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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
“Maybe creating practices and transmitting them through physical, social embodiment is actually a more resilient structure than any particular media might be.”
– Writer and AI researcher K Allado-McDowell, speculating that person-to-person knowledge transfer is more enduring than any media format. “A way to commit something to the future is through practice—teaching people how to do things that they can pass on,” notes Allado-McDowell, discussing the fragility of books and hard drives with New ModelsCaroline Busta and Lil Internet. [quote edited]

Rosa Menkman’s mixed-media installation, A Spectrum of Lost and Unnamed Colours (2024), opens at EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne (CH), concluding the “speculative dialogues” with computer and environmental scientists that informed the work and guided her EPFL residency. In a series of translucent, lens-like sigils, the Dutch artist and researcher tells the story of a future media archaeologist who, in mapping colour loss, uncovers how air pollution and AI deluge ‘dimmed’ the atmospheric rainbow—“nature’s original ‘glitch’.”

“If you’re confident in a contemporaneous movement or your own work, you don’t have to pretend it’s novel. Without acknowledging over half a century of media arts, you are asking to be forgotten.”
– Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) associate curator Regina Harsanyi, on inflationary claims of artistic innovation. “If we acknowledge history, we can be transparent about the failures of the past,” she writes on X. “I can’t trust someone selling me an idea if they’re not familiar with past failings forward of the same concept.”
“Cohen developed AARON with intention. The machine and the painter grew together—inefficiently, by tech’s standards, but fruitfully, by art’s.”
– Critic Travis Diehl, celebrating the outputs of Harold Cohen’s pioneering drawing robots currently on view at The Whitney. “Compared to the visual horrors emerging from the psychedelic meatgrinder of text-to-image AI’s, AARON’s docile pictures of people feel friendly and controlled,” Diehl writes. “The Whitney show speaks to a hopeful period of tech development, when the internet’s pioneers envisioned an anarchic realm of the mind, not the boundless attention-gathering machine it became.”

Honouring the centenary of late digital art pioneer Vera Molnar (1924-2023) as part of this year’s Genuary, American media artist and lecturer Golan Levin shares a re-code of Molnar’s 1970 plotter work, À la Recherche de Paul Klee. Realized in p5.js and fully accessible via the p5.js online editor, Levin’s tribute and countless others were prompted by generative artists Melissa Wiederrecht and Piter Pasma, who set the Molnar theme for the online creative coding sprint on Genuary 5th.

Retro computing blogger Josh Renaud reports the recovery of long-lost algorithmic music software developed by American-Israeli inventor and cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen in 1986. Magic Harp was a set of six thematic music disks to be bundled with the Commodore Amiga, each dedicated to a different genre. Found was a beta version of “baroque,” where a Bach-like “artificial personality” conducts digital organs and spinets (image). After the deal with Commodore fell through, Kirschen’s innovations were largely lost to obscurity.

Q
Niklaus Wirth
1934 – 2024
Swiss computer scientist and 1984 Turing Award winner Niklaus Emil Wirth dies, aged 89. The long-serving ETH professor’s legacy includes numerous programming languages such as Euler (1965), ALGOL W (1966), and, notably, Pascal (1970), a stint at Xerox PARC, and his 1995 plea for “Lean Software” (now known as Wirth’s law.)

In a love letter to Deluxe Paint, the popular pixel editor Electronic Arts published from 1985 to ’95, Swedish programmer Carl Svensson dissects and celebrates the package’s powerful drawing, animation, morphing, and colour cycling features that defined the workflow of pixel artists and game developers well into the PlayStation era. “If you’re an old school DOS, Amiga or even console gamer, it will have helped create some of your fondest memories,” writes Svensson.

The auction for “Keith Haring: Pixel Pioneer” concludes, bringing in $1.6M in sales across five lots. Undeterred by faltering NFT sales, several astute collectors swooped in to acquire the late artist’s trove of Commodore Amiga drawings. Created in the winter and spring of 1987, they showcase Haring’s signature exhuberent figures and vivid colour palettes, as shaped by the limited graphic capabilities (320 x 200 resolution, 32 colours) of the Amiga (image: Untitled #2 (April 16, 1987)).

