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“Still, I couldn’t stop tracking. My spreadsheet was the only thing I could control in a life I no longer recognized.”
“It is therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency.”
“Just as quarantining helped slow the spread of the virus and prevent a sharp spike in cases that could have overwhelmed hospitals’ capacity, investing more in safety would slow the development of AI and prevent a sharp spike in progress that could overwhelm society’s capacity to adapt.”
A survey of artworks acquired by the Nam June Paik Art Center during its COVID-19 pandemic closure opens in Seoul. “On Collecting Time” presents Kim Heecheon, Sunmin Park, Jinah Roh, Sungsil Ryu, and 6 other artists whose collected works are thematically bound in their exploration of “human and machine time in various forms.” Unmake Lab’s Utopian Extraction (2020, image), for example, pairs video demonstrating janky real-time object detection and documentation of slowly evolving landscapes.
“What Fukushima revealed is that we are also living in an age of climato-politics in which we must confront the chaos of planetary flows that trespass the borders of nation states and evade their attempts at control.”
Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki’s animated series 2 Lizards (2020) opens as an installation at The Whitney. In it, two anthropomorphized CGI lizards channel the artists’ experience of the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding in New York City, “a city gripped by extended isolation, and cries for social justice reform.” Originally released in eight episodes on Bennani’s Instagram, the Whitney show is 2 Lizards’s first institutional screening as a narrative film.
“This Unfathomable Weight,” a lightbox and billboard project parsing the trauma of “the massive crises of recent years,” opens at University of Toronto Mississauga campus. Curated by Farah Yusef for The Blackwood, the show invites Jessica Thalmann, Christina Battle, and Erika DeFreitas to sequentially contribute works; Thalmann’s opener, cut between the supports and collapse (2022, image), documents the emotional weight of time spent in the ICU (as a primary caregiver) during the pandemic.
Created between summer 2020 and spring 2022, during COVID isolation, Marcel Schwittlick’s plotter drawing series Upward Spiral concludes with an online archive and a show. The 144 cylinders, each penned by a custom-built drawing machine performing continuous spiral motions, contain all possible colour combinations of the solid-paint marker brand used. Whereas the archive compiles all the Spirals in a neat calendar view, the Berlin Bark LAB exhibition presents a selection of ten.
“Our leaders have offered few spaces for reflection, so artists have stepped in to fill the gap.” In her piece on COVID memorials, New York-based writer Jillian Steinhauer considers four exhibitions that “offer us a place to put our grief.” Featured works by Jill Magid, the Zip Code Memory Project, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and Coco Fusco in particular (Your Eyes Will Be An Empty Word, 2022, image) go beyond puncturing the anonymity of numbers; they “memorialize those whose stories we don’t know.”
A survey of seven performance and software works that explore human connection during COVID, Lauren Lee McCarthy’s solo exhibition “I Heard Talking Is Dangerous” opens at EIGEN+ART Lab, Berlin. In the 2020 piece the show is named after, for example, a masked McCarthy delivers text-to-speech monologues about safety and distancing to friends—on their doorstep. Captured in documentation and artifacts, the works reveal moments of augmented, but real, intimacy.
Bugniot, Dubačová, Hoppan
Stockpiling Food for Thought
A heartwreching visualization of COVID-19’s impact, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s A Crack in the Hourglass (2020) debuts IRL at the Brooklyn Museum. An “anti-monument,” the installation renders portraits of pandemic victims with grains of sand, once realized the delicate images fall away. Commissioned by MUAC (Mexico City), NYC is a fitting first stop, given the city endured amongst the “highest number of pandemic-related deaths in the U.S.—and worldwide,” note the curators.
“I couldn’t meet any students for almost three semesters. However, it would have been no problem for me as a director to shoot commercials or reality TV. How is system relevance defined here? Not to mention culture?”
“As of the second quarter of 2021, governments around the world have allocated around USD 380 billion on clean energy measures as part of their economic response to the Covid-19 crisis. This is around 2% of the total fiscal support in response to Covid-19.”
A hat tip to the star-studded browser space of Olia Lialina’s net art classic Some Universe (2002), the 11th edition of Eastern Bloc’s Sight + Sound Festival opens with the online exhibition “Some Universe—Internet Spaces in a Postdigital World.” Featuring 13 VR, video, and net art pieces by AAA, Banz & Bowinkel, Ronnie Clarke, Mara Eagle, Jiwon Ham, Jakyung Lee (image: Exodus, 2020), and others, curators Erandy Vergara and Tina Sauerländer explore how the pandemic shift online has changed our sense of space.
“Pakui Hardware’s work was timely pre-pandemic; it is in no need of conceptual frills to emerge as a strong indictment of our relationship to technology and the pervasive toxicity permeating contemporary methods of care.”
Counting 3,158 submissions “despite a pandemic and a temporary shutdown of the art world,” Ars Electronica announces the winners of this year’s Prix Awards. Golden Nicas go to Forensic Architecture’s airborne violence analysis Cloud Studies (image), Alexander Schubert’s AI ensemble Convergence, and Guangli Liu’s When the Sea Sends Forth a Forest, a CGI lesson in Cambodian “lost history” under Khmer Rouge rule. In addition to the three main prizes, the jury also granted six awards of distinction and 36 honorary mentions.
Eva & Franco Mattes
Dear Imaginary Audience
“It’s the ultimate hyperobject. The hyperobject of our age. It’s literally inside us.”
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