breakdown may become impossible.
LABORATORIA Art&Science Foundation opens its new exhibition space in the West Wing of Moscow’s New Tretyakov Gallery with “May the other live in me,” a group show bridging techno- and ecosphere curated by LABORATORIA founder Daria Parkhomenko. Assembling works by Marina Abramović , Agnes Meyer-Brandis , Ralf Baecker , Jenna Sutela , Saša Spačal , ::vtol:: , and others, the exhibition navigates the increasingly complex community of “living beings, technical systems, and hyperobjects” that, together, shape the modern world.
“I was thinking about the word collaborator and how I didn’t know what exactly collaborating with a non-human would look like, but I had my hands outstretched, trying to read the non-human’s body.”
– OpenAI’s text generator
GPT-3 , contributing to artist
Zadie Xa ’s essay “Moon Poetics and Child of Magohalmi” on “
New Mystics ,” an Alice Bucknell-instigated collaborative platform exploring magic, mysticism, ritual, and technology that features human
and non-human voices
A collaborative platform exploring magic, mysticism, ritual, and technology, “New Mystics” launches, issuing texts conceived between writer (and organiser) Alice Bucknell , 12 participating artists including Rebecca Allen , Ian Cheng , Lawrence Lek , Tabita Rezaire , and Tai Shani , and OpenAI’s language generator GPT-3 . Framed as “a new form of art writing that’s polyphonic and weird,” “New Mystics” unfolds with the lunar cycle, releasing three new artist texts every full moon until the autumn equinox.
“You cannot escape the fact that it’s humans all the way down and that humans are now being used as that connective tissue to make those systems work.”
“If we foreclose the potential of art to aid in this work of healing and remediation, we do so at our own peril.”
“China is rolling its own cryptocurrency and has every incentive to have as little competition as possible. I think we will see miners leaving China and relocate where there is spare or cheap energy.”
–
Cryptohopper CEO Ruud Feltkamp, on how the
Digital Yuan —not green energy targets—is driving China’s crackdown on bitcoin mining, which is prompting operations to relocate to
Kazakhstan and Texas , and other more hospitable regions
Constructed from a dismantled radio tower and motorised antenna speakers, Fragmentin ’s Paraboles ulx-56834 begins ‘broadcasting’ inside Lausanne’s St-François church . To help make tangible the invisible presence of electromagnetic fields, the Swiss collective invited researchers, poets, and artists including Nicolas Nova , Francine Carrillo , and Yves Citton to contribute sound. “These decentralised audio layers sculpt the air,” write the artists, “offering multiple viewpoints on the theme of breath and waves.”
“Pakui Hardware’s work was timely pre-pandemic; it is in no need of conceptual frills to emerge as a strong indictment of our relationship to technology and the pervasive toxicity permeating contemporary methods of care.”
Taking over a former Stasi HQ in Halle, Germany, Werkleitz Festival kicks off three weekends of “new world dis/order,” curated by Sandra Naumann and Daniela Silvestrin . As artists and theorists including Benjamin Bratton , Joana Moll , James Bridle , and DISNOVATION.ORG discuss planetary crises in the conference program, 12 installed artworks by Anna Ridler , Clusterduck , Martin Nadal , RYBN.ORG and others, all realised within EMAP , invite visitors to engage the festival theme on-site.
“The plant learned to grow there and, as far as anyone knew, only there. There were no competitors for that toxic soil. Until, that is, the lithium mine.”
–
Wired staff writer
Gregory Barber , on
Eriogonum tiehmii , or Tiehm’s buckwheat, a wildflower endemic to the lithium deposits of Rhyolite Ridge, Nevada, that the
Ioneer mining company estimates could power 400,000 electric car batteries. The current dispute between miners and conservationists forces a moral equation, writes Barber: “What is the value of the mine versus the value of the plant?”
British CGI artist and researcher Alan Warburton releases RGBFAQ , the video essay centrepiece of his eponymous 2020 solo exhibition at London’s arebyte gallery. A 27-minute deep-dive into the complicated history of computer graphics “which harnessed the technologies of war and used them to simulate new, immersive worlds,” Warburton explores how “CGI exploded the image, fragmenting it into colourful, data-rich elements that have since infiltrated all kinds of imaging technology.”
Picking up where The Stack (2016) left off, theorist Benjamin Bratton sketches a future of computation for Noema . Building on ideas from Marshall McLuhan and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, he articulates how “planetary sapience” pushes previous understandings of collective intelligence, computing power, and globalization into unsettling new territory—and takes stock of the implications. If The Stack articulated the end of sovereign nations driving a global agenda, this essay reads as a roadmap for life after Silicon Valley (and China’s tech stack). Looking beyond our current wasteful use of computing power—surveillance capitalism—Bratton imagines how and why we might use the sprawling computational infrastructure (the “smart exoskeleton”) we’ve built to enact planetary techno-solidarity.
OUT NOW :
Baser, Coupland, Obrist (eds)
The Extreme Self
A sequel to their cult classic The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present , critic Shumon Basar, novelist Douglas Coupland, and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s graphic novel features visuals from over 70 artists, photographers, technologists, and musicians that speak to our accellerated culture.
“This is a depressing yet somehow fitting development, reflecting how far the Web has drifted from its original ideals. From a place to share with everyone for free to a space for selling any and every thing. What’s next: Apache, Linux?”
As part of an Inke Arns -curated show on Galerie Barbara Thumm’s New Viewings online platform, exhibiting artist Aram Bartholl installs the first-ever USB-C Dead Drop outside the gallery’s Berlin exhibition space. An ongoing series of interventions launched in 2010, Bartholl embeds empty USB flash drives into the urban landscape to encourage spontaneous and anonymous acts of peer to peer file sharing. To date, over 1,400 of these ‘dead letterboxes’ have been set up in dozens of countries around the world.
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