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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
● 06/03/2024

“Universal / Remote,” a show chronicling how “capital and data flow freely on a global scale,” opens at the National Art Center Tokyo (NACT). Artists including Xu Bing, Maiko Jinushi, Trevor Paglen, and Evan Roth contribute works addressing globalization and social atomization. Hito Steyerl, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, and Miloš Trakilović stage their video installation Mission Accomplished: Belanciege (2019, image), a sardonic reflection on post-Berlin Wall European culture—and the luxury brand Balenciaga.

NACT
● 13/02/2024
OUT NOW:
Yanis Varoufakis
Technofeudalism
Maverick economist Varoufakis puts Silicon Valley in the crosshairs, arguing Big Tech has supplanted traditional capitalism and hoovered up much of the World’s capital to “construct private cloud fiefdoms and privatize the Internet.”
Melville House
● 22/08/2023
“Today’s sentence should serve as a warning to other corporate insiders that insider trading—in any marketplace—will not be tolerated.”
– Southern District of New York Attorney Damian Williams, on former OpenSea executive Nathanial Chastain’s sentencing of three years probation, the forfeiture of his ill-gotten gains, and a hefty fine as the first person convicted for digital asset insider trading. During the 2021 crypto boom, Chastain bought NFTs scheduled to be featured on OpenSea—and sold them for 200-500% profit when they were.
U.S. Department of Justice
● 01/08/2023
“I think markets are fundamentally a better source of truth than media or narratives.”
– 1confirmation founder Nick Tomaino, anticipating prediction markets (e.g.) will become a go-to source of ‘truth’ as faith in legacy media and government erodes. “People with skin in the game that are speculating on outcomes—I think that can bring a lot more truth to the world,” says the Peter Thiel-backed venture capitalist unironically of his wretched casino-like future.
Empire
● 29/06/2023
“Unlike traditional artists, I think generative artists operate a lot more, structurally speaking, like musicians. When a musician releases new music, they have tour tickets, which are somewhat reasonably priced and fans can feel like they’re directly supporting the artist.”
– Digital artist Maya Man, on how NFT releases (in the hundreds or thousands) facilitate more “expansive” artist-collector relationships than limited editions aimed at a few wealthy collectors
Dirt
● 23/06/2023

“Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop,” a send-up of disgraced crypto CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) Future Fund by Michael Stevenson, opens at Michael Lett in Auckland (NZ). The show takes aim at SBF’s defunct effective altruism charity by reproducing the text from the fund’s website on beanbag chairs—just like those beloved by the former billionaire. The New Zealand artist describes each chair (filled with shredded paper) as “a placeholder” for “good intentions and a compromised crypto ecosystem.”

Michael Lett
H
● 09/06/2023
“I think the Bitcoiners that are celebrating these enforcement actions tend to be later on the adoption curve and lower on the IQ spectrum than folks that actually know what’s going on. They’re cultists.”
– Crypto analyst Ryan Selkis, on the Bitcoin purists vocally celebrating recent SEC lawsuits that claim (at least as far as America is concerned) other leading cryptocurrencies are securities
YouTube
● 22/03/2023
“If TurboTax is Dark UI, Tax Heaven 3000 is Pink UI, the nightcore of tax software.”
– MSCHF co-founder Dan Greenberg, on Tax Heaven 3000 (image, 2023), a forthcoming dating simulator that allows Americans to court Iris, “a cheerful and easygoing girl who is oddly interested in your personal finances,” while doing their taxes
NME
● 08/03/2023

Serendipitously coinciding with an economy on the brink, Isaac Julien’s multiscreen installation Playtime (2014, image) opens at Berlin’s PalaisPopulaire. Set during the 2008-09 financial crisis that catalyzed the Great Recession, the filmmaker experiments in visualizing the flow of capital from the perspective of seven interlinked characters (a pair of hedge fund managers, a journalist, an artist, an art dealer, an auctioneer, and a maid) whose lives and ventures span Dubai, London, and Reykjavík.

