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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
“At its best, it tapped into creativity and wit that had lain dormant in the population, showcasing talents that didn’t previously exist because there had been no form or shape for them to take. Live snark became an art.”
– Journalist Jonathan Goldsbie, mourning the death of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. In his extended monologue, Goldsbie celebrates the early days of the microblogging platform and how it changed the nature of discourse, and laments the rot that ensued when Elon Musk took over.
“For me, it encapsulates the ways we’ve come round to performing and selling ourselves online. How we’re urged to almost embody capitalism!”
– transmediale Artistic Director Nóra Ó Murchú, on this year’s theme “you’re doing amazing, sweetie.” Named after a Kim Kardashian meme, the 2024 edition of the Berlin-based media arts festival will focus on “the horrors of content,” Ó Murchú reveals. “It’s warm, feels good, and builds community, “ she says, “but by trapping us in eternal viral loops and precarious economic models, it creates toxic engagements and a sense of meaninglessness.”
“Creating a single artwork on a small website at this point is a kind of Land Art. To view it you have to leave the urban centers of the feed and go to some off-grid locale. Nobody is coming to visit, but everyone says they want to.”
– American software artist Andrew Benson, on the platform consolidation of the internet—and escaping it. “Out there you can have more freedom, the access to raw material is abundant, and it feels better to feel like you made something real,” Benson muses. “But if you aren’t posting pics [on social media], does it even matter?”

The “Unleashed” edition of panke.gallery’s recent AR group exhibition, “Animal()City,” pops up at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37c3) in Hamburg (DE), releasing CGI creatures by Joachim Blank (image: The restless lion/ess, 2023), Eva Davidova, Meredith Drum, exonemo, Jonas Lund, Sahej Rahal, and Ingeborg Wie Henriksen. The show, curated by panke’s Sakrowski, draws inspiration from the ghostly presence of urban critters that, like people being siloed by online platforms and AI, seem to live in parallel worlds.

“We do not live in a simulation—a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews—but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic.”
Branch magazine editors Kit Braybrooke, Julia Kloiber, and Michelle Thorne, citing Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) in their “Gentle Dismantlings” opening letter
“For every charge that immersive events are diluting our experience of artistry, there’s a counterpoint to be made that it’s opening that experience out to people who might not normally gravitate towards it.”
– Writer Róisín Lanigan, weighing in on the post-pandemic rise of immersive media spaces like Frameless, Outernet (both London), and Sphere (Las Vegas). They empower creators, offer communal experiences, and yes, “they’re geared towards the gram—the number of views can attest to that,” Lanigan notes.
U
“In his feud with Zuckerberg, Musk is essentially playing Ric Flair without the charisma.”
– Tech reporter and Platformer founder Casey Newton, parsing the drama around the proposed cage fight between the two Silicon Valley giants in show sports terms. “As a connoisseur of pro wrestling, I’m quite familiar with the character Musk is playing here: the big talker who can’t back it up in the ring,” writes Newton. “Wrestling promoters have made a lot of money with cowardly heel champions [like Flair] who go to great lengths to avoid having to face their adversaries in combat.” In the real world, the Musk vs Zuck feud moves markets and, Newton argues, deserves a lot more skepticism.
“It’s easier to build LK-99 at home than it is to write a good internet regulation.”
– Tech journalist and Platformer founder Casey Newton, concluding a Hard Fork episode on the “folk science” surrounding the LK-99 room-temperature superconductor Korean researchers claim to have discovered—a potentially transformative technology that people are now trying to recreate themselves—and the tight rope between empowerment and censorship that the U.S. congress attempts to walk with the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)
“This is an unprecedented escalation by a social media company against independent researchers. Musk has just declared open war. If he succeeds in silencing us other researchers will be next in line.”
Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) Founder and CEO Imran Ahmed, in response to X, formerly Twitter, threatening legal action over the nonprofit’s research into content moderation. The organization had critized Musk’s leadership for the increase in anti-LGBTQ hate speech and climate misinformation.

Peter Burr’s Sunshine Monument (2023) launches on the Whitney website as part of the museum’s Sunrise/Sunset series of timed micro interventions. Visible for up to 30 seconds twice a day, the “fleeting shimmer” translates the site’s layout into seven abstract architectures—one for each day—bustling with activity. Burr’s harsh signature style channels “the atmosphere of the late Web 2.0 landscape, characterized by an increasingly indexed, optimized, and gamified environment,” writes curator Christiane Paul.

