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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
OUT NOW:
Madhumita Murgia
Code Dependent
The intimate investigation of AI that we’ve been waiting for, Indian-British journalist and Financial Times tech correspondent Madhumita Murgia compiles the stories of marginalized people—BIPOC women, war refugees, gig workers, tribal communities—“living in the shadow of AI.”

UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery opens “Bodily Autonomy,” Lauren Lee McCarthy’s largest solo show in the U.S. to date. Curator Ceci Moss brings together two major series of works—Surrogate (2022) and Saliva (2022)—in which the Chinese-American artist examines bio-surveillance through performances, videos, and installations. A newly commissioned Saliva Bar, for example, invites visitors to reflect on data privacy, race, gender, and class as they pertain to genetic material over traded spit samples.

“We’d have kept our fossil fuel funding sponsors AND curated poetry competitions on climate change if it wasn’t for those pesky school strike kids.”
– English trip hop juggernaut Massive Attack, ‘decoding’ a Guardian op-ed on ethics and precarity in the cultural sector. The piece cites the criticism and climate activism offered by Bergen’s recent International Literary Festival as an example for why festivals matter, but fails to explore the Faustian bargain that sustains a lot of cultural infrastructure.
OUT NOW:
Eleanor Drage & Kerry McInerney
The Good Robot
Building on their eponymous podcast (2021-), Cambridge University researchers Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney explore “why technology needs feminism” with leading feminist thinkers, activists, and technologists.

For MIT Technology Review. Cassandra Willyard surveys the state of rapidly advancing artificial womb research. As a promising prototype nears readiness for trials with human embryos, researchers and bioethicists are weighing potential implications on child-rearing. “The most challenging question to answer is how much unknown is acceptable,” says FDA neonatologist An Massaro to Willyard, of concerns that include gauging risk for premature infants and shifting discourse about a woman’s right to choose.

“If a human–pig chimera were brought to term, should we treat it like a pig, like a human, or like something else altogether?”
– Bioethics researcher Julian Koplin, extrapolating a moral quandary raised by embryonic stem cell research that blurs the line between human and animal. With research into synthetic embryos and lab-grown biocomputers underway, Koplin underscores that “we are creating entities that are neither one thing nor the other,” and that reflection on the moral status of these hybrids is needed.
R
OUT NOW:
Sanela Jahić
Under the Calculative Gaze
The paperback adaptation of Jahić’s artistic research shown at Aksioma in early 2023 expands on the entanglement of socially-applied technologies, systemic injustices, and creeping authoritarianism. Included: an essay by prominent AI critic Dan McQuillan.

“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.

“These billionaires purchased 55,000 acres to build their John Galt paradise, but they won’t pay a human artist to design it for them.”
– American illustrator Michele Rosenthal, burning the California Forever initiative for using AI to render dreamy scenes of their planned urban utopia. The group of Silicon Valley CEOs and investors came under fire recently when its grab of Solano County farmland under the unsuspecting parent company name of Flannery Associates became first known.
“This is an unprecedented escalation by a social media company against independent researchers. Musk has just declared open war. If he succeeds in silencing us other researchers will be next in line.”
Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) Founder and CEO Imran Ahmed, in response to X, formerly Twitter, threatening legal action over the nonprofit’s research into content moderation. The organization had critized Musk’s leadership for the increase in anti-LGBTQ hate speech and climate misinformation.
“I was afraid that if I did not participate, I and everything I represent would be erased from the digital memory of the world.”
– American artist and curator Linda Dounia Rebeiz, on incorporating AI into her image-making practice to feed future training sets with deliberate representation of diverse demographics and perspectives. “AI has the tendency to be an echo chamber of our world order,” Rebeiz says, “which, as a Black woman artist, makes my relationship with it complicated, but also makes my participation critical.”
“The majority of people aren’t users but subjects of AI. It’s not a matter of individual choice. Most AI determinations that shape our access to resources are behind the scenes in ways we probably don’t even know.”
– Signal Foundation president and AI Now Institute co-founder Meredith Whittaker, discussing AI ethics with Credo AI’s Navrina Singh, and Distributed AI Research Institute’s Alex Hanna at the Bloomberg Technology Summit. “AI is a surveillance technology,” Whittaker insists. “The Venn diagram of AI concerns and privacy concerns is a circle.”
“Extinction would directly affect the elite, which is why they care about mitigating risks. ‘Sub-extinction’ risks from AI that harm marginalized peoples don’t get signatures like this.”
– Journalist and philosopher Émile P. Torres, on the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) open letter signed by prominent international thinkers. “If AGI kills everyone, then marginalized groups lose along with everyone else,” Torres argues on Twitter. “If resources are poured into preventing hypothetical AGI dystopias, marginalized groups ALSO lose, because they’ll continue to be ignored.” [quote edited]
“The fact that we all need land to live, and that there’s no more land available, is the crux of the immorality in profiting from it. You’re renting someone’s rights back to them.”
– Writer and engineer Jehan Azad, on the travesty that is land ownership. Drawing on the agrarian justice teachings of Thomas Paine and Henry George, Azad makes the case against a system of perpetual “existential debt.” He writes: “From the moment you emerge, you’re in a space that belongs to someone else, and from then on, money is spent each day to give you access to the space you require to exist.”

A self-survey of Berlin-based bioartists Margherita Pevere, Theresa Schubert, and Karolina Żyniewicz, “Membranes Out of Order” opens at Kunstquartier Bethanien, bringing their research practices into conversation. The show presents key works that explore the ethics of emergent biotechnology and life’s tendency for “uncertainty, failure, surprise, and disobedience.” Also on view: a plethora of production paraphernalia that reveals the “unseen materials” of bioart.

“The hermit crab is, unlike its name suggests, a social creature. They live in groups and are probably much more comfortable in the wild than in an exhibition space.”
– Art blogger and critic Régine Debatty, questioning the ethics of Aki Inomata’s Why Not Hand Over a ​“Shelter” to Hermit Crabs? (2009-) within the “Biotopia” exhibition at Le Pavillon, Namur (BE), as part of KIKK Festival. The installation features a living hermit crab, sheltering in a “fancy” 3D-printed artifact.
“Basha’s paintings are dominated by circles, which she creates with her feet, while her lines are created by a painting arm.”
– Critic Hrag Vartanian, describing paintings by Agnieszka Pilat’s robot dog Basha (a renamed instance of General Dynamics’ Spot). Wary of the gimmick, Vartanian writes “these machines … are ultimately not our friends, and humanizing them distracts from their use by authorities to police, control, or kill populations from a distance,”
“Lab rats have rights … The same is true of scientists working with mice, monkeys, fish, or finches. These protected animals share one thing in common: a backbone.”
– Science journalist Elizabeth Preston, detailing the growing unease around the lack of “cephalopod care standards” for neuroscience experiments involving squid and octopuses

A retrospective collecting 40 works by the Australian artist, “Patricia Piccinini: We Are Connected” opens at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum. Showcasing her unsettling sculptures and installations that morph contemporary biopolitics towards the grotesque, the show features works including The Bond (2016, image centre) and The Field (2018, image), which, respectively, depict a mother cradling a human-ish fleshy creature, and a (wildly) genetically modified crop.

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