2,002 days, 3,078 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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Paolo Cirio ’s solo exhibition “AI Attacks” opens at Foam, Amsterdam, as part of the photography museum’s big AI survey . Framing the technology as a form of “automated violence, expressed through surveillance, discrimination, and disinformation,” the Italian artist shows three past works, Capture Obscurity Street Ghosts Resurrect
“The fact that Johannessen has made homey rugs out of military materials could be interpreted as a classic critical cross-cutting manoeuvre: two different life worlds are set against each other in order to make us take a closer look at them.”
– Critic Kristoffer Jul-Larsen, framing
Toril Johannessen ’s,
Deterrence and Reassurance (2024), an installation comprised of 18 rugs woven from military textiles. Currently
showing at Bergen Kunsthall (NO), the work glibly comments on Norway’s militarized efforts to secure its
arctic territory . [quote edited]
Addressing nationalism and Arctic sovereignty, Toril Johannessen ’s “Deterrence and Reassurance” opens at Bergen Kunsthall (NO). In the show’s titular work, the Norweigian artist contrasts comfy Scandinavian lifestyle with Norway’s arctic policy (read: securing oil and gas deposits) via 18 rugs woven from military textiles (2024, image). Through the rugs and accompanying maps, Johannessen “visualizes the presence of the military in the landscape and the social imaginary.”
“While many of the former colonial powers are busily engaging in critical self-examination–or artwashing , depending on how you look at it–the newer pavilions tend to exude a certain national pride and optimism.”
–
Nordic Art Review Editor
Mariann Enge , on the Venice Biennale’s national pavilions. Weighing tensions including Indigenous representation, the shuttered
Israeli pavilion , and the Biennale debut of formerly-colonized countries, Enge asks if it’s productive to frame global art as emanating from nation-states in 2024.
“There is a death drive in all of this. It is a drive to lethality. It is a drive towards self-destruction but also the destruction of all others. That is what underlies these systems.”
–
This Machine Kills co-host
Jathan Sadowski , emphatically rejecting
Lavender , an AI system Israel uses to compile ‘kill lists’ of Gazans to target. Drawing a connection to using AI to screen and reject healthcare applicants, Sadowski argues the logic is the
exact same , but Lavender “will lead to an immediate kinetic death rather than a somewhat slower social death.”
Dani Ploeger ’s solo exhibition “Destructive Circuits” opens at V2_, Rotterdam, surveying works from his long-running research into the appropriation of everyday technology for homemade weaponry. According to the UN, so-called Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) kill thousands every year and profoundly impact security. Ploeger illuminates IED construction, their history, and links to globalized techno-consumerism and media politics with the display of trigger systems, timer devices, a sci-fi short, and an interactive sculpture that ‘blows up.’
Italian game developer, artist, and educator Paolo Pedercini releases The New York Times Simulator (2024), a fast-paced browser game where players steer the news titan’s fortunes as editor-in-chief. Inspired by Lucas Pope ’s 2012 Flash game The Republia Times
“Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500–2025,” a show by researchers Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler opens at Fondazione Prada Osservatorio in Milan. Picking up where their collaboration Anatomy of an AI System
The Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale flagship exhibition, “The Spectre of the People,” opens in its namesake port city in Greece. Curated by Julian Stallabrass , artists including Lauren Greenfield , Carey Young , and The Archive of Public Protests explore populism. DISNOVATION.ORG contributes ONLINE CULTURE WARS
“3D analysis shows patterns of radial fragmentation on the southwest side of the impact crater, as well as a shallow channel leading into the crater from the northeast. Such patterns indicate a likely projectile trajectory with northeast origins.”
“I thought that the way I had structured it was enough of an extrapolation that I wouldn’t have to deal with precisely the question you’re asking. And that has been obliterated in the last few years. That, to me, is terrifying.”
– Egyptian-Canadian novelist
Omar El Akkad , when pressed on whether his climate dystopia
American War (2017) is starting to come true. Set in 2074, the “all-too-realistic cautionary tale” (
Writer’s Digest ) imagines wide-spread civil unrest set off by a ban on fossil fuels, after Florida has vanished and Louisiana is half-underwater.
“While the view from above has historically been aligned to an imperial gaze, the use of commercial drones has co-opted this sightline as a part of protest against imperialism and colonisation.”
Ismael de Anda III and Eugene Ahn ’s collaborative exhibition “Revolution Generators” opens at panke.gallery, Berlin, investigating territorialization at the U.S. and Mexican border, where Anda was raised, and the once divided German capital. 25 digital collages, printed on aluminium, capture real and fictional landscapes and are paired with projections and AR sculptural forms . A recurring motif are (hostile) metal turnstiles lifted from U.S. border crossings and cast into the sky as colourful satellites.
OUT NOW :
Antony Loewenstein
The Palestine Laboratory
Journalist
Loewenstein follows the money, demonstrating how occupied Palestine is an ‘R&D lab’ for surveillance and weaponry products exported globally by the Israeli military-industrial complex.
Taking its name from the eponymous searing neon work by feminist conceptual artist Claire Fontaine (2012, image), “Someone is getting rich” opens at Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum. Curated by Carrie Pilto, the show invites the aforementioned Fontaine along with Eline Benjaminsen , DIS , Femke Herregraven , Petr Pavlensky , and 10 other artists to present works that speak truth to power by “revealing how the aftermath of colonialism is still embedded in the financial sector today.”
“It’s like saying ‘we had knives before, so what’s the difference if we have a submachine gun?’ Well, a submachine gun is just more efficient at what it does.”
– Psychologist and AI scholar
Gary Marcus , arguing ChatGPT and other large language models will be used as “misinformation submachine guns” based on recent election meddling and public sphere manipulation
“Today Taiwan produces around one third of the new computing power we rely on each year. It produces ninety percent of the most advanced processor chips.”
– Historian and policy researcher
Chris Miller , contextualizing how catastrophic a Chinese invasion of the island country would be for global production. “Entire segments of industry would grind to a halt,” he warns, in discussion with Demetri Kofinas about his new book
Chip War
“As much as they might aspire to go back to a medieval world, WhatsApp comes in handy.”
– Tech journalists
Jamie Tarabay &
Eltaf Najafizada , on the Taliban’s increasing use of communication technologies—4G networks, Twitter, WhatsApp—since reclaiming power in Afghanistan last year
“Among the drivers’ complaints were the obscure way in which their accounts were blocked and the inequitable way in which fees earned by drivers were unilaterally decided and implemented by Uber.”
– University of Witwatersrand researchers
Hannah J. Dawson & Ruth Castel-Branco , on the conditions causing a December 2020 Johannesburg protest—Uber drivers disabled the app and refused new rides. Platform capitalism “threatens to extend informality into new sectors through ‘algorithmic insecurity,’” in the Global South
in particular , the duo argue.
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