Celebrating the Toronto artist-run centre’s 40th anniversary, “Remember Tomorrow: A Telidon Story” opens at InterAccess. Curator Shauna Jean Doherty present vintage works created with Telidon, a short-lived Canadian teletext and videotext service (similar to Minitel) that saw a wave of early 1980s artistic exploration. Artists including Paul Petro, Geoffrey Shea, and Nell Tenhaaf share original Telidon works (restored by John Durno) and contemporary digital artist Jerome Saint-Clair joins in.

“The Haring NFTs demonstrate that the smart contract can be a flexible tool, using metadata and code to accommodate the various needs and contexts of digital art.”
Outland’s Brian Droitcour, on Web3 developers Digital Practice setting a new standard for the blockchain-based sale and preservation of historical digital art. Having learned from the 2021 Warhol NFT controversy, the forthcoming NFTs of Keith Haring’s Amiga drawings “offer both flexibility and fidelity, encompassing files suitable for display on today’s screens as well as a faithful replica of the original pixels in contemporary code.”
“The Amiga drawings are significant because they were created at the dawn of the consumer computer age. Even then, Keith knew that computers were going to be important to people’s lives as their capabilities continued to advance.”
– Gil Vazquez, executive director and president of Keith Haring Foundation, on the forthcoming Christie’s NFT auction of the pop art icon’s pixelations from the late 1980s. “Long stored on floppy disks, the drawings had never seen the light of day—until now,” Artnet’s Min Chen writes.

Deep demake or meta media archaeology? Thanks to programmer WebFritzi, retro gaming fans can now enjoy Windows 95 classics Solitaire, Freecell, and Minesweeper on a Commodore 64—iconic Windows 95 desktop interface and mouse support included. Recreating an authentic 1995 PC experience on an 8-bit platform from a decade prior required some assembly language wizardry. “How are the icons created? Can you make a user interface like this? I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” stunned Commodore fans wrote online.

“The result is a fantasy—or nightmare—of computers as both preternatural agents of their own histories and autocratic engines of meaning.”
– Art historian and Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator Tina Rivers Ryan, on Lowell Nesbitt’s 1965 painting I.B.M. Disc Pack. The piece is part of a series of “deadpan enlargements of IBM materials” and currently on view at the Leslie Jones-curated LACMA exhibition “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age”—a “necessary survey” that “argues that early computer art is art,” as Ryan writes in her review.

British composer and vintage computer music connoisseur Paulee Alex Bow takes to his Magical Synth Adventure! YouTube channel to revisit obscure software instruments on the Commodore Amiga, a 16bit home computer platform launched in 1985. Introducing viewers to the unique capabilities of the system’s 4-channel sound chip, Paula, Bow demoes a variety of early real-time soft synths including Aegis SONIX (1986, image), Sonic Arranger (1992), and OctaMED (1989-97, “my happy place”) that enthusiasts experiment with to this day.

OUT NOW:
Andrés Burbano
Different Machines
In his investigation of the emergence of Latin American media technologies, the Colombian artist and scholar constructs a “historiographical and theoretical framework for understanding the work of creators who have been geographically and historically marginalized.”
“Immured like rarefied noctiluca or sliced geodes, these TVs are glitzy shells dramatizing media’s narcotic visualizations with Bender’s surgical editing amplifying the violence of homogenizing logics.”
– Critic Alex Bennett, on Gretchen Bender’s “fierce use of film and television as source material” that’s currently on view at Sprüth Magers, London. The “Image World” solo exhibition presents the American artist’s TV Text & Image series and other single- and multi-channel video works from the 1980s and ’90s on CRT monitors and television sets.

Marcel Schwittlick’s solo exhibition “Composition #84: The Long Run” opens at SP2 gallery, Berlin, juxtapozing three eponymous plotter drawings with videos documenting their creation. The pieces, each measuring 36 x 115 cm and comprising 2.5 million dots plotted over 23 hours, record the emptying of a collection of vintage felt tip pens, marking the “end of an era.” Eight stripes per plot, drawn with pens of the same colour, yield subtle variations that tell the “unique history of each pen,” notes Schwittlick.

“Eisenhower spent the next eight years in office. But in terms of influence over culture, the computer was arguably the night’s biggest winner.”
– Artist and Forbes critic-at-large Jonathon Keats, revisiting the moment when UNIVAC I, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, correctly predicted the outcome of the 1952 U.S. presidential election. Assuming the mainframe must be hallucinating Eisenhower’s landslide victory, the programmers underreported UNIVAC’s findings. “When the machine was vindicated—missing the final tally by just four electoral votes—the UNIVAC’s operators confessed their lies.”
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