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“In short: Right now NFTs are built on an absolute house of cards constructed by the people selling them. It is likely that every NFT sold so far will be broken within a decade.”
– Software engineer
Jonty Wareing , on how NFTs
actually reference media. “The NFT token you bought either points to a URL on the internet or an IPFS hash,“ he explains his findings in a (viral) Twitter thread. “In most circumstances, it references an IPFS gateway on the internet run by the startup you bought the NFT from. Oh, and that URL is not the media. That URL is a JSON metadata file.”
“Beginning today, Uber drivers in the UK will be treated as workers.”
– Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, announcing its UK drivers are workers—not independent contractors—and entitled to a living wage, holiday pay, and pension contributions. Not arising from benevolence, his op-ed concedes to a
February Supreme Court Ruling in favour of a 2016 lawsuit by UK drivers. While stopping short of recognizing Uber’s precarious workforce as employees, this designation has potential to reverberate throughout the global gig economy.
OUT NOW :
Adam Nocek
Molecular Capture
An examination of how popular media consumption and biology have converged in molecular animations, producing new ways of seeing and knowing
Better late than never: a year into the Zoom boom, American artist Sam Lavigne releases Zoom Escaper, a sneaky tool that helps you bow out of video meetings. “It allows you to self-sabotage your audio stream, making your presence unbearable to others,” writes Lavigne. The ‘unbearable’ signal interferences provided include echo, bad connection, construction noise, and a crying baby, all perfectly acceptable excuses to end a video call early. Lavigne offers a video tutorial on how to install Zoom Escaper here .
“The trend is worrying. There’s been a decline in submissions, and many personal emails show that artists are under massive pressure and simply don’t have the opportunities to implement or complete their projects.”
– Ars Electronica’s Artistic Director Gerfried Stocker, taking stock of this year’s
Prix award entries so far. To support struggling artists, the institution has endowed the long-running prize with substantially more money.
Marking the one-year anniversary of New Art City’s domain registration, New Art City Festival opens to celebrate with two dozen trailblazers of the browser-based 3D art and exhibition space. “A prototype grew into a tool, and a tool grew into a community,“ writes the team around Internet artist d0n.xyz . “Since then, more than 40,000 people in 125 countries have visited galleries on New Art City.” The site will add a new show every day through May 26, featuring works by Otrus Extraviadus , Sofia Crespo , Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley , and others.
“The film … is called Black Square . That’s a reference to Malevich’s Black Square painting which popularly is understood as the first painting of nothing, but I’m also thinking about blackness as a color and about this symbol as something that is unstable, right?”
With their solo show “In the Absence of Evidence,” opening at Galerie Liusa Wang, Paris, artist duo Quadrature revisit the boundary between science and fiction: C.R.E.D.O. (Cosmic Radio Engine for Delusional Observations), for example, is a 2020 sound installation that channels Pulsar signals, received via an on-site radio dish, into an otherworldly score. “The raw signals serve as input data for a neural network trained on human theories on aliens,” state the artists. The composition is the network trying to find E.T. messages in the noise.
“Meet me in the woods behind the observatory at midnight, or you’ll never see your lens again.”
– An 1872 ransom letter to
Samuel Langley , then director of the Pittsburgh Allegheny Observatory. As writer
Marina Koren relates in her survey of astronomy crimes, the telescope lens had indeed been stolen. “Langley refused to pay the thief’s ransom, believing that it would spur ‘lens-napping’ at other institutions.” The astronomer managed to retrieve the lens—but not without a few scratches.
The 24th Japan Media Arts Festival announces Meiro Koizumi ’s VR piece Prometheus Bound (2019) as this year’s Grand Prize winner in the Art Division. Inspired by Greek mythology and realized as a theatre experience, the work explores dreams of technological advancement through the eyes of a person suffering from ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), a paralyzing neurological disease. Other prize winners include Adrien M & Claire B , Simon Weckert , and Myriam Bleau .
“It’s a reminder of what has gone before, and that the commercial success of digital art in the present day is less surprising than it is long overdue.”
– Rhizome’s
Michael Connor , on his “Before the Boom” list of NFT precedents including
Postmasters Gallery ,
Art.Teleportacia ,
Neen ,
AND/OR , and
DAM . “There has never been this kind of speculative money in digital art,“ writes Connor, “still, it’s important to not lose sight of the long history of experimentation with the sale of digital work.”
With “Cao Fei: Staging the Era,” the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, opens a major retrospective of the trailblazing Chinese multimedia artist —the first in her home country. For over two decades, Fei has harnessed nascent formats (film, video, MMOs, VR, etc.) to surreally depict the dramatic social changes of a globalizing China. Years in the making, the show is realised as an IRL parkour of her many virtual worlds, where works bleed into one another to create “a sense of belonging to this particular here and now—a stage for our era.”
“Dear capitalism, Technology is yours but technique is mine Infrastructure is yours but the network is mine Platform is yours but the economy is mine”
“The poetry arises from the arbitrary creation of music, as if a ghost sat at the bench tapping the keys.”
Appropriating escape room conventions, Roos Groothuizen ’s installation I want to delete it all, but not now opens at Enschede, Netherlands’ Tetem . The space challenges players to explain the dissapearance of missing international student Rosa Aringa by solving digital and physical challenges spanning her room and computer. A “deliberately endless quest” and commentary on our digital footprint, its players confront ”their own dilemmas about online addiction, privacy, and responsibility” while sleuthing.
“I have more of a desire to hear than a rootedness in listening—listening is aspirational. I hope that I can listen, but I have a desire to hear, which is more overwhelming, suffocating, and loud.”
– Performance artist and composer
Suzanne Kite , in conversation with Riel Bellow about the “cornerstone of her psychological reality as an artist”
“Poor images like Beeple’s, or the $1.54 million ape in a fedora, or most everything in the stream, are lessons in why we can’t stay locked down forever. Can’t just stare into our screens until death.”
– Spike Editor
Dean Kissick , searching for a shred of meaning in the work of
Beeple and
KAWS , in a moment when ”artworks have begun to look more like memes, while memes have begun to look more like artworks”
A project linking the ISM , MESS , the Moogseum and 50+ museums and cultural organizations, “Music, Makers & Machines” launches. The Google Arts and Culture online exhibition offers “a brief history of electronic music“ through an innovative archival interface; visitors can explore nightlife oral histories, inventor biographies, music technology timelines, and musician influence maps (image: Daphne Oram , of BBC Radiophonic Workshop fame) as a way to sidestep histories of genre, and blur the lines between music making and engineering.
“In 2011, Trifonov reviewed 123 definitions of life. Each was different, but the same words showed up again and again … he concluded that all the definitions agreed on one thing: life is self‐reproduction with variations.”
– Science writer
Carl Zimmer , on geneticist
Edward Trifonov ’s search for a holistic definition of life, in an excerpt from his new book
Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
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