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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.

OUT NOW:
Simon Denny
Landscapes
The survey of the Berlin-based artist’s recent Metaverse Landscapes unpacks “historical resonances between territory, abstraction, and financialization” with commentary from Christina Barton, Adina Glickstein, Martin Herbert, Omar Kholeif, and Fred Turner.
“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.”
– Dutch software artist Harm van den Dorpel, dropping hard truths about NFT posterity. “The more immutable your artwork is, the more likely it is that it will break in the future because of compatibility issues with future dependencies.”
“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.”
– Irish digital culture scholar and Tokens (2023) author Rachel O’Dwyer, on how disillusionment and precarity fuel the “cruel optimism” of crypto hype cycles. “Crypto did not level the playing field,” O’Dwyer summarizes. “It exposed the vulnerable to fraud and scams. It offset risk on to the poorest in society, all while paying lip service to a dream.”
“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.”
– Digital artist and prolific collector Chris Coleman, on fellow creators “loading art onto the most wasteful crypto in existence,” Bitcoin, in the wake of Sotheby’s “Natively Digital: An Ordinals Curated Sale.” Rather than following the money, Coleman reaffirms his commitment to ‘green NFTs’ (on energy-efficient proof-of-stake chains) and takes a stand: “I don’t want to judge, but no way will I buy or sell on that chain.”
“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.”
– Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, calling for developers to “make Ethereum cypherpunk again” by focusing on privacy-enhancing tools and public goods—not casinofication [quote edited]
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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.”
– American media artist and lecturer Golan Levin, on his forthcoming Art Blocks release of algorithmic, cursor-interactive cells. Every aspect of the “xenocytology” is computationally generated, reveals Levin, “including the simulated behaviour of the depicted creature, the poiesis of its anatomy, the calligraphic quality of its lines, the asemic letterforms of its labels, and the (ahem) virtual ‘paper’ on which it is rendered.”
“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.”
– British conservationist and development researcher Peter Howson, on the corrosiveness of cryptocurrencies. In his new book, Let Them Eat Crypto (2023), Howson rescinds his initial blockchain advocacy, declaring the technology “industrial scale scumbaggery” that ought to be banned.
“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.”
Operator’s Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, on the blockchain embodiment of Human Unreadable (2023), an on-chain generative choreography project on view as part of HEK’s “Exploring the Decentralized Web” exhibition
“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.”
– Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator Tina Rivers Ryan, questioning the rhetoric of decentralization. “Trust is not simply the product of technological protocols (no matter how transparent),” she writes in her essay for HEK’s Algorithmic Imaginary, “but also of a ‘social layer’ of legal and professional codes and specialized knowledge bases.”
OUT NOW:
Himmelsbach & Magrini (ed.)
Algorithmic Imaginary
House of Electronic Art (HEK) curators Sabine Himmelsbach and Boris Magrini expand on the institution’s current arc of Web3-centric exhibitions with essays from Ruth Catlow, Primavera De Filippi, Penny Rafferty, Tina Rivers Ryan, and Marina Otero Verzier.
“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.”
Outland’s Brian Droitcour, on Web3 developers Digital Practice setting a new standard for the blockchain-based sale and preservation of historical digital art. Having learned from the 2021 Warhol NFT controversy, the forthcoming NFTs of Keith Haring’s Amiga drawings “offer both flexibility and fidelity, encompassing files suitable for display on today’s screens as well as a faithful replica of the original pixels in contemporary code.”
“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.”
– Gil Vazquez, executive director and president of Keith Haring Foundation, on the forthcoming Christie’s NFT auction of the pop art icon’s pixelations from the late 1980s. “Long stored on floppy disks, the drawings had never seen the light of day—until now,” Artnet’s Min Chen writes.

“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.”
– American software artist Casey Reas, discussing the state of NFTs in a wide-ranging conversation about the origins and future of Feral File, the (tightly) curated NFT market place he founded in 2020
“It’s the future of finance! Except when the SEC comes knocking, then it’s just a harmless little toy, Your Honor.”
– Crypto pundit Molly White, on Coinbase’s argument that crypto trading is a form of speculation. In a motion to dismiss the recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charge of operating an unregistered securities exchange, the American crypto vendor notes that there’s “no investment of money with a promise of future delivery of anything.” Rather than offering security, a crypto asset is no different than “an American Girl Doll, or a Beanie Baby, or a baseball card.”
“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. ”
– New Zealand artist Simon Denny, discussing why landscape painting is an apt medium for representing Web3 land plots (e.g. Decentraland) in Metaverse Landscapes (2023). “The Dutch have this long tradition—many colonial landscapes were painted in South Africa and Indonesia,” he adds, further complicating the marketing of virtual space. [quote edited]

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.”
– American media artist Kyle McDonald, parsing the methodology of a new Coinmetrics study on Bitcoin energy use that offers the most accurate picture yet. “It basically confirms what we already knew,” writes McDonald, “Bitcoin is using about as much energy as the entire internet (around 12GW or 100TWh/year).”
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