1,577 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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“Offshore finance pierces reality,” French artist collective RYBN reflects on their Offshore Tours (2018-20) in a Palm editorial. Over two years, the artists mapped 785,000 leaked addresses tied to offshore activity. “Behind each photographed facade hides a hot spot, a gap in the urban landscape connected to elsewhere, a true crossing point to offshore space,” they write. “These addresses are deserted at the very moment of their unveiling, the tracking of offshore finance thus turns into ghost hunting.”
“Temperature check on late-stage capitalism: you can buy NFTs of AI-generated descriptions of imaginary girlfriends.”
“Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age” opens at Mudam Luxembourg. Exploring the paradox that capitalism is ”both dependent upon and threatened by technological progress,” the show includes polemical works by Simon Denny , Oliver Laric , Martine Syms , and others. Strongly signalling the capital-collides-with-lifeworld aesthetic is Cao Fei’s Asia One (2018, image), a film about a burgeoning romance between two young workers in a gigantic logistics warehouse, set against a backdrop of automation.
“Work Upside Down,” a group exhibition exploring labour, opens at the Cluj Cultural Center in Cluj, Romania, as part of the Cluj Future of Work program. Curated by Time’s Up , Corina Bucea, and Rarița Zbranca, the show presents 13 newly commissioned works by, among others, Blajin, Mihaela Drăgan, Ioana Păun & Flavia Giurgiu, Polina Kanis , and Cristina Vasilescu & Bob Bicknell-Knight . The latter’s 24-minute CGI film Pickers (image) concerns Amazon Fulfilment Centres, abusive workspaces, and the 24/7 churn of 21st-century capitalism.
OUT NOW :
Ruben Pater
CAPS LOCK
A rigorous examination of the inextricable links between graphic design and capitalism that details how “design is locked in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources”
“This is the first major case of weaponizing personal data, shared by shady data brokers. I have been warning for years that there would be consequences for failing to protect Americans’ personal information.”
– U.S. Senator
Ron Wyden , sponsor of the “
Mind Your Own Business ” act, and other privacy-focused legislation, on the
recent outing of a high-ranking Catholic priest as a Gay bar patron based on Grindr location data obtained through a grey market reseller
“The objective of Extractor for the player is to achieve world domination as the ultimate data capitalist. The work is a fictionalised attempt to find a visual language to articulate complex invisible power structures.”
– Curator
Anna Briers , on
Simon Denny ’s 2019 board game, that “gamifies the dynamics of the data mining industry.”
Extractor is a “pivotal work” in the forthcoming “
Don’t Be Evil ” exhibition Briers curated for the University of Queensland (UQ) Art Museum.
“To witness rich boys using space travel for touristic amusement shows how much the modernist project of limitless expansion has come to a clownish end. Time to land.”
– French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist
Bruno Latour , on Virgin Galactic owner Richard Branson beating fellow space race billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to orbit
OUT NOW :
Jer Thorp
Living in Data
Canadian data artist
Jer Thorp compiles “A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future” that charts hopeful paths through the age of surveillance capitalism wherein our data is mined for profit, power, and political gain.
“Orchid enthusiasts and orchid enemies, please download the orchid collector guide to play along.” Thus posts Fantasia Malware to the sidebar chat, as Orchid Collector commences. Drawing on interests in “magical, corrupt, and chaotic software” the performance blurs lines between gaming livestream and scarcity rumination. Replete with banal narration (“I see now, a dark blue orchid!”), the trio rush to collect flowers, their mad scramble interrupted by news that the price of orchids has crashed.
“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.”
“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.”
“Although it felt a little creepy engineering a drug-resistant strain of E. coli in my kitchen, there was also a sense of achievement, so much so that I decided to move on to the second project in the kit: inserting a jellyfish gene into yeast in order to make it glow.”
–
Elizabeth Kolbert , author of
The Sixth Mass Extinction (2014), on CRISPR as a commodity that could help revive—or finish—threatened species
“Every human in the supply chain—from crane drivers up to the captain of the ship I was on—was constantly receiving instructions from unseen, distant, management algorithms.”
– Science fiction writer
Tim Maughan , on the invisible networks that control container ships—and the world—in the first entry to his new column aptly titled
No One’s Driving . “I am here to tell you that the reason so much of the world seems incomprehensible is that it
is incomprehensible,” Maughan writes.
Expanding upon
DISNOVATION.ORG ’s “Post Growth” exhibition at iMAL, Brussels, writer and critic
Chloe Stead delves into the French artist-researcher collective’s speculative work on kinship futures after fossil fuels and zombie capitalism.
“There’s no ‘healthy’ way to educate children entirely within structures of capitalist exploitation. There’s no way to entertain them safely either.”
– Artist and writer
James Bridle , on YouTube being “the perfection of a system of techniques held in common by Sesame Street, Teletubbies, and captology for the acquisition and retention of attention, stripped of all desire to do anything with that attention beyond profit from it”
“It feels so utopian to think about a face filter that doesn’t capture data, an interactive mirror that doesn’t use DARPA-funded body tracking, with no governmental or corporate uses. But I have to believe that we could have that.”
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.
Propelled by a huge increase of online purchases during the pandemic, and in the midst of the worst economic upheaveal since the Great Depression, Jeff Bezos’ net worth increases $4.9 billion, making the Amazon founder and CEO the world’s first-ever person to amass a $200 billion fortune.
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