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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The 23rd Japan Media Arts Festival awards American artist Adam W. Brown the Grand Prize in the Art Division for his 2019 work [ir]reverent: Miracles on Demand Serratia Marcescens bacteria that then perform ‘blood miracles’ in a piece of bread, the artwork examines the impact of invisible microbial agents on the course of human history and belief systems. Other awardees include Lauren Lee McCarthy , Natura Machina, Nils Völker , and Sebastian Wolf .
“We warned of the vulnerability as early as January and pointed out the consequences of its exploitation. Attackers gain access to the internal networks and systems and can still paralyse them months later.”
– BBC cyber reporter Joe Tidy, on the first known case of death by ransomware hack
“An anyonymous blogger writes a whistleblowing post about a degrading website spreading at Harvard where users are encouraged ‘rate woman’ after the college administration fails to act. Over the next two weeks the post spreads, and the creator of the website is expelled.”
– Tech strategist Dan Hon, “idly imagining a world where Facebook and Twitter don’t exist” in an alt-history thread recasting Silicon Valley as equitable and egalitarian
Artists Rosa Menkman and Sarah Grant launch their “Digital Crisis Research & Toolkit“ initiative. Supported by Eyebeam’s Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future program, Menkman and Grant aim to produce an “emergency first aid kit” that promotes digital self-reliance and less dependence on top-down, imposed platforms. “The closer we get to truly decentralizing critical communications infrastructure, the more resilient our methods of communication in times of crisis,” they write.
“Appropriately enough, the Wikipedia entry for disinformation does not seem entirely free of the phenomenon in question. It credits the term to Joseph Stalin—as a translation from the Russian dezinformatsiya … Stalin [is said to have] made the term sound French on purpose, to ascribe it Western origins.”
– Writer and editor Stephen Squibb, “A Brief History of Disinformation”
“I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count…. I know that I have blood on my hands by now.”
– Former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang in a 6,600-word memo on the company’s failure to combat public opinion manipulation. Shared internally on her last day, the memo is filled with concrete examples of how governments and political interest groups used the platform to consolidate power.
Matthew Braga explores prosperity and precarity for the artists and cultural workers whose true value will never be measured in dollars.
After polling the Twitter-verse on the most interesting social media accounts for generative art and creative coding “with a focus on the ~present,” digital artist and Processing co-founder Casey Reas shared a crowdsourced list of 200 accounts.
With Stones that Calculate , design-researchers Jonas Parnow and Paul Heinicker publish an impeccable online compilation of resources on post-digital materiality. Linking the writings of Max Frisch, Ursula K. Heise, Benjamin Bratton, Rosa Braidotti, Jussi Parikka, Donna Haraway, and others the growing archive “maps academic as well as artistic perspectives which reflect digital conditions within materialist discourses.”
“It’s a damning indictment of our community that we have some of the most resources, we preach equity and inclusivity, but couldn’t get JT housed (or much other help). I don’t think it’s too soon to ask: How do we keep this from happening again?”
–
Kyle McDonald , on the sudden passing of creative technologist JT Nimoy, who struggled with health issues and homelessness in recent years
JT Nimoy
Prolific software artist and creative technologist JT Nimoy dies in San Francisco. Well known for her work as part of the CGI dream team behind TRON: Legacy ‘s visual effects, her voluminous body of experimental and commercial projects stretches back more than two decades. Through her early work at UCLA, MIT, and ITP, and evangelism of Processing, JT played a tangible role in establishing the legitimacy of creative coding in the popular imagination.
“If inequity is woven into the very fabric of society then each twist, coil, and code is a chance for us to weave new patterns, practices, politic. Its vastness will be its undoing, once we accept that we are pattern makers.”
– Critical race scholar
Ruha Benjamin , in her MUTEK Forum Keynote
Simon Denny ’s solo exhibition “Mine” opens at Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf—and in Minecraft . Playing with the show’s themes of resource extraction and exploitation, the New Zealand artist recreated the entire K21 museum area—at one time the world’s largest coal mine—in the popular sandbox video game. Here, lo-fi representations of works like Denny’s Workers Cage (2019, based on an Amazon patent) reveal the deep interconnections between minerals, labour, and data.
“Soft _Ware,” a new group show exploring textiles as a “current medium of choice for artists to dissect the digital age,” opens at Kunsthaus Erfurt in Germany. Bringing together an all-millennial cast of artists to contemplate digital materiality, the show includes works by David Bradley, Elisa Breyer (image: to be good or to be good at it , 2020 & UNTITLED_PAIN , 2018), and Paul Yore.
“I’ve been using Melania Trump as my virtual gallery-goer. She stands exactly where I tell her to and gives the exhibition 5 stars.”
The culmination of years of research and an on-site residency, DISNOVATION.ORG ’s “Post Growth” exhibition opens at iMAL in Brussels. Presenting a series of objects, videos, and a living Solar Farm realized with Baruch Gottlieb , Clémence Seurat, Julien Maudet, and Pauline Briand, the French artist collective invites viewers to challenge dominant narratives about progress and, instead, consider a speculative economic model based on the Sun.
The Finish contemporary comics association Kutikuti launches “The Digi-Kuti Exhibition,” a spinoff of Kuti Magazine’s forthcoming 57th issue dedicated to “adventures into the forms of digital narration.” Curated by Kuti editor Tommi Musturi, the online gallery gathers works from international AI, pixel, and PETSCII artists including Benjamin Bergman , Tero Heikkinen, Jake Jellica , Tim Koch, Raquel Meyers , Goto80 , Ilan Manouach & Yannis Siglidis , and others.
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