1,548 days, 2,378 entries ...
Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
Gala Hernández López’s sci-fi documentary for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world (2024) premieres at Berlinale. In the double-screen collage of YouTube videos, archival images, and 3D animations, the French artist-researcher and filmmaker explores the links between crypto culture and cryogenics as two speculative technologies that exploit the future. A key narrative figure: American extropian and cypherpunk Hal Finney, who, in a fictional future, implements societal biostasis for economic gain.
Simon Denny
Landscapes
“Nothing is fully on-chain: there are always many more layers of tech off-chain that you depend on that interpret and transform data to display your art, like your browser. And your eyes and your mind to perceive it are extremely mutable too.”
“If the tale of hard work and upward mobility kept us yoked to our employers and our 9-to-5 jobs, the fantasy of the YOLO investment ‘Lambos or food stamps!’ keeps its subjects attached to the market. To risking it all.”
“It is really disheartening to watch artists I respect run to do ordinals. Can’t help but remember the rough convos we had around energy use and carbon load of ETH.”
“The growing awareness that unchecked centralization and over-financialization cannot be what ‘crypto is about,’ and new technologies like second-generation privacy solutions and rollups are finally coming to fruition, present us with an opportunity to take things in a different direction.”
“Cytographia is an elegy for species we will never know, or will never know again, expressed through generative illustrations from an imaginary book about imaginary organisms.”
“They serve no positive function for society. They’re like mustard gas, polystyrene, lead in gasoline—all these crappy ideas we had to get rid of.”
“Our physical realities, the human body and the planet, are no less real just because technology is taking up more of our attention. We are still embodied, we still look with our eyeballs, we still type with our hands, and we are still sitting here getting bad posture.”
“In the end, we need to ask more of museums and we need to ask more of DAOs (and of emerging technologies more broadly). For either to earn our trust, they need to continually define their terms and defend their motives.”
Himmelsbach & Magrini (ed.)
Algorithmic Imaginary
“The Haring NFTs demonstrate that the smart contract can be a flexible tool, using metadata and code to accommodate the various needs and contexts of digital art.”
“The Amiga drawings are significant because they were created at the dawn of the consumer computer age. Even then, Keith knew that computers were going to be important to people’s lives as their capabilities continued to advance.”
“Exploring the Decentralized Web – Art on the Blockchain” opens at Basel’s HEK (House of Electronic Arts), concluding the institution’s recent excursion into Web3. HEK’s Sabine Himmelbach and Boris Magrini gather some of crypto art’s finest including Simon Denny, Mario Klingemann & Botto, Sarah Friend, Chloé Michel, Rhea Myers, Operator, Lukas Truniger and others, to lay bare the politics and potentials of the metaverse. Of note: Kyle McDonald’s Amends (2022), a potent eco-critical work that’s on view for the very first time.
“I’m concerned that all the backlash and negative energy around NFTs did a lot of damage to the work that curators and artists had been doing in good faith.”
“It’s the future of finance! Except when the SEC comes knocking, then it’s just a harmless little toy, Your Honor.”
“What’s the default language that you go to to do that? It’s the modernist grid. That’s how you understand making new lands. That’s how you understand these digital frontiers. ”
Turning his eponymous 2021 NFT collection into an immersive video installation, Memo Akten’s solo exhibition “Distributed Consciousness” opens at ACMI, Melbourne (AU). 256 AI-generated octopi, each containing a hidden verse, invite meditation on non-human intelligence and human-machine co-creation. “Staged as a place of worship, our tentacular deities invite us to face our final Copernican Trauma, the reality that humans may not be the sole keepers of intelligence, creativity or even consciousness.”
“This new study is different because it measures tiny variations in the way that Bitcoin mining equipment generates random numbers. These variations serve as a fingerprint allowing us to directly estimate the proportion of different machines.”
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