1,548 days, 2,378 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
Month January February March April May June July August September October November December Show All
“Everything—capitalism, the economy, politics, the internet, supply chains—has become a terrifying, complicated mess that we can’t understand. But we can understand a ship blocking a canal.”
– Sci-fi writer
Tim Maughan , on our fascination with the
Ever Given grinding world trade to a halt. “It’s a relief to be able to point at something and know that it’s wrong,“ writes Maughan. “It’s a huge, dumb, obvious object wedged into a place it shouldn’t be.”
OUT NOW :
Catherine Mason
A Computer in the Art Room
Originally published in 2008,
Catherine Mason ’s chronicle of the birth of UK computer art between 1950 and 1980 is now available as an e-book with an updated introduction
“I’ve spent a lifetime wondering why the Amiga ‘Insert Workbench’ boot image looked kinda wonky,” confides Panic Inc . co-founder Cabel Sasser on Twitter. ”I always assumed it was hand-drawn pixel art.” It turns out it’s vector art. A surprised Sasser reveals that just 412 bytes of vector drawing instructions were needed to render the iconic (Sheryl Knowles-created) hand-held floppy disk. “Incredible!” Meanwhile, media artist Golan Levin verified the 1985 vector data with a “quick-and-dirty” Processing sketch .
“Technologies aren’t for anything. They emerge and are socially constructed as a mix of opportunity, problem-solving and chance, not some inevitable building block in the myth of progress.”
– British artist and designer
Tobias Revell , on the assumption “that crypto technologies have some sort of teleology—a preordained role in an inevitable story of humanity.” Instead, Revell posits that “crypto still doesn’t have its shibboleth, its narrative monument, its imaginary—and if it does have one now it’s probably, unfortunately, Beeple.”
Opening at Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt, Germany, Daniel Canogar ’s solo show “Latencies” explores a world of transient, fleeting memories, shifting media and continuously increasing data streams. Next to signature works from the artist’s Small Data and Echo Series , the show features five pieces from the new Latencies Series (image: Monocle ), for which Canogar mapped discarded parts like lenses, heat sinks, and shredded aluminium onto animated screens.
“The ‘softwalk’ has long been the artist’s designation for the way avatars in 1990s simulation games traverse their fictional universe: an even, smooth step, unperturbed by the specificities of the environments they cross.”
Gerhard Mantz (1950–2021)
Famous for his dystopian landscapes, German CGI artist
Gerhard Mantz dies at the age of 71 in Berlin. A successful sculptor before embracing 3D modelling software in the 1990s, Mantz’ renders showed at MIT, MoMA, and the LA Center for Digital Art. He was also one of five artists exhibited at HaW’s “Natürlich Künstlich” in 2001, one of the first digital art shows in Berlin.
“How many people do you need to put together a Manhattan Project? The relevant question is: how large of a population do you need to draw from in order to recruit enough scientists to staff such an effort?”
– Sci-fi writer
Ted Chiang , on why people and not AI, are the key to the fabled
intelligence explosion . “This is how recursive self-improvement takes place—not at the level of individuals but at the level of human civilization as a whole.”
Indigenous computational media artist Jon M. R. Corbett is the subject of a fascinating interview with Daniel Temkin at Esoteric.Codes. Corbett delves into the syntax and epistomology underpinning his Cree#, Ancestral Code, and Wisakecak coding languages, which all circumvent the eurocentric (and latin alphabet) origins of “not just programming, but computing technologies in general.” His ambitious extending beyond software, he also speaks to his alt-keyboard design—based on the Cree Star Chart (image).
“Flare gas could just as well power carbon capture machines, water desalination plants, or data centres that support more widely used applications. There’s a social value in those things that I don’t see for Bitcoin.”
Commissioned for transmediale’s “For Refusal ” program, !Mediengruppe Bitnik releases Refuse to be Human , a web extension that changes your browser settings to that of a Yandex bot. Like Google, Russia’s primary search engine Yandex uses web crawlers to index online content. “Surfing as a bot gives you access to the grey web,” write the Bitniks, “a layer of content only visible to bots.” Image: RYBN’s Double Negative Captchas (2020)—the bot test that directly inspired Bitnik’s work.
“Arcane financial maneuvers, only nominally attached to physical objects, regularly achieve a level of dematerialized abstraction to which most conceptual art only aspires: the transubstantiation of nothing into something.”
–
Travis Diehl , on the “metaphysical appeals” of NFTs and other high-stakes schemes attached to art
“Only off by a factor of roughly 125 trillion.”
– YouTuber
stacksmashing , on how his Game Boy-powered Bitcoin mining rig compares to the competition. Whereas modern hardware mines at ~100 terahashes per second, the 1989 Nintendo handheld (controlled via a Raspberry Pi Pico) clocks in at 0.8. “It would take several quadrillion years to mine a single coin.”
“Sites like these are where online shopping leaves its physical footprint—where capital, battling over space, inscribes itself in the landscape.”
–
Charlie Jarvis , on how spaces of logistics keep eating into public lands to satisfy friction-free capitalism. “According to the real estate firm Knight Frank, every £1 billion spent online demands 1.3 million square feet of further warehousing.”
Jean-Pierre Hébert (1939-2021)
An explorer of algorithmic aesthetics since the 1970s, computer art pioneer
Jean-Pierre Hébert passes away in Santa Barbara, California. Known for his minimalist plotter drawings, sound and mixed media installations, the trained computer engineer also co-founded famed digital art group
The Algorists in 1995. In 2012, SIGGRAPH recognized Hébert’s
Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art .
“Light and Language,” an exhibition showcasing the late land and conceptual artist Nancy Holt , opens at Ireland’s Lismore Castle Arts. Focused on 1960-80s works, it notably includes Electrical System (1982, image), a room-scale illuminated network shown for the first time in three decades that makes the gallery it is presented in “part of open-ended systems, part of the world.” The Lisa Le Feuvre -curated show also includes related (light)works by Dennis McNulty , Charlotte Moth , and Katie Paterson .
“When Stewart Brand sets out to help the commune folks of the late 1960s and early 1970s, what does he choose as his vehicle? A catalog. For Brand and the people around him, business was a good way to change the world. Politics were bankrupt, but business was great.”
A juxtaposition of ‘infinite’ new media sculptural works, Alex Czetwertynski ’s second solo show “Loop Point” opens at K10 Media Arts, Bogota. “The digital no longer needs to feed off of the physical to create its internal codes and narratives,” states Czetwertynski about the current era of tokenized digital derivatives that reference themselves like memes about memes. “What happens when the loop closes on itself and the chain of content is rich enough to feed off of its own image ad infinitum?”
Load More
To dive deeper into Stream, please
Log-In or become a
HOLO Reader .
Daily discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture: Get full access by becoming a HOLO Reader !
Perspective : research, long-form analysis, and critical commentaryEncounters : in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovatorsStream : a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and countingEdition : HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print
Become a HOLO Reader