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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
“Nothing is fully on-chain: there are always many more layers of tech off-chain that you depend on that interpret and transform data to display your art, like your browser. And your eyes and your mind to perceive it are extremely mutable too.”
– Dutch software artist Harm van den Dorpel, dropping hard truths about NFT posterity. “The more immutable your artwork is, the more likely it is that it will break in the future because of compatibility issues with future dependencies.”
“They serve no positive function for society. They’re like mustard gas, polystyrene, lead in gasoline—all these crappy ideas we had to get rid of.”
– British conservationist and development researcher Peter Howson, on the corrosiveness of cryptocurrencies. In his new book, Let Them Eat Crypto (2023), Howson rescinds his initial blockchain advocacy, declaring the technology “industrial scale scumbaggery” that ought to be banned.
“Our physical realities, the human body and the planet, are no less real just because technology is taking up more of our attention. We are still embodied, we still look with our eyeballs, we still type with our hands, and we are still sitting here getting bad posture.”
Operator’s Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, on the blockchain embodiment of Human Unreadable (2023), an on-chain generative choreography project on view as part of HEK’s “Exploring the Decentralized Web” exhibition
“In the end, we need to ask more of museums and we need to ask more of DAOs (and of emerging technologies more broadly). For either to earn our trust, they need to continually define their terms and defend their motives.”
– Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator Tina Rivers Ryan, questioning the rhetoric of decentralization. “Trust is not simply the product of technological protocols (no matter how transparent),” she writes in her essay for HEK’s Algorithmic Imaginary, “but also of a ‘social layer’ of legal and professional codes and specialized knowledge bases.”
OUT NOW:
Himmelsbach & Magrini (ed.)
Algorithmic Imaginary
House of Electronic Art (HEK) curators Sabine Himmelsbach and Boris Magrini expand on the institution’s current arc of Web3-centric exhibitions with essays from Ruth Catlow, Primavera De Filippi, Penny Rafferty, Tina Rivers Ryan, and Marina Otero Verzier.

“Exploring the Decentralized Web – Art on the Blockchain” opens at Basel’s HEK (House of Electronic Arts), concluding the institution’s recent excursion into Web3. HEK’s Sabine Himmelbach and Boris Magrini gather some of crypto art’s finest including Simon Denny, Mario Klingemann & Botto, Sarah Friend, Chloé Michel, Rhea Myers, Operator, Lukas Truniger and others, to lay bare the politics and potentials of the metaverse. Of note: Kyle McDonald’s Amends (2022), a potent eco-critical work that’s on view for the very first time.

Z
What Just Happened?:
Burak Arikan Maps Power Structures, Financial Flows, and Networks of Influence

The New York-based artist discusses the collector ecosystem revealed by his ‘meta NFT’ Social Contracts (2023) and the evolution of peer-to-peer economies

Jan Robert Leegte’s solo exhibition ”No Content: Contemplations on Software” opens at Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam, examining digital media through “the carrier and reality that holds it.” JPEG (2023), for example, is a series of algorithmic images that fully express the signature compression; Broken Images (2023) foregrounds the volatility of digital assets by minting broken links as NFTs, and Scrollbars (image)—a Leegte classic—presents obsolete interface elements as sculptural and cultural debris.

The public mint for Social Contracts, an Ethereum wallet network visualization by Turkish artist Burak Arikan closes. In all, 899 editions were minted by NFT collectors who were curious to see what their purchase history reveals about their nearest neighbours on the blockchain. Built by Arikan using his Graph Commons platform, the token visualizes connections between the owner and other collectors, predicts future NFT acquisitions, and evolves with each purchase and transfer of ownership.

“It’s a question of permanence. What will last the longest? What will give me the strongest sense of comfort that a work will exist well beyond my lifetime?”
– Software artist Sarah Ridgley, musing about how the code for her generative piece Nymph, in Thy Orisons (2023) is hosted on the decentralized Arweave protocol for posterity. In a Twitter Space with curator Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, and “Code Chronicles” artists including Maya Man and Lia Something, Ridgley and company delve into the details of their ongoing show at Bitforms.