Billed as their largest solo show to date, Eva & Franco Mattes’ “Fake Views” opens at Frankfurter Kunstverein (DE), illuminating platform culture, internet infrastructures, and online communities. For their new installation P2P (2022-23, image), for example, the Italian net art duo invited peers Nora Al-Badri, Simon Denny, Do Not Research, Olia Lialina, Jill Magid, and Jon Rafman to create new works to be hosted on a peer-to-peer server enclosed in a wire cage—an ‘exhibition within the exhibition.’

German media artist and Post-Internet purveyor Aram Bartholl unveals Delusion And Survival (2023), a collection of custom-made steel paper clips in @ sign form. Created in collaboration with The Internet Shop for an upcoming group show at Berlin’s A:D: Curatorial, the whimsical artifact fuses two concepts whose overlapping histories permeate contemporary digital culture—the paper clip that lives on in our interfaces and as a metaphor for AI dystopia, and the now ubiquitous @ sign, first introduced in 1971.

Berlin-based generative artist and prolific Twitch streamer Raphaël de Courville releases a Chrome browser extension that rids Twitter of ‘Chief Twit’ Elon Musk’s latest attempt at humour. “DogeBeGone saves your precious eyes from the scourge of Doge,” writes de Courville about undoing the platform’s sudden logo swap for the Dogecoin mascot dog on April 3 (that may be related to a $258-billion racketeering lawsuit against Musk). Thanks to de Courville’s hack, the bird is back—“just like nature intended.”

“Starting April 15th, only white nationalists with 30 followers will be in ‘For You’ recommendations.”
Eve 6 band leader and Buzzfeed columnist Max Collins, responding to Elon Musk’s announcement of Twitter Blue favouritism. Cited in Mashable reporter Matt Binder’s analysis of the social media company’s flailing subscription game, Collin’s tweet rings true: Half of Twitter Blue users have less than 1,000 followers and comprise “far right wing accounts, cryptocurrency scammers, and hardcore Elon Musk supporters.”

Berlin-based media artist Aram Bartholl plants a towering heart emoji, or Triangle of Sadness (2023), outside of Stadtgalerie Kiel, Germany, as part of the gallery’s “Tourismus. Let’s do it all” group exhibition. The latest in Bartholl’s series of supersized Internet iconography (Map, 2006-19, This is Fine, 2022) deals with the performative aspects of travel in age of platform capitalism and calls attention to the social cost of algorithmically driven content production and consumption cycles.

”Wherever you look, youth mental health is collapsing, and the inflection point is ominously consistent: 2010 give or take a year or two—when smartphones went from luxury to ubiquity.”
– Data journalist John Burn-Murdoch, parsing research on the impact digital devices have on teens. Studies conducted by Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, reveal that the more time young people spend on social media, the worse their mental health is. A key metric: meeting friends IRL. “As screen-time has surged, everyone hangs out less,” notes Burn-Murdoch.

“Terms of Use,” a show exploring “(re)framing of individual and collective selves, as we grapple with living simultaneously online and AFK,” opens at PHI Foundation in Montreal. Curated by Daniel Fiset and Cheryl Sim, the exhibition draws inspiration from feminists Ursula Franklin and Legacy Russell, and invites artists including Skawennati, Shanie Tomassini, Wu Tsang, Nico Williams, and Chun Hua Catherine Dong (image left: Meet Me Half Way, 2021) to examine tensions between identity and virtuality.

“Offline, I had Starbucks cake pop detritus lodged into my pink-and-purple braces. But on Stardoll.com, I was skisweetie2029, a digital doll with improbably shiny hair and the nose piercing that I always wanted IRL.”
Spike columnist Adina Glickstein, looking for comfort in her digital past. “The temporal horizon recedes in both directions,” she writes about ‘neostalgia’ and extractive data horrors. “The coziness of ‘before’ can eternally be made anew, at profit. But also, undeniably, at cost.”
OUT NOW:
Mojca Kumerdej
New Extractivism
A compilation of interviews with artists Joana Moll, Vladan Joler, DISNOVATION.ORG, and Ben Grosser conducted as part of Aksioma’s eponymous exhibition and conference program in 2022
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