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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
OUT NOW:
Tristan Perich
Pseudorandom
Composer Perich complements his new conceptual circuit album Noise Patterns, Pseudorandom with a hefty 1024-page printout of the 16,777,215 numbers that comprise one complete cycle of its central 3-byte random number generator.

“SOUND MACHINES,” a show exploring the untapped sonic potential of NFTs, opens on Feral File. Curated by MoMA, it features 0xDEAFBEEF, American Artist & Tommy Martinez, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, and Yoko Ono. Their works playfully introduce sound to tokenized art, as evidenced by 0xDEAFBEEF’s PAYPHONE (2022-, image), which allows collectors to purchase a phone card granting priority access to participate in a performance by the artist.

“Many technologies are modelled on our anatomy—they are extensions of us. I wanted to get closer to the sirens, to see them as a ‘circuit of an ear and a mouth, listening out for threat and broadcasting it to the population,’ to quote the film.”
– Artist Aura Satz, describing the noisemaking subject at the heart of her debut feature film Preemptive Listening (2024). In conversation with associate producer Tendai John Mutambu, Satz discusses sonic aesthetics and how adopting an abolitionist framework impacted her narrative.
OUT NOW:
Neural 73
Negotiating Values
Reflecting on the Oscillations sound artist exchange program, guest editor Matteo Marangoni explores the politics of collaboration. Of note: interviews with Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Kexin Hao, Pei-Ying Lin, and Vivian Caccuri, and essays by Nicholas Norton and Paul Prudence.

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.

“The deluge of automation will amplify whatever it is pointed at. If we continue to value engagement above all else it will excel at facilitating 24-hour content avatars, sophistry, and distracting novelty.”
– American artist and composer Holly Herndon, on how prompt-based AI music generators like Suno AI will further homogenize culture. “AI may thrive in satisfying [middle-of-the-road] preferences but that does not answer the question of how to revive everything else.”
G

Exploring sound across the ages (and over the Atlantic Ocean), “Resonaciones. An embrace to awake” opens at IFA Gallery Stuttgart. Inspired by the ancient Peruvian whistling vessels in the Linden Museum collection, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen presents art and environments by artists and culture workers Carolina Arévalo, Francisca Gili, Nicole L’Huillier, and Bettina Korintenberg that weigh the impact of colonialism and how soundscapes function as “a living and permanently changing archive.”

Coinciding with the 8th edition of the ACT Festival, “Planetary Pulse,” a showcase of the Asia Culture Center’s (ACC) residency program opens in Gwangju (KR). Featured are artists including Ahram Jeong, Su Jin Bae and Jonathan Lemke, Kim Joon, Matt Gingold (image: The Absent Orkestra, 2023), and Inhwa Yeom, who were selected from a pool of 340 applicants from 46 countries. Presented in conjunction with the ACC Sound Lab, the show focuses on soundscape and a “postcolonial analysis of the notion of listening.”

“Situated Listening,” an exhibition by Hong Kong-based composer and sound artist Samson Young, opens at Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover (DE). Featured are The Travelers and the Listeners (2023), a collage of musical films inspired by a Walter de la Mare poem, and Variations of 96 Chords in Space (2023, image), a video installation in which a palette of 96 colours (each linked to a chord played by violist William Lane) blur across screens “in endless combinations, largely systematic, partly arbitrary.”

Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s permanent installation Voices of Memory (2023, image) opens in the Hall of Remembrance at Warsaw Insurgents Cemetery. A memorial to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in which 150,000 civilians and 18,000 insurgents died during a revolt against occupying German forces, it “expresses opposition to all armed conflicts.” In the piece, Wodiczko presents audio of survivors’ testimonials and syncs their traumatic recollections with projections of flickering flames.

“Alluding to the physical laws of propagation of light particles and sound waves,” Carsten Nicolai’s solo show “Strahlen / Raggi” opens at the Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (FMAV) in Modena (IT). Displayed are tributes to the German artist’s late friend and collaborator Ryuichi Sakamoto, a Geiger counter-driven reinterpretation of a Japanese Zen garden, and a pair of installations where sound causes water in rotating parabolic basins to ripple—cleverly warping reflected light (image: reflektor distortion, 2016).

Canadian artists Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller open their own art space in rural British Columbia (CA) with a retrospective of several of their renowned works. Featured in the raw ‘art warehouse’ are surround sound installations including The Murder of Crows (2008), a dreamlike “film experience that has no film” sonic pastiche, and The Forty Part Motet (2001, image), which famously turns a Salisbury Cathedral Choir performance into an immersive, embodied, and transcendent listening experience.

Field Observatory, a “site-sensitive” installation by Finnish artist Teemu Lehmusruusu opens in Kirjurinluoto park in Pori (FI). Inspired by the root systems of alfalfa and other plants, Lehmusruusu’s “underground weather station” monitors underlying soil conditions and translates that data into a generative animation and soundscape. Drawing on dialogue with farmers and researchers developing carbon farming practices, the installation is a “portal into the volumes of the ground.”

Ars Electronica announces the 2023 winners of the prestigious Golden Nica media art prize, awarded in New Animation Art, Digital Musics & Sound Art, AI & Life Art, and other categories. Winning projects, selected from 3,176 submissions, include Atractor Studios and Semántica Productions’ sonification of Colombian agricultural soils, A Tale of Two Seeds (2022), and Winnie Soon’s Unerasable Characters Series (2022, image), that reveals the chilling scale of censorship on China’s biggest social media platform, Weibo.

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.

Copenhagen Contemporary opens “Yet, It Moves!,” a city-wide exhibition of art-science encounters that explore the universe’s only constant: movement. Eleven artists including Cecilia Bengolea, Ryoji Ikeda, Black Quantum Futurism, Jakob Kudsk Steensen (image: Tongues of Verglas, 2023), and Jenna Sutela worked with leading researchers through Arts at CERN, ModLab, DARK, and the IMC to express phenomena like black holes, star formation, and gravitational waves as 3D animations, VR, AR, sound, and immersive installations.

LaMont Hamilton’s sound installation To Hear the Earth Before the End of the World (2023) opens at Alaska’s Anchorage Museum, immersing visitors in sonicifications of the five planetary systems: the geosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. Building on years of research to gain “a ground-zero understanding of our changing Earth,” the American multi-disciplinary artist added a new chapter drawing on field recordings made during a 2022 residency with the museum.

“Space synthesis,” the debut solo show of German artist and composer Jan St. Werner, opens at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (DE). Known as half of musical duo Mouse on Mars, his recent projects include directional speaker experiments and “Alchemical,” a 2021 Bitforms exhibition with Casey Reas. Curated by Çağla Ilk, Werner activates the Kunsthalle’s acoustics with an installation that modulates sound and light, inviting visitors to explore and “become part of a moving, multi-perspective scenario.”

Manifesting how data centres “buzz, hum, and groan around the clock,” 24/7 (2023, image), a new audiovisual installation by composer and visual artist Esmeralda Conde Ruiz opens at HELLERAU in Dresden (DE). Produced during her residency at TU Dresden’s multidisciplinary Schaufler Lab, the installation transforms the HELLERAU orchestra pit into a pseudo-server farm, inviting visitors to explore a noisy labyrinth that foregrounds the sound of ubiquitous data flows.

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