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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
● 14/01/2024
“It is really disheartening to watch artists I respect run to do ordinals. Can’t help but remember the rough convos we had around energy use and carbon load of ETH.”
– Digital artist and prolific collector Chris Coleman, on fellow creators “loading art onto the most wasteful crypto in existence,” Bitcoin, in the wake of Sotheby’s “Natively Digital: An Ordinals Curated Sale.” Rather than following the money, Coleman reaffirms his commitment to ‘green NFTs’ (on energy-efficient proof-of-stake chains) and takes a stand: “I don’t want to judge, but no way will I buy or sell on that chain.”
X / Twitter
● 31/12/2023
“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]
Globe and Mail
● 01/12/2023
“Instead of being in charge, these executives and lobbyists should be behind bars. At the very least, the UN should ban them from climate summits.”
– American climate scientist and author Peter Kalmus, on the annual United Nations climate summit, COP28, being overrun by fossil fuel industry figureheads. Worse yet, COP president and oil executive Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber is reported to actively use the event for striking dirty energy deals. “It’s hard to imagine anything more cynical or more evil,” writes Kalmus.
Newsweek
● 04/08/2023
“It’s easier to build LK-99 at home than it is to write a good internet regulation.”
– Tech journalist and Platformer founder Casey Newton, concluding a Hard Fork episode on the “folk science” surrounding the LK-99 room-temperature superconductor Korean researchers claim to have discovered—a potentially transformative technology that people are now trying to recreate themselves—and the tight rope between empowerment and censorship that the U.S. congress attempts to walk with the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)
Hard Fork
● 19/07/2023

How does generative AI’s carbon footprint fare against human creators? Pretty well, according to a recent paper shared by American software artist Kyle McDonald. Comparing text and image creation energy use, University of California researcher Bill Tomlinson and team found that BLOOM, ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E2 beat human writers and illustrators (and their computers) by wide margins: “An AI creating an image emits 310 to 2900 times less CO2,” states the paper. McDonald’s dark take: “New eugenics just dropped.”

Twitter
● 08/07/2023

Aram Bartholl’s solo exhibition “Package ready for pickup” opens at Kunsthalle Osnabrück (DE), kicking off the church-turned-gallery’s 30th anniversary celebrations. Highlighting material flows and environmental degradation, Berlin-based Bartholl presents e-waste recycling crates, QR code climate alerts, and chandeliers made from salvaged TVs. The highlight: a pop-up DHL package station will service customers for the duration of the exhibition, drawing non-art audiences to the show and its themes.

Kunsthalle Osnabrück
Z
● 02/07/2023
“To be frank, it was an accident. We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.”
– UMass Amherst professor of electrical and computer engineering Jun Yao, on the discovery of hygroelectricity—renewable power pulled from thin air. In a new paper, Yao and team demonstrate the generation of a small but continuous electric current from atmospheric humidity, enough to light a single pixel on a large LED screen.
The Guardian
● 30/06/2023

French visual artist Joanie Lemercier shares glimpses of new works in progress that draw on solar rather than projector light. “These photons travelled 150 million kilometers,” he writes about the beam of sunlight used in his lens refraction experiments. “It encompasses the entire electro-magnetic spectrum—visible light, infrared, uv, radio waves, x and gamma rays—and conveys about 500W of energy,” Lemercier notes in subsequent posts. “It’s low tech, yet so much brighter than any high-end projector.”

Instagram
● 13/06/2023
“This new study is different because it measures tiny variations in the way that Bitcoin mining equipment generates random numbers. These variations serve as a fingerprint allowing us to directly estimate the proportion of different machines.”
– American media artist Kyle McDonald, parsing the methodology of a new Coinmetrics study on Bitcoin energy use that offers the most accurate picture yet. “It basically confirms what we already knew,” writes McDonald, “Bitcoin is using about as much energy as the entire internet (around 12GW or 100TWh/year).”
Twitter
● 08/06/2023

“Chasing the Devil to the Moon: Art Under Lunar Occupation Today” opens at Tallinn Art Hall (ES), constructing post-colonial cosmic imaginaries. Inspired by the 19th-century Estonian folk tale The Moon Painters, curator Corina L. Apostol presents six artists including Agate Tūna, Amélie Laurence Fortin, and Pau/a that explore social and political notions of “recolouring” the Moon. Fortin’s new CGI video The Blue Moon Project (2023, image), for example, offers a utopian vision of sustainable (blue) energy.

