1,549 days, 2,380 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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Korean artist duo Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho ’s solo exhibition “Seoul Weather Station” opens at Art Sonje Center in Seoul, presenting two new works that tackle the planet’s collapsing ecosphere. The large-scale immersive installation To Build a Fire (2022) shows anthropocentric shifts from a nonhuman perspective—a four-legged robot—while Mobile Agora (2022) offers a participatory platform for critical climate conversations as part of the artist-run World Weather Network (WWN).
What Just Happened :
Kyriaki Goni Weaves Counter-Narratives to Colonial Cosmologies and Space Expansionism
The Greek artist discusses the interplanetary ethics at the heart of her Warsaw Biennale installation
N∰menon , an installation by Melle Nieling and Amelie Mckee opens at Künstlerhaus Dortmund. Produced during a Plicnik-Collective summer residency at the German venue, it consists of a series of apparatuses intended to draw attention to the lack of a user. Drawing on video interviews that describe a mysterious event with spiritual and economic resonance, the spartan scene stokes “feelings of paranoid threat, in which the unknown opens the imagination.”
Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China, opens with its inaugural exhibition “In the Line of Flight, for Possible Worlds.” Presenting installations, video, and interactive works by key artists including Pierre Huyghe , Tomás Saraceno , and “father of Chinese video art” Zhang Peili , curator Zhang Ga creates a “post-pandemic microcosm” for reflection. Peili’s XL Chamber (2017, image), for example, is an algorithmic ‘trap’ whose shutter doors open and close randomly.
Featuring 100 works by international designers and artists, “Unknown Unknowns,” an exhibition “whose boundaries are hazy and permeable” opens at Triennale Milano. Curated by astrophysicist Ersilia Vaudo , the show features new commissions from designer Irene Stracuzzi , architects SOM , and artist Refik Anadol . A fourth, Yuri Suzuki ’s Sound of the Earth: Chapter 3 (2022, image), is a globe comprised of 300 speakers that play an ambient megamix of crowdsourced geotagged field recordings.
“Xenogenesis,” a retrospective of the London-based Otolith Group , opens at Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Collecting works produced between 2011-18 by Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun, and collaborators, that cultivate “a science fiction of the present” through media, installation, and performance, the show includes Sovereign Sisters (2014), a CGI short about the Universal Postal Union’s “imperial ambition,” and a special public program curated by the collective.
Martine Syms’s solo exhibition “She Mad Season One” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), marking the U.S. premiere of the fifth and newest episode of the artist’s titular sitcom project. She Mad tells the story about a young woman trying to make it as an artist in Los Angeles, “dissecting the ways Black experiences are mediated on television, in film, and online.” Shown in its entirety for the first time, the museum situates each episode within an immersive sculptural installation.
“Because The Sky Will Be Filled With Sulfur,” a show by artist Jeremy Bolen opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia (MOCA GA) in Atlanta. Contemplating deep time , its works consider the future-history of the climate crisis and the “aesthetics of a possible geo-engineered future.” Included are photos of an expedition to a key Anthropocene site , and a new series of casts of 20th century relics: air conditioners, airplane parts, and leaf blowers (image).
“Indivisible,” a show presenting installation, film, and software from Ralf Baecker , Yunchul Kim , Semiconductor , and Richard Vijgen , opens at New Media Gallery, in New Westminster, British Columbia. The focus on “prosthetics and strategies that help us reach beyond human perception” is exemplified by the inclusion of Kim’s ARGOS (2018, image), a bundle of electron sensing Geiger–Müller tubes encased in a glass and aluminum exoskeleton—fusing scientific instrument with sculptural form.
“A Sea of Data,” German media artist Hito Steyerl ’s first solo show in Asia, opens at Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). Named after an e-flux essay by the artist, the exhibition includes 23 works, spanning 1990-2000s video art through her more recent (often iconic) installations. It also premieres a new commission: Animal Spirits (2022, image) is a sensor-driven animation of post-pandemic (human) conditions—from remote culture to decentralization.
“Different possibilities are revealed, and others are destroyed. It breaks down the illusion of absolute truth. For me, this is a step forward in understanding ourselves, the world, and our place in it in new plural and relational ways.”
– British scientist-turned-artist
Libby Heaney , on the implications of quantum computing. In her latest immersive installation
Ent- , Heaney explores a “quantum aesthetic” that “reveals the pluralities at the heart of all matter.”
“We built a recording studio for bees. A sensitive microphone, placed at the center of a wooden box, recorded the flight and activities of each bee entering the mini-studio. We recorded over 600 bees.”
– French sound artist and audio engineer
Félix Blume , on the creation of
Swarm (2021), a sound installation composed of 250 small speakers, each reproducing the sound of a flying bee [quote edited for brevity]
A survey of seven performance and software works that explore human connection during COVID, Lauren Lee McCarthy ’s solo exhibition “I Heard Talking Is Dangerous” opens at EIGEN+ART Lab , Berlin. In the 2020 piece the show is named after, for example, a masked McCarthy delivers text-to-speech monologues about safety and distancing to friends—on their doorstep. Captured in documentation and artifacts, the works reveal moments of augmented, but real, intimacy.
The final chapter in Meriem Bennani ’s CGI film trilogy Life on the CAPS debuts at the University of Chicago’s The Renaissance Society as a video installation. A co-commission with Nottingham Contemporary, UK, the film returns to the series’ dystopian island world the artist based on research into island societies, biotechnology, and vernacular music. Protagonist Kamal gets a new body to fight for CAPS’ liberation—a cause impossible to solve within a single lifetime.
“Formulations as Texture, Horizontal and Vertical Crossings,” a solo exhibition by Florian Hecker opens at Simian in Ørestad, Copenhagen. The show’s single spatial audio piece deploys two variants of Formulations (2015), an algorithmically-generated composition, into a new 3-channel version that capitalizes on distinctions between the two versions producing “a maze of different resolutions, gradations, scales, similarities, and differences.”
Libby Heaney ’s Light Art Space (LAS) commission Ent- (2022) premieres at Schering Stiftung , Berlin, taking quantum computing as both medium and subject matter. Inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1490–1510), the British artist and physicist used quantum code to manipulate and animate her own paintings, creating “hybrid organisms, breathing landscapes, and exploding structures” inside the metaphorical black box of a 360° immersive installation.
After its 2020 premiere at K21 in Düsseldorf, Hito Steyerl ’s retrospective “I Will Survive” opens at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The show offers an expansive overview of the German artist and filmmaker’s oeuvre, from the early documentary works to the more recent CGI video installations (image: Social Sim , 2020). “Her work has always had a clairvoyant and penetrating understanding of society,” curator Karen Archey writes about Steyerl’s importance. “She disrupts the status quo as the bedrock of her practice.”
“EMPATHIE,” an exhibition of Scenocosme ’s interactive works from the last decade, opens at Musée de Vence in France. Whimsical interfaces by the artist duo on display include musical plants , resonant stones , wood veneer instruments , and other experiments in haptics, materials, and audiovisual abstraction. Also featured is Metamorphy (2013, image), where viewers manipulate a veil-like surface, shaping the flow of organic and liquid forms.
“Kazuo Umezz the Great Art Exhibition,” opens at Tokyo City View . For his career celebration, the manga legend has painted a sequel to his classic Watashi wa Shingo (1982-6) and artist duo exonemo pay tribute; their array of 12 screens mimic the form of panels, displaying infinite randomized scenes “that Shingo would have seen in the comic.” Fittingly, the installation sits in front of a view of the Tokyo Tower , an important site in the comic’s narrative.
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