PalaisPopulaire
● 10/01/2023
“As each patron stepped up and withdrew from the ATM, their picture was taken, ranking them based on the amount of money left in their wallet. For the opulent at Basel Miami, is was the perfect piece to feed your hubris.”
– Critic Seth Hawkins, reflecting on Brooklyn collective MSCHF’s Art Basel Miami Beach intervention, and its lingering crypto winter significance
Artillery
● 04/01/2023
“By attempting to shield consumers from high prices, governments will only encourage consumption via lower prices, prolonging the energy crisis.”
– Oxford Institute for Energy Studies Senior Research Fellow Adi Imsirovic, advising against governments deploying “subsidies, retail price caps, and tax reductions” to placate cash-strapped consumers. “Such actions only support the rich,” encourage fossil fuel use, and stifle innovation, he argues.
The Conversation
● 20/11/2022
“A premature extinction event occurs before we’ve flooded the universe with ‘value.’ We, then, shouldn’t spend money on global poverty: those resources should instead go to ensuring that we realize our ‘longterm potential.’”
– Philosopher and author Émile P. Torres, parsing the moral bankruptcy of longtermism, an ideology espoused by, for example, crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, who claimed to “get filthy rich, for charity’s sake.”
Salon
● 17/11/2022
“From compromised system integrity and faulty regulatory oversight, to the concentration of control in the hands of a small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated, and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”
– Lawyer and corporate restructuring specialist John Jay Ray III, bluntly assessing bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX
Decrypt
● 08/11/2022
“The rumours for this blowup seem so egregious and unnecessary to me. I can’t imagine running an exchange that makes mid-8 figures per day in revenue and thinking ‘how can we leverage this for more?’”
– Crypto pundit Cobie, trying to make sense of the insolvency of leading cryptocurrency exchange FTX, a collapse so significant and shocking that it is drawing comparison to the 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy
Twitter
● 19/10/2022
“They’ve contributed $73 million through June 30th of this year. That’s more than the oil and gas industry has put into politics, more than defence, and more than the transportation sector.”
– Campaign finance reporter Bill Allison, explaining how high-net-worth individuals from the crypto space (e.g. Sam Bankman-Fried) are U.S. midterm election megadonors. “They’re really focusing on Congressional races, and trying to influence the outcome of those races,” he continues, predicting industry friendly regulation in 2023.
Bloomberg Crypto
● 30/08/2022
“We believe AI is the future of corporate management. Our appointment of Ms Tang Yu represents our commitment to truly embrace the use of AI to transform the way we operate our business, and ultimately drive future growth.”
– Dr. Dejian Liu, chairman of the Chinese metaverse company NetDragon, announcing the world’s first (female) robot CEO. “Tang Yu is an AI-powered virtual humanoid,” reports Anugraha Sundaravelu, and “will be at the forefront of the company’s ‘organizational and efficiency department’.”
Metro
● 05/04/2022
“And that ad is not an argument for why crypto works. It’s not an argument for what it does or what problems it can solve. It’s just financial FOMO.”
– New York Times journalist Ezra Klein, arguing the FTX Super Bowl ad was designed to attract dumb money. In it, misanthropic comedian Larry David dismisses world-changing inventions—the wheel, the light bulb, the dishwasher—through the ages, and repeats the mistake by writing off cryptocurrencies.
The Ezra Klein Show
● 09/04/2021
“Using steganography, I have hidden the whole essay inside the JPEG. Yes, you’re looking at a conceptual artwork that is currently explaining itself to you.”
– Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, demonstrating how artists are broadening what NFTs could be on the burgeoning artist-led marketplace Hic et Nunc. “NFTs may liberate artists not only technically, but conceptually,” he writes. ”As the certificate becomes widely accepted as the transferable commodity, the associated artwork is free to be an idea, an essay, or a gift.”
plummerfernandez.com
● 20/03/2021
“We’re in the CompuServe age of this stuff. Like, we haven’t even gone to AOL or MySpace or, you know, even Facebook yet in terms of lineages, of how technologies develop.”
– Gray Area Executive Director Barry Threw, on the transformative potential of NFTs. “It’s an asset bubble, it’s a hype bubble, and it provides some opportunity for artists to have some traction,” Threw explains. “[But] it’s a market that’s just as interested in buying memes as it is in buying art.”
San Francisco Chronicle
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