Tallinn Art Hall
● 14/04/2023

“New Visions,” the 2nd Edition of the Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media opens in Oslo (NO). A total of 22 artists including Anna Ehrenstein, Anna Engelhardt, Kristina Õllek, Monira Al Qadiri, Emilija Škarnulytė (image: RAKHNE, 2023), and Istvan Virag contribute media and installations, drawing on traditional mediums and new modes of automated image-making to underscore the ubiquity of “resource extraction, energy distribution, and data harvesting.”

Henie Onstad Kunstsenter
● 07/04/2023
“Current mining operations have now become their own geological force, scraping, sorting and collecting more dirt, rock and sediment than the world’s rivers, wind, rain and glaciers every year.”
– Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, citing British geologist and Extraction to Extinction (2021) author David Howe in a scathing critique of the extractivism-powered “green techno-dream.” If continued, he writes, “the pile of human mined materials on this groaning planet will triple global biomass by 2040.”
The Tyee
● 04/01/2023
“By attempting to shield consumers from high prices, governments will only encourage consumption via lower prices, prolonging the energy crisis.”
– Oxford Institute for Energy Studies Senior Research Fellow Adi Imsirovic, advising against governments deploying “subsidies, retail price caps, and tax reductions” to placate cash-strapped consumers. “Such actions only support the rich,” encourage fossil fuel use, and stifle innovation, he argues.
The Conversation
● 16/12/2022

“This Current Between Us,” an installation and performance program, opens at the Neo Faliro Steam Power Plant in Piraeus, Greece. Artists including Nikos Alexiou, Hypercomf, and Miriam Simun contribute works exploring energy and production in response to the decommissioned site. The latter’s performance Do Not Break Out of Prior Range (image), for example, draws on a blender, lightbulb, and power cord—and Simun announcing “this isn’t just a milkshake, it’s a crucial north-south energy bridge” into a microphone.

Blow-Up
● 15/12/2022
“Some institutions are spending more on their energy bills than they are on their exhibition programs, which is crazy.”
– Heath Lowndes, Managing Director of Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), on the ecological and financial footprint of climate-control systems used in collection management. “The regulations governing them were set in the 1950s and collection managers are still largely tied to these antiquated, irrelevant standards, which means they basically keep art in a fridge.”
Frieze
● 29/07/2022
“Paired together, you’d have nearly a whole kilowatt of power being sucked up by just the processor and graphics card. Everything else will absolutely push this system over the 1000W line.”
– TechRadar computing editor John Loeffler, on next-gen Nvidia and AMD circuits hogging energy. “Value and efficiency seem to have been completely thrown by the wayside, and that isn’t just a mistake, it’s increasingly unethical.”
TechRadar
● 28/07/2022
“At some point, we’re amassing all this computing power at the consumer level for the sake of amassing this power because we can. Then we just go and use it to stream Netflix.”
– Tech journalist John Loeffler, commenting on rumoured 200% performance increases in upcoming Nvidia and Intel chips. Concerned about financial accessibility and egregious power consumption he concludes “it’s okay to say, ‘you know, 60 to 70 fps at 1440p is good enough,’ because honestly, it is.”
TechRadar
● 23/07/2022
“Journalists were actually actively looking for the contrarians. It was really feeding an appetite that was already there.”
– Don Rheem, former environmental journalist turned lobbyist, on his work for the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). Throughout the ’90s, the fossil fuel interest group challenged the science of global warming by funding climate sceptics. “My role was to identify the voices that were not in the mainstream and to give those voices a stage,” Rheem says.
BBC
● 11/05/2022
“The evidence now suggests a 3 to 4 degree warming by mid-century, not accounting for tipping points—which could easily be 5 or 6 degrees.”
– Benjamin Sovacool, University of Sussex energy researcher and one of the lead authors of the recent IPCC Working Group III report, on the damning implications of current climate legislation implementation gaps. “Even if we were to meet 100% of the 2015 Paris accord, we’d still be pretty far off from 2 degrees,” says Sovacool.
The Energy Transition Show
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