“Value Flows,” a pop-up show curated by the decentralized JPG community opens as part of NFT Paris. Artists including 0xDEAFBEEF, Kim Asendorf, Dmitri Cherniak, Simon Denny & Guile Twardowski, and Sarah Friend contribute works revealing the “on-chain transactions and mechanisms, or off-chain interactions between humans, that live at the core of every blockchain system.” Rippling with DIY energy, it juxtaposes ad-hoc pyramids of analogue displays (image) with the backdrop of a bustling trade show.

Rhea Myers’ solo exhibition “The Ego, and It’s 0wned” opens at Nagel Draxler’s Crypto Kiosk in Berlin, offering blockchain-based “symbolic forms” that ponder property, representation, identity, and secrecy. In the titular piece (2023), for example, the British artist and hacker tokenizes her brain wave recordings while Type Opposite Images (2023, image) reverses colourful Vaporwave tropes. Also on view: new NFT editions of iconic Ethereum works that Myers created in 2014.

“No currency, no collectors, no cashing out. Just having fun swapping and chatting about work that we made and loved.”
Kyle McDonald, on the joys of trading digital art before the NFT boom. In 2019, McDonald and a few dozen peers joined a2p, a speculative blockchain-based exchange run by artists Casey Reas, Addie Wagenknecht, Rick Silva, and exonemo. “It’s an artist-to-artist system to build and curate a collection,” Reas wrote in the platform’s brief. “It’s a performance, but also a way to think about what happens to the work after it’s made.”

Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg’s “A Slice of the Pie” platform launches as part of “DYOR,” a crypto art exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich curated by Nina Röhrs. For its duration, artists can purchase pie segments on a 16 m2 LED wall to show their work, effectively becoming part of the exhibition. The hustle is broadcast 24/7, inviting remote competition and/or collaboration. Once a day, the pie’s state is frozen and minted as an NFT, starting the cycle anew.

“The line between utility, saving one’s market, and wash trading seems to be blurred.”
– Blockchain researcher HENFT_Reporter, sharing a tabulation of artists buying their own NFTs across all major Tezos platforms from winter 2021 to fall 2022. Whether this data reveals abject market manipulation, necessary customer service, or requires more granularity is the subject of subsequent debate.

Sarah Friend’s solo exhibition “Terraforming” opens at Nagel Draxler’s Crypto Kiosk, Berlin, with a series of new works that “turn to the protocol layer of blockchains and the physical reality of the internet as subject matter.” Using text, video, code, and waste from a local data center, the Canadian software artist foregrounds “internet infrastructure, its stories, shape, materials” and the false “dichotomy between competition and cooperation.”

“Blue chip galleries and institutions ‘groom’ mid-career artists but forget all the things that fed that career: the unpaid cultural workers, the project spaces. They skim off the top and I wanted to hold them accountable.”
– Writer and critic Penny Rafferty, on the origins of Black Swan DAO, a digital tool kit that enables artists and cultural organizations to distribute resources in equitable and democratic ways
“I grabbed an old Sol LeWitt certificate of authenticity, got some Wite-Out, whited out the details of his work and just quickly wrote in the details of mine and photocopied it a few times.”
– Blockchain artist Rhea Myers, on the origins of Certificate of Inauthenticity (2020). From 2011 to 2012, Myers commissioned 3D-printed Shareable Readymades from art history’s canon and rendered “sarcastic certificates” upon the exhibiting gallery’s request. “I don’t own the copyright in the works,” Myers notes, “that’s part of the concept of the project.”

“The Byzantine Generals Problem,” a group show seeking consensus on crypto, opens at distant.gallery. Curated by Domenico Quaranta, the online exhibition features Sterling Crispin, Sarah Friend, Ben Grosser, Anna Ridler, and 10 others. Interrogative in tone, included works span Rhea Myers’ blockchain visualizations (2014-5), Kyle McDonald’s Ethereum carbon footprint calculations (2021), through a Web3 Dot Com Séance (2022, image) by Simon Denny and collaborators.

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