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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
● 08/09/2023
“The institution is drawn toward those who can leverage their racial identity into a curatorial practice, which the institution can then leverage (or co-opt) into its brand.”
– Writer and designer Simon Wu, on the catch-22 of the art world finally embracing racialized curators. Drawing on his time at MoMA, Wu observes that the desire to confront labour and ethics issues within institutions often gets trumped by the stability (“healthcare, a living wage, parental leave”) that many curators of colour have only just got access to for the first time.
Momus
● 09/11/2022

As the lacklustre presentation of NFTs even at major exhibitions and conferences continues to disappoint, Swiss software artist Andreas Gysin shares an “opinionated” mini-guide for newly-minted curators and organizers. Works that use the popular square aspect ratio, for example, suffer in particular on standard 16:9 screens, Gysin notes and offers three simple tricks that improve the overall composition. “The important thing is to NOT put it in the center!” (example on left).

Twitter
● 12/10/2022
“The role of the digital exhibition is not to imitate its physical counterpart. Digital art and its exhibitions exist to examine the affordances of their endemic space.”
– Ender Gallery curators Sarah Friend, Cat Bluemke, and Jonathan Carroll, reflecting on experimenting with digitally native exhibition spaces. Throughout 2021, Ender Gallery hosted four artist residents, Cat Haines, Simon M. Benedict, Huidi Xiang, and Travess Smalley, to make art on a dedicated Minecraft server.
Backflash
● 12/09/2022
“It’s not just like going out and buying a chair. There are issues of IP, of the end-user license agreements. We had to talk some producers into changing the EULA for us.”
– MoMA Senior Curator Paola Antonelli, on the complexities of building the museum’s videogame collection that’s now on view (in its entirety!) as part of the “Never Alone” exhibition. “Designers want their work to be in the museum, of course,” Antonelli notes. “It’s the lawyers that stop them.”
Input
● 26/05/2022

“Grid Island,” a meta-exhibition questioning “fundamental tasks of a museum such as collection, research, exhibition, and education,” opens at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA). Ahram Kwon, SungHong Min, Nicholas Pelzer, contribute works that question boundaries of medium and (time) period; Jungki Beak’s Fusor (2021, image), presents a functioning nuclear fusion device designed in the style of the ganui, a 15th century Joseon Dynasty astronomical instrument.

SeMA
● 08/01/2021
“I find virtual studio visits most successful when I get a tour of artists’ hard drives—having their desktop appear on my own creates an interesting new form of shared space.”
– Digital art curator Christiane Paul, on the merits of screen-sharing, PDFs, and personalized Zoom backgrounds in a survey conducted by Rea McNamara (that also includes Jeremy Bailey, Faith Holland, Skawennati, and others)
Hyperallergic
B
● 13/05/2020

Given the transition that art galleries, fairs, and all manner of cultural producers have made in switching from IRL events to online content, Rhizome Artistic Director Michael Conner has begun a timely multi-part essay project cataloguing essential history and clarifying what is at stake. The first installment, on ‘performance, variability, objecthood’ is up and more are promised in the coming weeks.

Rhizome
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