1,570 days, 2,406 entries ...

Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
● 27/03/2024
“Could this be your new signature scent? Sample it on your skin. My algorithm feels confident that it can deliver you the computer conjured scent of your dreams.”
– Digital artist Maya Man, pitching Notes (2024), a series of fictional fragrances released through the Artblocks platform. “The collection requests you to use your imagination,” she says of her NFT edition, in which each instance is a colourful collage of evocative and scent-inducing words and phrases.
Are.na
● 24/03/2024
“My version of feminist, queer, trans-affirmative politics is not about policing. I don’t think we should become the police. I’m afraid of the police.”
– Gender Trouble (1990) author Judith Butler, explaining that policing language is not the answer to anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. “I think a lot of people feel that the world is out of control, and one place where they can exercise some control is language,” she says of simmering global tensions around gender and identity.
New York Times
● 15/08/2023
“Both The House of Dust and Cree# are microworlds, homes for forms of computing and expression that fall outside of the traditional purview of ‘information technology’ and industry-focused coding practices and tools.”
– Canadian artist Matt Nish-Lapidus, linking Alison Knowles’ 1960s computer poem with an esoteric programming language created by Jon Corbett. Well-played references in an essay on the “enchantment and joyful attachments” of programming, Nish-Lapidus uses elemental code to construct his own microworld.
C Magazine
● 27/06/2023
“Like powering an engine with the methane that comes from decomposing corpses in a graveyard.”
– Computational Poet Allison Parrish, using a visceral analogy to characterize how large language models (LLMs) compose new text from old text. In conversation with Joanne McNeil about generative AI, Parrish describes LLMs as “inherently conservative. They encode the past, literally.”
Filmmaker Magazine
● 23/06/2023

“WE DID THIS TO OURSELVES,” a survey of Ron Terada’s news and typography-focused works, opens at The Power Plant in Toronto. Grimly articulating the surrealism and noise of the post-truth information landscape, the Canadian artist’s monumental painting series TL;DR (2017-22) takes centre stage, immersing gallery visitors in the “overwhelming experience” of perusing a wall of weird tech headlines (collected from The Verge) rendered in the familiar and authoritative New York Times typeface.

The Power Plant
● 15/06/2023
“I would pick a subject, write something on it, and then shrink the text to what I hoped were the essentials—banishing adjectives and dreck.”
– Conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, on the wordsmithing that propelled her to fame. In conversation with Artnet Europe editor Kate Brown about her retrosepctive at Düsseldorf’s K21, the American artist discusses her formative years, the writers she draws on, and archival research.
The Art Angle
Z
● 09/03/2023
“In the absence of a capacity to reason from moral principles, ChatGPT was crudely restricted by its programmers from contributing anything novel to controversial—that is, important—discussions. It sacrificed creativity for a kind of amorality.”
– Linguistics and AI scholars Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull, in an op-ed excoriating the “amorality, faux science, and linguistic incompetence” of ChatGPT. “We can only laugh or cry at the popularity of such systems,” they conclude.
New York Times
● 02/03/2023
“Institutions make these standard statements, but oftentimes they address Indigenous communities as if they are from the past—when they are still present here today.”
– Curator Lauren R. O’Connel, on land acknowledgements. In conversation about the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) exhibition “Language in Times of Miscommunication,” she contrasts the signage-based “positive reinforcement” of Indigenous artist Anna Tsouhlarakis to the tone and subtext of (boilerplate) land acknowledgements.
Arizona PBS
● 28/02/2023
“It seems that forcing a neural network to ‘squeeze’ its thinking through a bottleneck of just a few neurons can improve the quality of the output. Why? We don’t really know. It just does.”
– TechScape columnist Alex Hearn, describing an idiosyncrasy of neural network design. Part of a (largely) jargon free ‘glossary of AI acronyms,’ Hearn breaks down the meaning of ubiquitous AI terminology (GAN, LLM, compute, fine tuning, etc.).
The Guardian
● 06/01/2023
“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
The Ezra Klein Show
● 04/01/2023
“Much within me is indeed worm, as I lie facedown, fused to my smartphone, in my blanket cocoon of proto-singularity.”
– Writer Adina Glickstein, ringing in 2023 with a meditation on Nietzsche, transhumanism, and ‘goblin mode.’ The latter, Oxford’s word of the year 2022, is defined as ‘unapologetic self-indulgence’—not unlike the singularity, that Glickstein describes as “existential goblin mode, disembodied and self-indulgent to the max.”
Spike
● 30/12/2022
“The watermark looks completely natural to those reading the text because the choice of words is mimicking the randomness of all the other words.”
– Search engine marketer Roger Montti, describing forthcoming cryptographic watermarks that will make texts generated by language models like ChatGPT instantly detectable. Summarizing research computer scientist Scott Aaronson is doing for OpenAI, Montti considers both the utility and fallibility of the security measure.
Search Engine Journal
● 17/11/2022

“DO COMPUTERS WORRY YOU,” an exhibition of recent work by Canadian artist Matt Nish-Lapidus opens at Toronto’s Collision Gallery. Presented alongside “Greenlight: Carlaw,” a companion exhibition by Simon Fuh, Nish-Lapidus deploys assemblies of custom networks and Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) combining “industrial and domestic materials, found texts, and bespoke algorithms” into a materialized polemic for more poetic (and personal) modes of computation.

Collision Gallery
● 19/06/2022

Much to the delight of writers, concrete poets, and ASCII artists, creative coders Play and EREN launch Typed, a text-based NFT market place on the Tezos chain. Featuring a spartan interface reminiscent of the Hic et Nunc glory days, Typed allows minting of bare-bones text entries, inviting all kinds of character-based experimentation. Within hours of being announced on Twitter, the platform was bustling with activity (image: Leander Herzog’s adaption of his generative art hit Agglo).

Typed
● 29/04/2022

As part of her eponymous solo exhibition, American software artist Lauren Lee McCarthy performs a new iteration of her 2020 COVID response piece I Heard Talking Is Dangerous at EIGEN+ART Lab, Berlin. Whereas the original performance had McCarthy trigger text-to-speech monologues from her phone, Proceed At Your Own Risk invited the gallery audience to use the same technology (via a custom web app) to talk back.

I Heard Talking Is Dangerous
● 24/03/2022

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.

I Heard Talking Is Dangerous
● 13/01/2022
“Conceptually, working with NFTs has inspired me to continue evolving my hypothesis that poetry is a technology, a durable, adaptive data storage system for preserving humanity’s most valuable information—poetry as the original blockchain.”
– Poet, artist, and AI researcher Sasha Stiles, on embracing Web3 with her own work and the crypto poetry gallery theVERSEverse she co-founded with Ana Maria Caballero and Kalen Iwamoto in late 2021
The Tokenizer
● 09/03/2021
“In 2011, Trifonov reviewed 123 definitions of life. Each was different, but the same words showed up again and again … he concluded that all the definitions agreed on one thing: life is self‐reproduction with variations.”
– Science writer Carl Zimmer, on geneticist Edward Trifonov’s search for a holistic definition of life, in an excerpt from his new book Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
Quanta Magazine
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