1,576 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“Public blockchains, through making visible latent forces such as financing, unequal returns, or scarce and valuable ownership, are bringing long existing dynamics to the surface to be scrutinized. These forces are not new , they are nude.”
– Technologist
Mat Dryhurst , on “the shock of the nude:” the realization that financialization and inequity have been part of our digital lives all along. Web3 introduces “feasible abundance,” Dryhurst argues: free media that sustains the people creating it.
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“I want to do a show which is purely about its own financial flows, and the beauty of paying people well. There needs to be an aesthetic around this. An aesthetic of financial fairness.”
– German media artist
Hito Steyerl , discussing (decentralized) financial flows and public good with
Other Internet ’s Laura Lotti and Sam Hart. Together, they proposed a blockchain-based governance model for legacy institutions like Germany’s Bundeskunsthalle.
“It seems possible that too much globality in terms of trust leads to loss of granularity and silencing of difference, and too much locality leads to a disturbing filter-bubble effect.”
–
Sarah Friend , on turning trust into data. In her essay, published as part of
Process and Protocol festival, the Canadian software artist digs into trust network taxonomies and reveals how
Circles UBI , a community-based currency that Friend co-founded, applies “trust networks and decentralization to a social problem.”
“A Sea of Data,” German media artist Hito Steyerl ’s first solo show in Asia, opens at Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). Named after an e-flux essay by the artist, the exhibition includes 23 works, spanning 1990-2000s video art through her more recent (often iconic) installations. It also premieres a new commission: Animal Spirits (2022, image) is a sensor-driven animation of post-pandemic (human) conditions—from remote culture to decentralization.
“The dish’s colonial origins not only placed an elided aspect of European history in the spotlight, but also sought to explore the quasi-colonial relations that are built into the Internet’s infrastructure, a mentality we wanted to confront and oppose.”
Software artists and project co-founders Paloma Rodríguez Carrington and Harm van den Dorpel announce the discontinuation of Left Gallery . Active since 2015, the blockchain-based space for the display and dissemination of downloadable objects pioneered crypto art with a curated marketplace and exhibitions. Launched at Spike Art ’s Berlin project space, Left Gallery fittingly concludes with NFT auctions of the magazine’s covers throughout the years.
After ‘squatting’ the Ethereum domain of Germany’s Bundeskunsthalle in July 2021, provoking questions about ownership of public art institutions, German artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl and the Berlin-based Department of Decentralization launch Strike DAO , an “experiment in participatory governance of blockchain art institutions.” Three models are put up for a vote, and visualized through a vote-based re-edit of Steyerl’s eponymous 2010 video piece .
“I think the obsession with immutability and stable identity, which is being imposed on commercial blockchain projects, is very un-cyberfeminist and it’s very un-Satoshi Nakamoto. So that’s definitely a site of a struggle.”
– Blockchain artist
Rhea Myers , on tensions between ‘forever’ ledgers and fluid trans identities, during a conversation with
McKenzie Wark
“You are meant to be a good little Homo economicus and behave in accordance with profit maximization.”
What comes after platform capitalism? An assemblage called ‘hyperstructures,’ according to Jacob Horne. In an essay published on his website, the co-founder of the NFT marketplace aggregator Zora outlines the frameworks he sees emerging around crypto protocols. Inspired by the utopian architecture of Paolo Soleri , Horne argues the permissionless nature of hyperstructures generates low-friction exchange, yielding more equitable outcomes for participants (versus web 2.0 platforms where the user is the product ). Is this the frothy rhetoric we’ll hear as money flows into web3? Yes, but Zora’s manifesto claim that “platforms hold our audiences and content hostage” is not wrong.
“Conceptually, working with NFTs has inspired me to continue evolving my hypothesis that poetry is a technology, a durable, adaptive data storage system for preserving humanity’s most valuable information—poetry as the original blockchain.”
– Poet, artist, and AI researcher
Sasha Stiles , on embracing Web3 with her own work and the crypto poetry gallery
theVERSEverse she co-founded with Ana Maria Caballero and Kalen Iwamoto in late 2021
“We’re talking about something that is going to profoundly disrupt politics. If you thought Super PACs were bad, wait until you find out about the funneling of money through blockchain, completely outside of any regulatory mechanisms.”
– Art historian and Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator
Tina Ryan Rivers , on the dangers of wide-spread adoption of (unregulated) cryptocurrencies. “The art world needs to understand the stakes,” urges Rivers. “It’s much bigger than ‘I don’t like this cartoon monkey.’”
Kyle McDonald shares a “bottom-up” estimate and tracker of Ethereum emissions and energy use that considers key variables such as hashrate and hashing efficiency, hardware and data centre overhead, grid loss, and power supply efficiency. According to the artist’s analysis, the popular cryptocurrency network consumes around 23 terawatt hours per year—as much as the entire state of Massachusets. “Ethereum is effectively operating two to three coal power plants,” McDonald writes on Medium.
“By putting my DNA sequence in the blockchain, I’m stating that I think we’re not fully prepared for the way our bodies and technology will intersect. Both our bodies and technology feel like these illegible black boxes that code runs through.”
–
Rachel Rossin , on minting her sequenced genome on OpenSea.
Rachel Rossin’s Raw DNA , the American multimedia artist explains, comments on an impending future where wetware (living tissue)—as opposed to software or hardware—serves as the building blocks of technology.
“Don’t catalogue eyeballs. Don’t use biometrics for anti-fraud. In fact, don’t use biometrics for anything. The human body is not a ticket-punch.”
–
Edward Snowden , on
Tools for Humanity ’s announcement of
Worldcoin , a forthcoming proof-of-personhood digital identity system and cryptocurrency made available in return for biometric data. “This looks like it produces a global (hash) database of people’s iris scans, and waves away the implications by saying ‘we deleted the scans!’” warns the famous whistleblower.
“The art world seems preoccupied with bringing culture to the blockchain. But it already is a culture, and it’s fascinating, fast-moving, and inclusive. In many ways, the NFT space has succeeded where more traditional institutions have failed.”
– Artist and musician
Holly Herndon , during an
Art Basel panel discussion on NFTs. “I’m obsessed with the weird culture that’s coming out of this space,” says Herndon. “It has its own language, and understanding of aesthetics—and some of it is beautiful.”
“Trying out never explaining blockchain again, and instead only giving deranged answers like, ‘extremely shitty global computer’ or ‘the biggest clock ever built.’”
– Software artist and crypto pundit
Sarah Friend , on the current moment of max hype and max confusion
“I wanted to see what human-generated randomness looks like,” writes Jonathan Chomko of his NFT project Proof of Work . Extending out his previous prompt-driven choreography , the Montréal artist created software for collecting random values from “small-scale“ gestures: typing random characters on a keyboard. Experiments with scale and colour yielded a pixellated visual language and, post-NFT drop , he notes the labourious process “records a minimum viable artwork, the hand of the artist visible in the digital image.”
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