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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
Madhumita Murgia
Code Dependent
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.”
Eleanor Drage & Kerry McInerney
The Good Robot
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?”
Sanela Jahić
Under the Calculative Gaze
“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.”
“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.”
“I was afraid that if I did not participate, I and everything I represent would be erased from the digital memory of the world.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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.”
“Basha’s paintings are dominated by circles, which she creates with her feet, while her lines are created by a painting arm.”
“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.”
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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