1,725 days, 2,676 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
Year
Month
Tag
Order
Custom
Filter
The U.S. Treasury Department has identified the culprits behind a recent $625 million theft from a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) exchange: North Korea’s Lazarus Group . The jaw-dropping 173,600 ETH and 25 million USDC heist took place on March 23rd, when Ronin Bridge (a DeFi exchange connected to Axie Infinity ) was accessed via hacked private keys and then drained. DeFi hacks have been frequent thus far in 2022, and this is the largest yet. That a state actor is behind the theft, and bypassing sanctions by pickpocketing the NFT play-to-earn economy speaks to the deep strangeness of international banking and finance right now. “There may be mandatory secondary sanctions requirements on persons who knowingly, directly or indirectly, engage in money laundering,” warns the Treasury Department, stating they are working to track the purloined funds.
“And if you do live that strange life, then honestly, your decision to become a vegan shut-in who sits in a tiny house heated exclusively by the exhaust from your massive gaming rig is probably sort of ethically praiseworthy.”
– TechScape columnist
Alex Hearn , hypothesizing a monk-like gamer that is (somewhat) free of blame from the medium’s massive carbon footprint
OUT NOW :
Alexander Monea
The Digital Closet
An exploration of how heteronormative bias is deeply embedded in the internet’s platforms and protocols
OUT NOW :
K Allado-McDowell
Amor Cringe
A partially AI-generated “deepfake autofiction” novelette about a TikTok influencer that seeks God, intented to be “as cringe as possible”
“The content moderation algorithms that Tumblr implemented to institute its ban on ‘pornographic’ content was comically inept—with tragic consequences. Many LGBTQ+ archives lost their entire catalogues overnight with no redress and no way to recover their lost content or user base.”
A retrospective of the feminist performance artist in her native France, “ORLAN Manifesto. Body and Sculpture” opens at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse. Collecting 100+ works from ORLAN ’s archives, the show links 1960-70s photography and performance, the iconic cosmetic surgeries (image: 7th Surgery-Performance called Omnipresence , 1993), to works in bioart and robotics, underscoring how her practice “opposes morality, natural and social determinisms, and all forms of domination.”
Japanese media artist Ryoji Ikeda and Les Percussions de Strasbourg perform 100 Cymbals (2019) at The Hague’s Rewire Festival. In the piece, 10 percussionists weave through a 10 x 10 grid of Turkish cymbals articulating their texture and (revered) harmonics. The piece “produces alluring and hypnotic sounds that verge on droning synthesizers” and “invites us to rethink the overlap and differences between electronic and analogue,” writes the Rewire team.
“Meta Folklore,” a collection of recent sculptures by Polish artist Janek Simon opens at The Hague’s experimental art space 1646. Analyzing a trove of images from Etsy and eBay that “problematically categorize folkloric sculptures from around the world,” Simon used machine learning to generate a new homogenized ‘meta’ sculptural language for a series of 3D prints. The resulting colourful forms are recognizable to “everyone and at the same time no-one,” notes the artist.
“Plastic can, in this light, be thought of as a medium, communicating with long-dead organisms to make their vital presence felt among the living.”
– Ecology researcher
Heather Davis , on how plastic is a
medium . “Settlers need to learn the lessons of haunting, even as we are being haunted by this material that refuses to let us go,” she advises, offering a path forward from the (material) glut of past mistakes.
OUT NOW :
James Bridle
Ways of Being
A “radical new story about ecology, technology and intelligence,” that considers alternate ways of co-existence with one another and the non-human world
“And in four dimensions, that gets harder. Like, that ability to just literally observe the space goes away. But you can still draw these representative pictures where you lose some but not all information.”
– Mathematician
Lisa Piccirillo , on the difficulty of representing knots in
four dimensional space . In conversation with host Steven Strogatz and fellow mathematician
Colin Adams , the trio untangles varied applications of knot theory in fields including synthetic biology and genetics.
“I’ve joined the ranks of those who selflessly put their bodies on the line, despite ridicule from the ignorant and punishment from a colonizing legal system designed to protect the planet-killing interests of the rich.”
– American climate scientist
Peter Kalmus , on being arrested for locking himself to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown LA, following the latest
IPCC report . “Out of all the investment banks in the world, JP Morgan Chase funds the most new fossil fuel projects.”
Austrian computer art pioneer Herbert W. Franke shares glimpses of z-galaxy , the virtual world and 3D exhibition space he began building on the Active Worlds platform in 2005. The objects populating it—trees, pavilions, sculptures—were created procedurally using Wolfram Mathematica , the 94-year-old veteran explains on Twitter. Z-galaxy (“z stands for Konrad Zuse ”) officially opened in 2008, showing algorithmic works by Franke and friends.
OUT NOW :
Geert Lovink
Stuck on the Platform
The Dutch
media theorist and
Institute of Network Cultures founder parses “disaffection with the platform condition”—Zoom fatigue, cancel culture, crypto art—and tells a “relapse-resistant story“ about alternatives.
“And that ad is not an argument for why crypto works. It’s not an argument for what it does or what problems it can solve. It’s just financial FOMO.”
–
New York Times journalist Ezra Klein, arguing the
FTX Super Bowl ad was designed to attract dumb money. In it, misanthropic comedian Larry David dismisses world-changing inventions—the wheel, the light bulb, the dishwasher—through the ages, and repeats the mistake by writing off cryptocurrencies.
“The U.S. Bill of Rights is really the napkin sketch for our understanding of what it means to be an American. Like all sketches, it leaves lots of room for interpretation.”
Robert Seidel premieres his latest experimental film, Hysteresis , at Filmfest Dresden , Germany, marking the artist’s first foray into AI and modern dance. Berlin-based Seidel uses machine-learning to mediate dense feedback loops of analogue drawings projected onto a performer’s choreography, corrupting the AI to unveil a “frenetic, delicate, flamboyant visual language of the hysteria and hysteresis in this historical moment.”
“Kristen Dunst is terrific of course, but Gabrielle ***** steals the show. ”
– Comedian
Chandler Dean , joking about the blocking of an
actor’s last name (that sounds
awfully similar to organized labour) on Amazon’s internal chat app
Load More
To dive deeper into Stream, please
Log-In or become a
HOLO Reader .
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 commentaryEncounters : in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovatorsStream : a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and countingEdition : HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print
Become a HOLO Reader