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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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.
“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!”
“If there was a small city of 380,000 people where painted beer caps were highly valued, but they were only valuable in that city and worthless to the other 7.75 billion people in the world, would you consider painted beer caps the next big thing in the global economy?”
Wired senior writer Kate Knibbs meets avatar artist LaTurbo Avedon (image), “a cross between the Japanese hologram pop idol Hatsune Miku and the pseudonymous British street artist Banksy,” in Second Life to chat digital mirrors, the metaverse, and NFTs. “There’s no separating the art from the artist,” Knibbs muses, after attempts to get Avedon to break character fail. “The artist is the art project, a sprightly-looking, nonbinary virtual being untethered from a human body.”
“In the metaverse Facebook envisions you are the Neopet, and your in-game activities may affect every sphere of life that Facebook already touches: careers, relationships, politics.”
Avatar artist LaTurbo Avedon announces that the mirror emoji submitted by her, Theo Schear, and ‘emoji activist’ Jennifer 8. Lee is now official Unicode (13.0) standard. Citing anthropologist Tom Boellstorff’s writings on mirrors in Second Life, their proposal from February 21, 2019, argues for the mirror as an important “non-literal” symbol users carry over from one world to another as “we integrate ourselves more closely with the virtual.”
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