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“Those minerals are not found in urban centres. They’re found on traditional territories, or you will need roads and access to traditional territories to get to them.”
– First Nations Major Project Coalition Sustainability Officer Mark Podlasly, on how Canada needs Indigenous consent to access many of the rare earth minerals required to reach net zero emissions. “First Nations are not prepared to see what happened in previous gold, transportation, and industry rushes” repeat itself, says Podlasly of his apprehension towards mounting efforts to boost domestic battery production. [quote edited]

Exploring sound across the ages (and over the Atlantic Ocean), “Resonaciones. An embrace to awake” opens at IFA Gallery Stuttgart. Inspired by the ancient Peruvian whistling vessels in the Linden Museum collection, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen presents art and environments by artists and culture workers Carolina Arévalo, Francisca Gili, Nicole L’Huillier, and Bettina Korintenberg that weigh the impact of colonialism and how soundscapes function as “a living and permanently changing archive.”

“During the workshop, interesting ideas emerged. Like a pair of decolonial sandals. In this imaginary, wherever you walk in the sandals, you (re)connect with the ancestral practices of that territory.”
– Activist Joana Varon, sharing an idea generated with The Oracle For Transfeminist Technologies at a Rio De Janeiro platform cooperativism conference. In conversation with SUPERRR’s Julia Kloiber, Varon discusses how speculative design can “bring you back to the past while playing with the idea of the future.”

“What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI” opens at New York’s Ford Foundation Gallery. Curators Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan enlist 16 artists including Algorithmic Justice League, Morehshin Allahyari, Kite, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Mimi Ọnụọha, and Caroline Sinders to counter pervasive “algorithmic worldmaking” models with “feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI.” Allahyari’s series Moon-faced (2022, image), for example, hallucinates genderless Qajar dynasty portraits.

“While the view from above has historically been aligned to an imperial gaze, the use of commercial drones has co-opted this sightline as a part of protest against imperialism and colonisation.”
– Critic Daniel Jewesbury, parsing Kurdish artist Behjat Omer Abdulla’s film It’s Your Turn, Doctor (2018) in Sarah Tuck’s research documentation Drone Vision: Warfare, Surveillance, Protest (2022). The film juxtapozes drawings (based on Youtube footage) of a 2013 aerial bombing of the city of Daraa, Syria, and private drone footage of the asylum reception centre near Swedish Gothenburg.
“The physical still has power. Let’s at least get the power of digital in our own hands, for us to be able to tell that story, rather than leave it up to museums to start representing things digitally, and then own that narrative.”
– Looty’s Chidirim Nwaubani, calling for the digital repatriation of cultural plunder from major museums. Until institutions admit guilt and return the ill-gotten “spoils of war” that line Egyptian and African museum wings in the Global North, he and collaborator Ahmed Abokor are defiantly 3D scanning artifacts (and sharing them in AR) for their rightful inheritors.
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“Scanning the irises of individuals in the Global South, who genuinely need the money and are unaware of potential risks, is a contemporary form of colonialism.”
– New York-based artist Burak Arikan, on the recent launch of Worldcoin. Sam Altman’s biometric cryptocurrency project that aspires to be “the world’s largest identity and financial public network” rolled out with an aggressive recruitment campaign including in the Global South. Luring people with a sign-up bonus of 25 WLD—about $50 USD—Worldcoin booths in Nairobi, Bengaluru, and Hong Kong, for example, drew massive crowds.
“European scientists seem to be quite captivated that this time period starts very recently. For Indigenous and other displaced and dispossessed peoples who were impacted by violence over the last 600 years, everything that leads up to what makes this global shift possible starts much earlier.”
– Métis Anthropologist Zoe Todd, problematizing debates about how recently the Anthropocene began [quote edited]
“What’s the default language that you go to to do that? It’s the modernist grid. That’s how you understand making new lands. That’s how you understand these digital frontiers. ”
– New Zealand artist Simon Denny, discussing why landscape painting is an apt medium for representing Web3 land plots (e.g. Decentraland) in Metaverse Landscapes (2023). “The Dutch have this long tradition—many colonial landscapes were painted in South Africa and Indonesia,” he adds, further complicating the marketing of virtual space. [quote edited]

Julius von Bismarck’s solo exhibition “When Platitudes Become Form” opens at Berlinische Galerie, examining simplistic clichés of “how nature is seen and history is written.” For the sculptural piece I like the flowers (2017, image), for example, the German artist pressed dried plants of non-European origin into two dimensions. Bismarck’s critique of extractivist colonial world views also includes his own family history: A suspended 9 x 12 meter cloth, Landscape Painting (2022), invokes the moving waters of the Bismarck Sea.

