1,549 days, 2,380 entries ...

Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
“Apple selectively restricts access to the points of connection between third-party apps and the iPhone’s operating system, degrading the functionality of non-Apple apps and accessories.”
– U.S. Attourney General Merrick Garland, describing the iPhone and App Store as an anti-competitive walled garden. “Apple has held a dominant market share not because of its superiority, but because of its unlawful exclusionary behaviour,” he says in a speech announcing sweeping antitrust action against the tech giant.
“It’s more than Apple and Microsoft’s market caps combined. It’s more than than any company has raised for anything in the history of capitalism.”
New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, contextualizing the reported $5-7 Trillion in funding OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking to boost global GPU production. The staggering amount “is a really good indicator of what people in positions of leadership in the AI industry think that is going to take to get AI to the next level,” says Roose.

In the wake of its new After AI issue, the Australian art magazine Artlink revisits its special issues on digital media art practice, beginning with Art & Technology (image), published in 1987 in collaboration with the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) and Apple. Writer Julianne Pierce attributes this “prescient commitment” to founding editor Stephanie Britton’s exposure to holographics, digital animation, and computer-generated video in Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation (EAF).

“If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cyberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns.”
LA Times tech columnist Brian Merchant, channelling media scholar David Karpf’s critique of Apple’s “anti-metaverse,” where people disappear into a “totally immersive computer on their face”—alone. “If the world keeps getting worse,” Karpf says, “this will eventually have a lot of appeal.”

“Introducing iPhone, on your face,” quips ‘Famous New Media Artist’ Jeremy Bailey about the reveal of Apple’s Vision Pro. Bailey anticipated the company’s mixed-reality goggles after coming across a 2015 patent (image), while patenting (whimsical) AR interfaces of his own. “Current AR and VR patents,” Bailey wrote in 2016, “are hilariously broad and forecast a future where culture itself belongs to the world’s largest tech companies.” The new Apple face computer still gets a thumbs-up (“this is incredible”).

“We may one day possess tools that keep us plugged in all the time, yet trick us into believing we’re not. The beauty of these ugly goggles is that they show what’s really going on.”
– Tech reporter Molly Roberts, on Apple’s newly announced Vision Pro mixed-reality goggles. “We will be able to be not present while also being present—to fail to pay full attention to what’s around us without technically having to look away from it,” Roberts writes. “Welcome to the future.” [quote edited]
Z
“The subdued blackness of the Apple II computer terminal—which has slowly given way to white-dominated monitors—is juxtaposed with the seeping, gooey asphalt, which seems to suggest that Blackness will not so easily be contained.”
– Writer Veronica Esposito, on American Artist’s Mother of All Demos III (2022), featured in the forthcoming group exhibition “Refigured” at the Whitney. The piece invokes Douglas Engelbard’s epochal 1968 presentation and has “the feel of an archetypical, Promethean moment when things changed forever.”

Milan’s MEET Digital Culture Center launches a new exhibition series on digital art history with “GMM RELOADED,” a retrospective of the Italian multimedia art group Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici. Active from 1984 to 2004, GMM pioneered the genre of computer comics (using Apple IIs), video art, and performances. The show presents a complete history with all their works as well as an immersive re-actualization of their 1991 video installation Tecnomaya in Infotown.

“Take Me to Another World,” the first-ever Charlotte Johannesson retrospective, opens at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Named after a computer graphic the Swedish artist created in the 1980s, the survey traces 60 years of Johannesson’s image-making between craft and technology. A textile artist who turned to computer programming (in 1978, the autodidact swapped her loom for an Apple II Plus), Johannesson’s political tapestries are inwoven with 1960s counterculture, punk, and feminism.

In advance of the second Computer Mouse Conference, which is scheduled for next summer, artist and researcher Emma Rae Bruml Norton has launched The Mouse Sees “a series of discussions and research performances” that will take place in the coming months. Delving into the roots of human-computer intearction, Xerox PARC, and Apple’s early years, she promises to critically re-frame conversations around the pointing device—interaction design’s ground zero.

Apple announces updates to its code terminology that remove non-inclusive and insensitive language across its developer ecosystem. “Developer APIs with exclusionary terms will be deprecated as we introduce replacements across internal codebases, public APIs, and open-source projects, such as WebKit and Swift,” the company states. Instead of references to blacklist and whitelist, for example, Apple will implement more neutral language like allow list and deny list.

“There’s a LIDAR scanner on the right side, most likely to help scan your surrounding environment to help overlay 3D images in a realistic manner, but so far no cameras.”
– Sci-fi writer Tim Maughan, sardonically quoting Popular Mechanics’ report “Everything We Know About Apple’s Smart Glasses”
To dive deeper into Stream, please or become a .

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 commentary
  • Encounters: in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovators
  • Stream: a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and counting
  • Edition: HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print
$40 USD