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
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Mario Santamaría ’s solo exhibition “Remote Hands” opens at àngels barcelona as part of the 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA). In addition to showing his Cloudplexity (2019) series of data cloud depictions sourced from US Patents, the Spanish artists debuts Underdesk (2022): an invitation to ‘lounge in the cloud’ and explore the gallery’s material internet infrastructure from a hammock underneath a fireproof computer desk.
“Trained on images of the forest in knowing anticipation of its loss, the fossil here precedes the body, making a shape a felled tree can fall into.”
For Art in America , Walker Downey describes recent trends in sound art that “suggest a revision of its parameters.” Drawing on works by multidisciplinary artists Kevin Beasley (image: A Cotton Gin Motor , 2012-18) Christine Sun Kim , and Nikita Gale , Downey forges connections between 1980s and early 2000s sound practice, and uses his case studies to discuss the emergence of “sound sculptures,” and multimodal deployments of sound that challenge ”logics of power and prejudice.”
“The people in the room were the good ones. The bad ones were (thankfully) not in the room. It was our task to legislate or otherwise mitigate the excesses of the bad ones.”
– UKAI Projects Managing Director
Jerrold McGrath , noting the ‘moral composition’ of attendees at a recent event on big data and surveillance. In his simultaneously cheeky and erudite post “Not Every Story Needs a Villain,” McGrath mulls over how “abstracted ethics” (and emotional reactions) often steer conversations about AI and automation in an unproductive direction.
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist for the 15th anniversary of the Julia Stoschek Collection, “WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age” opens at Stoschek’s Düsseldorf location. Obrist assembles over 30 works from true pioneers of interactive and time-based media art including Cory Arcangel , JODI , LaTurbo Avedon , and Ian Cheng (image: BOB (Bag of Beliefs) , 2018-19) to explore digital aesthetics and alternate realities, be it in single channel video or immersive installations.
“I am waiting for a system that will say, ‘eh, I can’t really draw that,’ or, better yet, ‘no, I refuse to draw that.’”
– American fiction writer
Robin Sloan , flagging the “unflagged enthusiasm” with which new AI image models accept free-form text prompts and render “whatever’s been requested, no matter how absurd or overwrought.” “Nearly all presentations of art produced with these models include the text prompt,” Sloan observes. “The pleasure, it seems, is not in the image; rather, it’s in the spectacle of the computer’s interpretation.”
“Indivisible,” a show presenting installation, film, and software from Ralf Baecker , Yunchul Kim , Semiconductor , and Richard Vijgen , opens at New Media Gallery, in New Westminster, British Columbia. The focus on “prosthetics and strategies that help us reach beyond human perception” is exemplified by the inclusion of Kim’s ARGOS (2018, image), a bundle of electron sensing Geiger–Müller tubes encased in a glass and aluminum exoskeleton—fusing scientific instrument with sculptural form.
“Is it like a postcoital-snail telegraph? Or like a Renaissance-era wheel device that allowed readers to browse multiple books at once? Or perhaps like a loom that weaves together souls?”
Bringing together 19 artworks, “Earthbound—In Dialogue with Nature,” opens at Luxembourg’s Möllerei learning centre. Part of the 2022 European Capital of Culture , artists including Refik Anadol , Tega Brain , and Mary Maggic help viewers “become aware of otherwise invisible ecological processes.” Sabrina Ratté’s Floralia I – IV (image, 2021) depicts a virtual archive of extinct plants that glitches “under the effect of interference” by the genetic memory of its stored species.
“Public blockchains, through making visible latent forces such as financing, unequal returns, or scarce and valuable ownership, are bringing long existing dynamics to the surface to be scrutinized. These forces are not new , they are nude.”
– Technologist
Mat Dryhurst , on “the shock of the nude:” the realization that financialization and inequity have been part of our digital lives all along. Web3 introduces “feasible abundance,” Dryhurst argues: free media that sustains the people creating it.
The 2nd Biennale Warszawa opens, themed “Seeing Stones and Spaces Beyond the Valley,” to examine the relation of technology, power, and capital. On view are 25 works by, among others, Paolo Cirio , Kyriaki Goni , Metahaven , Laura Poitras , Jenna Sutela , and Julian Oliver that dig deep into reactionary politics and Silicon Valley ideologies. Luis August Krawen ’s The Shire II , (2022, image), for example, connects Tolkien’s fantasy to tech start-ups idealising both progress and conservatism.
“The white coat acts as a hinge between the visible and the invisible. Its smooth surface actively resists the unseen bacterial sources of disease. It is a kind of inhospitality to disease.”
– Scholar
Mark Wigley , on the pathology of “chronic whiteness” in modernist architecture. Part of
Sick Architecture , Wigley’s text is one of two dozen essays in a research project cataloguing how “past health crises are inscribed into the everyday.”
OUT NOW :
David Cronenberg
Crimes of the Future
A visceral journey into a grisly world of embodied posthuman performance art
Rethinking Our Futures: Art and Collaboration , a follow-up publication documenting an eponymous 2021 symposium is published. Organized by Molior , the initiative brought curators including Natacha Clitandre , Dominique Fontaine , and Mikhel Proulx to Montreal to discuss challenges facing digital art. Now, those conversations are echoed by a rich collection of short essays on “internet-specific” exhibitions, alt-infrastructure, and intercultural exchange.
“It felt like it was taking away the power of computing from people. I could see that this was slowly eating away at people’s ability to see the computer for what it was: an open a box of tricks.”
– American artist
Auriea Harvey , on how the convenience of Web 2.0 disempowered users and, ultimately, ended Net Art. “Now ‘good navigation’ is expected, whereas we were all about crashing the browser and making people think.”
OUT NOW :
Mark Peter Wright
Listening After Nature
An excursion into field recording, ecology, and critical practice that grapples with the thresholds of sensory perception and what we are not hearing
Bloomberg ’s Allyson Versprille and Bill Allison report that US political donations from the crypto sector surged to more than $26 million during 2021 and early 2022—a rise of 5,200%. Faced with increased scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators, the digital-asset industry outspent internet giants ($20M), drug makers ($7M), and the defense industry ($18.6M). “It has come out of nowhere to spend a significant amount of money on politics,” said OpenSecrets senior researcher Dan Auble.
“I don’t subscribe to the view that flipping is a bad thing, partly because this art form is not pure art. It’s a strange combination of community, cult, Robin Hood, slot machine, and status game all in one.”
– Galaxy Interactive Managing Director
Richard Kim , answering a fiercely debated question:
is buying and then quickly reselling NFTs to profit on the money (and greed) in the cryptoart space gross ?
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