Carla Gannis’ solo exhibition “wwwunderkammer” opens at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (HICA) in Charleston (US), aiming to decolonize the wunderkammer and, by extension, the museum. A real-world manifestation of her ongoing social VR project (2019–), the show invites visitors to explore a series of ‘chambers,’ each focusing on a different aspect of life in the internet age. In line with the American transmedia artist’s penchant for illusionism, the gallery uses AR to obfuscate what’s real and what’s not.

“Back to Earth: Contested Histories of Outer Space Travel” opens at New York’s Canal Projects. Nuotama Bodomo, Zahy Tentehar, and Alice dos Reis contribute to a film program that counters colonial space narratives (conquest, mining, tourism, etc.) with intersectional perspectives. Subash Thebe Limbu’s film Ningwasum (2021, image), for example, is a sci-fi film about a trio of Indigenous time travellers, from a future where Yakthung “knowledge, culture, ethics, and storytelling are still intact.”

Taking its name from the eponymous searing neon work by feminist conceptual artist Claire Fontaine (2012, image), “Someone is getting rich” opens at Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum. Curated by Carrie Pilto, the show invites the aforementioned Fontaine along with Eline Benjaminsen, DIS, Femke Herregraven, Petr Pavlensky, and 10 other artists to present works that speak truth to power by “revealing how the aftermath of colonialism is still embedded in the financial sector today.”

“If you’re possessed by one, there is that trouble—the horror—of interruption of flow, of being in your life. It’s almost like they’re hacking into a system. Maybe, jinn are a kind of hacker.”
– Iranian-American artist Morehshin Allahyari, on her obsession with West Asian spirits and their cyborgian nature. In her work She Who Sees the Unknown (2017–2021), Allahyari used 3D modelling to visualize female and/or queer demons as avatars for hysteria, gendered morality, and the experience of “living in a female body in the Middle East.”
“In the same way that English language emotion concepts have colonized psychology, AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions.”
– American UX designer and health futurist Jenka Gurfinkel, on the proliferation of the American smile as “distinct cultural histories and meanings of facial expressions become mischaracterized, homogenized, subsumed under the dominant dataset”

Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich’s single-channel video installation Onset (2023) opens at Aksioma, Ljubljana. Co-commissioned by transmediale, the film draws on medieval demonology, open-source intelligence, and CGI animation to ‘haunt’ Russian air bases the duo reconstructed from satellite imagery. “The true horror of Russian colonialism becomes manifest in the process of possession,” the artists write, “the imposition of external control that gradually destroys an organism from within.”

“Holding Up The Sky,” a solo show by Caroline Monnet, opens at the Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB) in Ontario, Canada. Foregrounding her interests in indigenous geometry and the figure of the cube (image: It Cracks with Light, 2021), the Franco-Anishinaabe artist presents The Room (2023), a 3 square metre assembly of inscribed styrofoam. The installation, and another made of PVC pipes and conduits, rebukes “prescriptive colonial architecture … the urge to square and compartmentalize.“

For the launch of Vertical Atlas, a book and exhibition capturing Hivos and Het Nieuwe Instituut’s joint research into digital geopolitics, South African artist Francois Knoetze unleashes the mythical e-waste creature from his 2018 short Core Dump ‘E-Revenant’. Shot in Dakar and the first in a series of four, the film “emerges from the dystopian landfills of consumer culture” to explore the links between digital technology and colonialism.

OUT NOW:
Jack Ashby
Platypus Matters
A reconsideration of the (often colonialist) history of one of nature’s most idiosyncratic mammals
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