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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
“Still, I couldn’t stop tracking. My spreadsheet was the only thing I could control in a life I no longer recognized.”
“Like Bartleby, we would all ’prefer not to.’ Maybe it’s fatigue-induced, seeking relief from the incessant demands of 24/7 capitalism, careening towards meltdown. Terminally online, we ‘can’t even.’”
“Perhaps compassion simply needs to be performed, the healthcare provider must be seen to be sympathetic to relieve the patient.”
“It is therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency.”
”Wherever you look, youth mental health is collapsing, and the inflection point is ominously consistent: 2010 give or take a year or two—when smartphones went from luxury to ubiquity.”
“Might there be a role that institutions could play if we know that sound and music is healing? Can that open up new possibilities for arts funding, for policy, for what is considered a therapeutic experience or an artistic experience?”
“Blood and Breath, Skin and Dust,” a solo show that zooms in on Kim Morgan’s eight years working with scanning electron microscopes, opens in Halifax. Featuring work across digital images, installation, and intervention (image: Blood Galaxy, 2017), the show deploys the same imaging technology that revealed the coronavirus for all to see, provoking questions about “understanding threats to human health, and of the social disparities that a virus spread exacerbates.”
“A human operator tags the ends of the intestine with drops of fluorescent glue, creating markers the robot can track.”
“On Breathing,” an exhibition by Nina Barnett & Jeremy Bolen that examines respiration relative to “pressure, particulate, filtration, and flow,” opens at Johannesburg’s Adler Museum of Medicine. Its lone installation, On Breathing—Iron Lung With Blue Gums (2022, image), puts a hulking iron lung in conversation with Blue Gum Trees, mine dust, extraction residue, and radioactive bricks, contrasting the deep time of resource extraction with local atmospheric conditions.
“This Unfathomable Weight,” a lightbox and billboard project parsing the trauma of “the massive crises of recent years,” opens at University of Toronto Mississauga campus. Curated by Farah Yusef for The Blackwood, the show invites Jessica Thalmann, Christina Battle, and Erika DeFreitas to sequentially contribute works; Thalmann’s opener, cut between the supports and collapse (2022, image), documents the emotional weight of time spent in the ICU (as a primary caregiver) during the pandemic.
Exploring how medicine and shamanism can begin to blur into one another, “Post-Human Narratives—In the Name of Scientific Witchery” opens in Hong Kong. Featured artists include Betty Apple, Mayumi Hosokura, and Yu Shuk Pui Bobby, with contributed works ranging from Liv Tsim’s biomatter fabrications (2022, image) to Florence Lam’s Zirca, an extremely witchy performance about channeling energy—applying so much of it to materials that they produce light.
“To this childless writer, it was an eye-opening lesson—all the more acute in a post-Roe America—in just how much labor it takes to keep someone alive.”
Richard Nieva reports on SilentSpeller, a hands-free interface for inaudible texting. Developed by University of Tokyo PhD student Naoki Kimura, the prototype provides users with a 1164-word dictionary accessed through tongue movements detected by an existing smart retainer product. Working under the guidance of Google Glass technical lead Thad Starner, Kimura will present the project at CHI22 this spring; potential applications include aiding sufferers of Parkinson’s disease and other motion disorders.
Bugniot, Dubačová, Hoppan
Stockpiling Food for Thought
A heartwreching visualization of COVID-19’s impact, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s A Crack in the Hourglass (2020) debuts IRL at the Brooklyn Museum. An “anti-monument,” the installation renders portraits of pandemic victims with grains of sand, once realized the delicate images fall away. Commissioned by MUAC (Mexico City), NYC is a fitting first stop, given the city endured amongst the “highest number of pandemic-related deaths in the U.S.—and worldwide,” note the curators.
Museum Sinclair-Haus in Bad Homburg, Germany, opens “Tempo! All the Time in the World,” a group exhibition exploring the pace of natural cycles and “humanity as an initiator and victim of acceleration.” Among the highlights: American artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s Sleep Study (2021, image), a newly commissioned app and immersive installation that invites users to experiment with their own sleep cycles as a potential climate engineering technology.
“To consider the history of computing through the lens of computer pain is to center bodies, users, and actions over and above hardware, software, and inventors.”
Dora Vrhoci & Florian Weigl
Art and Care
The 24th Japan Media Arts Festival announces Meiro Koizumi’s VR piece Prometheus Bound (2019) as this year’s Grand Prize winner in the Art Division. Inspired by Greek mythology and realized as a theatre experience, the work explores dreams of technological advancement through the eyes of a person suffering from ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), a paralyzing neurological disease. Other prize winners include Adrien M & Claire B, Simon Weckert, and Myriam Bleau.
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