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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.”
– Brooklyn-based data artist and information designer Giorgia Lupi, on logging her life with long Covid. In an interactive essay for The New York Times, Lupi, who first contracted Covid in March 2020, recounts recording symptoms, doctors appointments, emergency room visits, medical procedures and costs with paint. “Every day is filled to the brim with appointments, meds, needles, bills and pain,” she writes of her ongoing battle. “The brushstrokes of my illness are suffocating.”
“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.’”
– American writer and Spike editor Adina Glickstein, contemplating exhaustion and melancholia in a terminally online, crisis-ridden world. Existential inertia can engender a productive refusal, Glickstein writes in her final (deeply personal) “User Error” column: “a wildcat strike of the soul, against a world where all manner of activity is increasingly apt to be flattened into work.”
“Perhaps compassion simply needs to be performed, the healthcare provider must be seen to be sympathetic to relieve the patient.”
– Art writer Angeria Rigamonti di Cutò, reflecting on AI’s capacity for emotional labour after encountering Sofie Layton’s Does AI Care? (2023). Inspired by how the audio piece draws on cancer patient and oncologist consultation to ‘perform’ empathy, di Cutò uses part of her review of Science Gallery London’s “AI: WHO’S LOOKING AFTER ME?” to imagine a near future where AI offers healthcare workers support to (better) tend to patients’ emotional needs.
“It is therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency.”
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announcing the end to the coronavirus crisis as a “public health emergency of international concern”—its highest level of alert—which has been in place since January 30, 2020. The battle, however, is not over. “We still have [systemic] weaknesses,” notes WHO’s emergencies director Michael Ryan. “And those weaknesses will be exposed by this virus or another virus. In most cases, pandemics truly end when the next pandemic begins.”
”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.”
– Data journalist John Burn-Murdoch, parsing research on the impact digital devices have on teens. Studies conducted by Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, reveal that the more time young people spend on social media, the worse their mental health is. A key metric: meeting friends IRL. “As screen-time has surged, everyone hangs out less,” notes Burn-Murdoch.
“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?”
– Writer and musician K Allado-McDowell, on the questions driving their new AI opera Song of the Ambassadors. The piece premiered at New York’s Lincoln Center on Oct 25th with the support of composer Derrick Skye, visual artist Refik Anadol, and neuroscientists Ying Choon Wu and Alex Khalil.
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“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.”
– Science journalist James Gaines, describing the computer vision workflow that allowed the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) prototype to recently successfully perform intestinal surgery on pig tissue

“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.”
– Critic Jillian Steinhauer, on Ani Liu’s solo show “Ecologies of Care” in which the American artist turns her experience of new motherhood into thought-provoking works. For example: “Untitled (Labor of Love) (2022) charts every feeding and diaper change during the first 30 days of Liu’s infant’s life through vials containing breast milk, formula and pieces of diapers.”

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.

OUT NOW:
Bugniot, Dubačová, Hoppan
Stockpiling Food for Thought
“Imagining New Sensibilities During Quarantine,” Sensorium Festival’s Lucia Dubačová, Juraj Hoppan, and Célia Bugniot parse the pandemic through the lens of art and digital culture

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.”
– Scholar Laine Nooney, following the “tide of bodily dysfunction that none of us opted into” all the way to the beginning of the information age. “That pain in your neck, the numbness in your fingers, has a history far more widespread and impactful than any individual computer or computing innovator.”
OUT NOW:
Dora Vrhoci & Florian Weigl
Art and Care
A reflection on the curatorial research behind “To Mind Is To Care,” an exhibition and “interdisciplinary study of care,” shown at V2_, Rotterdam’s Lab for the Unstable Media, earlier in the year
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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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