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Mohawk multimedia artist Skawennati’s new machinima, They Sustain Us (2024), premieres at Gray Area, San Francisco, expanding a music video built and filmed in Second Life into an IRL garment collection and runway performance. Two years in the making and Gray Area’s biggest commission to date, the piece reimagines Three Sisters, beloved personifications of Indigenous staple crops (corn, beans, squash) as futuristic superheroes that celebrate food sovereignty, sustainability, and femininity.

Total Refusal’s solo exhibition “Every Strike Hits Dead Center” opens at Taipei’s Digital Art Center (DAC), presenting new and recent videogame appropriations that explore the representation of labour and leisure. Whereas Club Stahlbad (2022, image), for example, tunes into the frenetic escapism of NPC clubbers in Cyberpunk 2077, the Austrian machinima collective’s new piece, Loop Labor (2023), highlights—and liberates—Latin American field workers in Grand Theft Auto V.

Mischievous game modders 2girls1comp release Every Thing (2023), an experimental Grand Theft Auto V mod that “sequentially spawns every object from the game’s prop database until the program ultimately crashes.” A video showing it in action (image) reveals a small-to-large amassing of furnishings, signs, trees, and infrastructure into a dense illegible volume of CGI pseudo-matter. “It’s a reverse Katamari Damacy. The antithesis of Jenga,” quips machinima and videogame art scholar Matteo Bittanti.

What Just Happened?:
Total Refusal Collective Casts NPC Workers in Critique of Contemporary Labour

The Austrian pseudo-marxist media guerilla discusses their award-winning Machinima film Hardly Working (2022) and videogame interventions writ large

Navigating the gap between veteran digital artists and next generation upstarts, “Machine Violence” opens at Postmasters Gallery in New York City. Twelve artists including Damjanski, Huntrezz Janos, Eva & Franco Mattes, and Jennifer & Kevin McCoy present works spanning machinima to painting. Of note: the show includes Biennale.py (2001, image), the Mattes’ 49th Venice Biennale contribution, in which a connected virus-laden and ‘clean’ computer “infect and disinfect each other in an endless cycle.“

“If Second Life goes bankrupt, like it once almost did, I would probably not go looking for another virtual world. I feel the same way about my marriage—I don’t think I’ll want another one!”
– CGI artist Skawennati, professing her enduring lover for the original virtual world. In conversation with LaTurbo Avedon, the duo discuss online economies, avatar evolution, and swap 3D modelling tips.
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The Lustenau (AT) art space DOCK 20 celebrates the videogame interventions of Austrian “pseudo-Marxist media guerilla” Total Refusal in an immersive solo exhibition. Known for appropriating blockbuster titles for cultural critique and counter narratives, the machinima collective stages three works that deal with sleep, work, and recreation. Their newest piece, Club Stahlbad (2023, image), is a Cyberpunk 2077 mod that explores incomputable human sensations like intoxication and euphoria.

An ethnographic exploration of the work and daily life of non-playable characters, Total Refusal’s meta-documentary Hardly Working premieres (and wins best direction) at Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland. The film follows four digital extras—a laundress, a stableman, a street sweeper, a handyman—toiling away in the videogame Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). “Their labour loops, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.”

Cryptoheaven3 (2022), a CGI short imagining the “digital afterlife” of disgraced ponzi crypto exchange CEO Gerald Cotton, premieres at Milan Machinima Festival. After defrauding traders for $180 million the QuadrigaCX CEO died in 2018—Ukrainian artist Letta Shtohryn began making shorts about his idyllic posthumous adventures with The Sims 4, and this third iteration depicts Cotton’s arduous daily regime of “sunbathing, daily massages, and exotic cocktails.”

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