1,359 days, 2,170 entries ...

Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
● 08/09/2023
“The institution is drawn toward those who can leverage their racial identity into a curatorial practice, which the institution can then leverage (or co-opt) into its brand.”
– Writer and designer Simon Wu, on the catch-22 of the art world finally embracing racialized curators. Drawing on his time at MoMA, Wu observes that the desire to confront labour and ethics issues within institutions often gets trumped by the stability (“healthcare, a living wage, parental leave”) that many curators of colour have only just got access to for the first time.
Momus
● 14/03/2023
OUT NOW:
Meredith Broussard
More than a Glitch
Interpreting glitches as a “signal that we need to redesign our systems,” data journalist Broussard highlights algorithmic biases against race, gender, and ability across the tech sector—and suggests a path forward to a more equitable future.
MIT Press
● 28/02/2023
“The subdued blackness of the Apple II computer terminal—which has slowly given way to white-dominated monitors—is juxtaposed with the seeping, gooey asphalt, which seems to suggest that Blackness will not so easily be contained.”
– Writer Veronica Esposito, on American Artist’s Mother of All Demos III (2022), featured in the forthcoming group exhibition “Refigured” at the Whitney. The piece invokes Douglas Engelbard’s epochal 1968 presentation and has “the feel of an archetypical, Promethean moment when things changed forever.”
The Guardian
● 16/12/2022
“Though there are mushrooms aplenty here, humans are in short supply.”
– Art history and visual culture scholar Alex Kitnick, observing the lack of works engaging humans, humanity, and race in the MIT List Visual Arts Center show “Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere”
4Columns
● 23/08/2022
OUT NOW:
DeForrest Brown, Jr.
Assembling a Black Counter Culture
A critical reframing of Detroit techno as a unique (and vital) form of Black musical and cultural production
Primary Information
● 23/06/2022
“Black art is held, then, to show white viewers what they refuse to see while critically refusing to provide a prosthetic for white vision.”
– Scholar Fred Moten, contextualizing recent works by American Artist. He further notes his subject, along with a cadre of artists including Aria Dean, Adelita Husni-Bey, and Sondra Perry, make works that are “an experimental constraint one enters … in order to test and break freedom’s limits.”
CURA.
L
● 03/06/2022
“The white coat acts as a hinge between the visible and the invisible. Its smooth surface actively resists the unseen bacterial sources of disease. It is a kind of inhospitality to disease.”
– Scholar Mark Wigley, on the pathology of “chronic whiteness” in modernist architecture. Part of Sick Architecture, Wigley’s text is one of two dozen essays in a research project cataloguing how “past health crises are inscribed into the everyday.”
e-flux Architecture
● 02/06/2022

Three Doors—Forensic Architecture/Forensis, Initiative 19 opens at Frankfurter Kunstverein (FKV). Featuring London-based Forensic Architecture working with local partners, the show (re)presents evidence in three instances of racially motivated violence in Germany. Oury Jalloh’s Cell: Smoke Traces (2022, image), demonstrates the central architectural motif, by modelling the circumstances of an African asylum seeker’s burning death, while in police custody in 2005.

FKV
● 28/05/2022

An excavation of the legacy of sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler, American Artist’s solo exhibition “Shaper of God” opens at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles. Both spent their formative years in the Pasadena region, which the artist translates into ruminations on “technology, race, surveillance, identity, and place” that map Southern California sites inspired by Butler’s novels and life: To Acorn (1984) (2022), for example, is a sculpture resembling the city bus stops that Butler would have waited at.

REDCAT
● 25/03/2022

“Robota,” a show featuring Matthew Angelo Harrison’s encasements of auto industry ephemera and African sculptures in sold resin blocks, opens at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. A Detroit native who worked as a clay modeller for Ford, Harrison “attends to the devaluation of human labour” by freeze-framing UAW strike ephemera and hardhats, headlights (image: Seer: Lay Bare, 2020), and African sculptures in vitrine-like forms.

List Visual Arts Center
● 03/12/2020
“Silencing marginalized voices like this is the opposite of the NAUWU [Nothing About Us Without Us] principles which we discussed. And doing this in the context of ‘responsible AI’ adds so much salt to the wounds.”
– Timnit Gebru, computer scientist and Google’s star AI ethics researcher, in an internal email criticising the company’s treatment of minority employees that led to her abrupt firing
Platformer
● 29/10/2020

Forensic Architecture launches an interactive archive of police brutality cases documented at Black Lives Matter protests across the United States. In examining thousands of videos shared online, the London-based research agency together with Bellingcat investigators managed to verify and analyse more than 400 attacks on civilians using chemical agents, 300 instances of unjustified arrest, detention, and intimidation, 300 physical assaults by officers, and 250 attacks on journalists, medics, and legal observers.

Forensic Architecture
● 19/08/2020
“Oftentimes, cisgendered white-identified and white-presenting people are recognized as the forward thinkers in discourse about cyberculture…. The romanticized discourse around the 1990s and, in particular, the birth of cyberfeminism often prioritizes white women as the core contributors.”
– Glitch Feminism author Legacy Russell, on challenging cyberculture’s origin story
Frieze
● 15/06/2020
“There are no supervillain tech bros in her account, no evil cabals of trolls launching denial-of-service strikes from the Dark Web, no innocent bots corrupted by the inherent evils of Twitter. There’s just prejudice and its pernicious adaptability.”
– Stephen Kearse, on the sharpness of Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019)
The Nation
To dive deeper into Stream, please or become a .

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 commentary
  • Encounters: in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovators
  • Stream: a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and counting
  • Edition: HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print
$40 USD