1,576 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
Year
Month
Tag
Order
Custom
Filter
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.
Brigitte Kowanz (1957-2022)
Austrian light art pioneer
Brigitte Kowanz dies at 64 in Vienna. Known for her fluorescent light sculptures and immersive spaces, the 2009 Grand Austrian State Prize winner and
Transmedia Art Professor exhibited internationally (e.g. Venice Biennale) and regularly incorporated codified language into her work.
“BioMedia: The Age of Media with Life-like Behavior” opens at ZKM Karlsruhe, exploring synthesis, emergence, and biophilia. Over 60 artists including Refik Anadol , Anna Dumitriu , Libby Heaney , Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg , Jakob Kudsk Steensen , Harm van den Dorpel , and Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield (image: Artificial Nature , 2007-) present artificial agents in hybrid ecosystems that demonstrate interdependency. “The sympoetic community of the future will welcome artificial beings […] as a responsibility to life itself.”
A new site-specific iteration of Robert Irwin ’s iconic Light and Space installation opens at Kraftwerk Berlin. Commissioned by the LAS Foundation, the American artist who pioneered the Light and Space movement of the 1960s intervenes in Kraftwerk’s notable brutalist architecture with a 16 x 16 metre matrix of white and, for the first time, blue fluorescent light tubes to immerse audiences and explore, in his own words, “how art structures the way we see the world.”
Lauren Lee McCarthy ’s latest interactive performance Womb Walk premieres as part of her Surrogate installation at IDFA DocLab , the Amsterdam documentary film festival’s new media program. As the American artist strolls the city wearing a prosthetic belly (image), participants ‘become’ McCarthy’s baby. “You control my movements by triggering small internal kicks to the sides of my belly directing me when to turn,” she writes on Instagram . “Together, we navigate the city, with imagined baby as interface.”
“Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota,” the first major survey of the work of the pioneering artist in Japan in three decades, opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT). A fixture in Fluxus , Kubota made pioneering contributions to video sculpture, exploding the screen into scenes and structures bathed in shapes and colour. “Viva Video!” includes the triumphant Skater (1991-2, image), the cascading Niagara Falls (1985), and her signature Duchampiana series (1970-90).
Part of the London-based collective’s ongoing eco-fiction project Untertage where salt emerges as an agent of cultural evolution, Troika ’s No Sound of Water opens at Arte Abierto , Mexico City. Taking the form of a towering salt waterfall that is juxtapozed with Troika’s Terminal Beach (2020), the installation channels “the extractive technologies that have contributed to the planet’s transformation.” Over time, salt crystals spill across the exhibition space, and into people’s pants, lungs, and lunches.
In her first institutional solo show “The Notebook Simulations,” on view at Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Berlin-based artist Agnes Scherer supersizes the laptop, rendering its mythos in paint (not pixels). Nine monumental laptops evoke “contemporary folklore” with error messages from Microsoft Windows and endlessly multiplying program windows. Recalling “megalithic stone formations and ancient temple sites,” Scherer’s notebooks resemble archaic ruins of an era in the process of drifting away into the past.
A survey of the Argentinian artist’s inquiries into breath, spirit, and regeneration, Tomás Saraceno ’s solo exhibition “We Do Not All Breathe the Same Air” opens at neugerriemschneider in Berlin. A highlight is Saraceno’s newest installation, Particular Matter(s) , that illuminates microscopic air particles “like millions of suspended galaxies” with a beam of light. Noteworthy: the exhibition is powered by renewables and opening hours shift with daylight to conserve energy.
Alex Schweder ’s “The Sound and the Future” opens at Clifford Gallery in Hamilton, New York. Its name borrowed from its lone work, the exhibition offers a fun glimpse into Schweder’s world of “performance architecture”—dynamic architectural and sculptural forms. Here, a made-to-order very Detroit installation, first shown at Wasserman Projects in 2016, sways again; a homage to Motor City’s dance music genre, silvery nylon inflatables undulate, animated by blown air, to a slowed down techno soundtrack.
A media art trail of “dreams and utopias” curated by Vesela Stanoeva and Alain Bieber , “Welcome to Paradise” opens at NRW Forum, Düsseldorf. Across the 1,200 square-meter exhibition architecture, visitors encounter works by over 20 international artists including A.A Murakami , Martin Backes , Sandrine Deumier , Noriyuki Suzuki , and Paola Pinna that explore new forms of spirituality, digital rituals, and physicality in the virtual. “At the end of the journey, paradise awaits—or does it?”
An ode to the cosmos’ hidden mysteries, Ryoji Ikeda ’s The Universe within the Universe opens as part of THE INFINITE, an immersive environment inspired by NASA missions. Created by Felix & Paul Studios and PHI at Montréal’s Arsenal , the 12,500 square-feet XR experience sends visitors on a journey to the International Space Station. Along the way, they encounter Ikeda’s audiovisual installation: a pitch black room with an LED ceiling and mirrored floor, designed to create “the feeling of weightlessness and even vertigo.”
A loose response to MoMA’s iconic 1970 “INFORMATION ” exhibition, “INFORMATION (Today)” opens at Kunsthalle Basel, examining how AI, digital currencies, and data harvesting—all products of 21st-century capitalism—drive post-truth proliferation. To illuminate “data’s nebulous modes of circulating,” curator Elena Filipovic gathered works by Sondra Perry , Trevor Paglen , Sung Tieu , as well as new commissions including Simon Denny ’s Economist Chart NFT and American Artist ’s Veillance Caliper (Annotated) (image).
A shrine to IBM’s midcentury corporate aesthetic, Rayyan Tabet’s “Deep Blues” opens at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Illuminated by the melancholic glow of IBM’s 10 shades of blue, the installation references Eero Saarinen’s IBM Rochester design and Charles and Ray Eames work for the multinational—a matrix of their chairs hang overhead. Tabet’s nods to IBM’s design patronage coupled with AI-trained text-to-speech narration foreground the affect of knowledge work, and of a singular corporate identity.
Built to give seven of his kinetic light works a permanent home, Christopher Bauder ’s 1,000 square meter exhibition space DARK MATTER opens in Berlin. The career-spanning selection also includes Inverse , a choreography of 169 black spheres set against white light (image) the German artist created specifically for this space. “The artworks which have travelled the world over the last 20 years are now coming together in one exhibition in Berlin,” Bauder writes. “Never before have I had the opportunity to show so many of my installations in one place.”
“The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance” opens at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center. Curators Vincenzo de Bellis and Jadine Collingwood mine the gap between ”still life and the living picture” through works by 60 artists active over a half century—from Joan Jonas to Jordan Wolfson . The strangeness of Haegue Yang ’s Sonic Intermediates (2020, image) captures the lines blurred within the show—interactive, ‘viewers’ turn its eccentric forms, sounding metallic tones and textures.
SFMOMA’s “Nam June Paik” presents 200 works by the pioneering video and installation artist in a major retrospective. It takes a show of this scale to weigh Paik’s influence on media art, and key works like TV Chair (1968), TV Garden (1974, image), and Sistine Chapel (1993) are included. The middle work of that trio “epitomizes one of Paik’s great strengths,” says co-curator Andrea Nitsche-Krupp , “the ability to revisit, permutate, and recombine ideas, images, and concepts into newly generative work.”
Load More
To dive deeper into Stream, please
Log-In or become a
HOLO Reader .
Daily discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture: Get full access by becoming a HOLO Reader !
Perspective : research, long-form analysis, and critical commentaryEncounters : in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovatorsStream : a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and countingEdition : HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print
Become a HOLO Reader