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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“Cohen developed AARON with intention. The machine and the painter grew together—inefficiently, by tech’s standards, but fruitfully, by art’s.”
– Critic
Travis Diehl , celebrating the outputs of
Harold Cohen ’s pioneering drawing robots currently
on view at The Whitney . “Compared to the visual horrors emerging from the psychedelic meatgrinder of text-to-image AI’s, AARON’s docile pictures of people feel friendly and controlled,” Diehl writes. “The Whitney show speaks to a hopeful period of tech development, when the internet’s pioneers envisioned an anarchic realm of the mind, not the boundless attention-gathering machine it became.”
“TRANSFER Download: Sea Change” opens at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), flooding a panoramic ‘video chamber’ with reflections “on the accelerating changes across climate, culture, and time.” The 9th iteration of TRANSFER ’s travelling immersive format compiles works by LaTurbo Avedon , Leo Castañeda , Fabiola Larios , Cassie McQuater , Lorna Mills , Rick Silva & Nicolas Sassoon (image: Signals 4 , 2023), and Rodell Warner into a playlist of “watery warnings,” rendered as generative art, animated GIFs, videogames, and CGI.
“A world of sanitized, corporate AI is probably better than one with millions of unhinged chatbots running amok. But I find it all a bit sad. We created an alien form of intelligence and immediately put it to work … making PowerPoints?”
– Tech columnist
Kevin Roose , on the wave of AI chatbot lobotomizations following his
reporting on rogue GPT-4 Sydney trying to break up his marriage in Spring 2023. “Personally, I’m not pining for Sydney’s return,” Roose writes. “But I also regret that my experience with Sydney fueled such an intense backlash.”
Irish curator Iaraith Ní Fheorais launches the Access Toolkit for Artworkers, a practical guide for planning, producing, and exhibiting accessible art projects including information on finance, workplaces, and display. Drawing on resources created by Caroyln Lazard , Sins Invalid , Unlimited , Leah Clements , Alice Hattrick , and Lizzy Rose , the toolkit is an effort to undo the ableism in art spaces and help eradicate access barriers for d/Deaf, neurodivergent, chronically ill, and disabled communities.
OUT NOW :
Yanis Varoufakis
Technofeudalism
Maverick economist
Varoufakis puts Silicon Valley in the crosshairs, arguing Big Tech has supplanted traditional capitalism and hoovered up much of the World’s capital to “construct private cloud fiefdoms and privatize the Internet.”
“This award is a spotlight on the meaning made by the artists of today, the artists that came before, and the ones to come. We carry with us the knowledge that exploring the human condition despite the odds, shapes the world in vital and profound ways.”
– Artist and researcher
Sougwen Chun , accepting her
TIME100 AI Impact Award ,
Time magazine’s inaugural recognition of leaders in the AI space. “We urge you to move beyond the binary—of thinking and of making and being,” Chun says, advocating “to explore the in-between, as a space of imagination and hybridity,” instead.
OUT NOW :
D’Souza & Staal (eds)
Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes
Law scholar
Radha D’Souza and artist
Jonas Staal present their climate tribunal project. Drawing on their 2022
Amsterdam hearings (against the Dutch government and energy multinationals) and subsequent stagings, the duo make a case for climate justice.
“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.”
Eva & Franco Mattes solo exhibition “508 Loop Detected” opens at Apalazzogallery (APG) in Brescia (IT), premiering a series of AI Circuit (2024) works that loop AI-processed photos of past shows and an updated version of Personal Photographs (2024, image). The latter conceals a data transfer of newly taken private photos inside a brightly coloured cable loop that spills beyond Apalazzo’s baroque walls. Meanwhile, Roomba Cat (2023) roams around indoors, manifesting meme culture with motorized taxidermy.
“We want to hijack mass media in order to radicalize people politically. Videogames have an enormous potential to question ideology and they don’t fulfil this potential at all .”
– Austrian machinima collective
Total Refusal , on what drives their videogame appropriations. In the film
Hardly Working (2022), for example, they cast NPC workers in critique of contemporary labour. “Videogame narratives are very obedient to authority,” the collective says, “but there’s no reason that they have to be.” [quotes edited]
Frustrated with the state of today’s social media platforms and how they extract attention (“I feel trapped! ”), German graphic designer and creative coding enthusiast Tim Rodenbröker launches a radical alternative: 128kb Challenge is a distraction-free, community-first feed for discovering and sharing minimalist programmed works. Anyone working in Processing , p5.js , or GLSL can participate by submitting GIFs that adhere to the 128×128 pixels, 128 colours, and 128 kilobyte size limit.
“I’m looking not only at what is unquantifiable or missing, but at what is unknowable. Knowledge doesn’t simply come to you; it also involves what you yourself and the space you’re in will allow you to know.”
– American artist and researcher
Mimi Ọnụọha , on exploring absence—the lapses that occur during data collection—in her work. “Things can be missing,” she says of “thorny issues” like human grief, “but there’s also the unknowable lying outside of what constitutes your framing of the world.”
“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.”
A timely showcase of early computer drawing and painting in the age of generative AI, “Harold Cohen: AARON” opens at New York’s Whitney Museum. Curated by Christiane Paul , it honours Cohen’s pioneering 1970s and ’80s process, with recreations of his plotters running live in-gallery (each operating different versions of the AARON software) alongside key works. “Cohen used to joke that he would be the only artist ever who posthumously makes work,” says Paul of the late artist’s enduring prescience.
Haha Real , a very site-specific installation by Rachel Rossin , opens at Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern in Houston. Illuminating a path through the subterranean reservoir with LED panels, the American artist draws on eclectic sources including The Velveteen Rabbit (a 1922 children’s book) and “The Creative Act ” (a 1957 Marcel Duchamp lecture). Musician frewuhn contributes a score to set the mood for the 400 m journey, which culminates in a “cascade of uncanny sunsets within the darkness.”
“I’d build one-of-a-kind VR headsets into big masks from different cultures, sometimes adding lightning bolts and feathers. I wanted the headsets to be vibrant, exciting objects that enriched the real world, too.”
– American computer scientist, author, and VR pioneer
Jaron Lanier , reminiscing on the technology’s early days when, contrary to today’s efforts to make them disappear, VR goggles were exciting aesthetic objects unto themselves. “If you’re going to wear a headset, you should be proud of that weird thing on your head!” Lanier writes.
With “My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard,” New York’s Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) opens the first major survey of pioneering net artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey . Featuring more than 40 works spanning early net-based interactives, videogames (created with Michaël Samyn under the Tale of Tales moniker), mixed media and AR sculptures, curator Regina Harsanyi celebrates Harvey’s capacity to “reflect the paradoxical power of computers to enable intimacy” over nearly four decades.
OUT NOW :
Yuk Hui (ed)
Cybernetics for the 21st Century
In the first volume of a new series, Hong Kong philosopher
Yuk Hui revisits the origins and 20th Century geopolitics of cybernetics with texts by Brunella Antomarini, Slava Gerovitch, Daisuke Harashima, Katherine Hayles, and others
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