1,579 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“Timefall,” a solo exhibition by Spanish artist Karlos Gil , opens at The Hague’s 1646. Designed to evoke the archetypal image of the cave, the exhibition centres Hollow Ghost (2022, image), video depicting the vernacular of contemporary caves—data farms, seed vaults, doomsday bunkers—in all their liminal (and terminal) glory. More mythos: also featured is a Jacquard loom -woven tapestry series, each depicting the sonic frequencies of a “fantastic” animal (cyclops, mermaid, etc.).
“What Fukushima revealed is that we are also living in an age of climato-politics in which we must confront the chaos of planetary flows that trespass the borders of nation states and evade their attempts at control.”
Swiss artist and designer Jürg Lehni celebrates the 20th anniversary of his seminal robotic drawing machine, Hektor (2002), in a commemorative Twitter thread. “Imperfect and full of character,” the hanging computer-controlled spray-paint plotter drew at transmediale, Design Museum London, and the MoMA , and remains a DIY marvel for its time: “edged circuit boards, assembly-programmed microcontrollers—we did everything by hand,” Lehni notes about making in the pre-fab era.
“Moments when pop culture and politics collide are about regressive, puritanical control over women’s bodies, over culture, over challenges to the status quo or perceived progressive shifts.”
– Feminist media critic
Anita Sarkeesian , on mapping media culture wars in her new series,
That Time When , that concludes with
Gamergate , the 2014 harassment campaign she was at the center of and that is now “part of our understanding of how internet culture exists, how communities form and what they form around”
Trevor Paglen ’s solo exhibition “A Color Notation” opens at Pace’s recently expanded arts complex in Seoul. The show presents new and recent landscape photography (image: Near Bodega Bay Deep Semantic Image Segments , 2022) the American artist interpreted through custom-built computer vision systems and AI. “Through his masterful manipulation of these technologies, Paglen brings questions of perception to the fore of his image making practice,” Pace notes.
As the lacklustre presentation of NFTs even at major exhibitions and conferences continues to disappoint , Swiss software artist Andreas Gysin shares an “opinionated” mini-guide for newly-minted curators and organizers. Works that use the popular square aspect ratio, for example, suffer in particular on standard 16:9 screens, Gysin notes and offers three simple tricks that improve the overall composition. “The important thing is to NOT put it in the center!” (example on left).
“These cycles of boom and bust are incredibly destructive within organizations because people employed there feel like they don’t know where they stand.”
– Harvard Business School Professor
Sandra J. Sucher , commenting on Meta laying off 11,000 employees, the latest in a series of major Big Tech cutbacks
The V&A launches an online resource to explore their 3,000+ item Digital Art & Design collection. Thus far 574 items are posted, with initial highlights including Vera Molnar’s plotter drawing Structure of Squares (1974) and Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Radical Love (2016), a 3D-printed mask of Chelsea Manning’s face. Additional tools for researchers include two ‘selection boxes’ of noteworthy items, an incisive history of digital art, and a glossary of technical nomenclature.
“The rumours for this blowup seem so egregious and unnecessary to me. I can’t imagine running an exchange that makes mid-8 figures per day in revenue and thinking ‘how can we leverage this for more?’”
Artists Vladan Joler , Gordan Savičić , and scholar Felix Stalder launch Infrastructures of a Migratory Bird (2022), a data visualization of rewilding efforts of the Northern Bald Ibis in the European Alps. The iconic bird, regionally extinct since 1621, was reintroduced into its historic habitat in 2013. Hatched within ZHdK’s Latent Spaces research project, the map reveals the extent of the conservation infrastructure, from GPS satellite tracking, to data analysis, to cost.
“Big social media reduces interface friction to increase user engagement. The smoother your experience the more likely you’re the product. Celebrate moments of friction as opportunities to see, feel, grasp what the system is, who it works for, and who it makes most vulnerable.”
– American software artist
Ben Grosser , on the platform capitalism game plan—and how to navigate it
For Artnet , Vivienne Chow delves into South Korean projections of ‘soft power’ in the cultural sector. Patrons of recent exhibitions worldwide, South Korean corporations are praised for “listening to what we want to do,” by LACMA Director Michael Govan. Of note: Chow’s discussion of Hyundai , who, beyond pumping money into the sector, use the language of digital art (image: Hyundai Motorstudio Goyang ) to communicate brand values in concept showrooms worldwide.
“The good news is that we are halfway to making a true NerveGear. The bad news is that so far, I have only figured out the half that kills you.”
–
Oculus founder
Palmer Luckey , working on a new VR headset that will kill the user if they die in-game. Inspired by the NerveGear helmets in the
Sword Art Online anime, Luckey’s prototype features three explosive charges aimed at the player’s brain. “At this point, it’s just a piece of office art,” he reveals in his
personal blog , “a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design.”
OUT NOW :
Ilan Manouach
Fastwalkers
Co-created with AI (GAN, GPT-3) and a team of experts, Manouach’s
synthetic manga is a nonlinear meditation on deep learning that explores the inherent computational qualities of comics to play with the latent space lurking in the reader’s cognition.
Milan’s MEET Digital Culture Center launches a new exhibition series on digital art history with “GMM RELOADED,” a retrospective of the Italian multimedia art group Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici . Active from 1984 to 2004, GMM pioneered the genre of computer comics (using Apple IIs), video art, and performances. The show presents a complete history with all their works as well as an immersive re-actualization of their 1991 video installation Tecnomaya in Infotown .
“One of my co-workers described it as ‘like hack week, but with a gun to your head.’”
– Anonymous Twitter employee, on the intense pressure of (unachievable) 3-4 day software engineering deadlines imposed by Elon Musk as part of the billionaire’s frenzied shake-up of his newly acquired social media platform
The first-ever solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF opens at Perrotin, New York, presenting elaborate interventions that leverage the absurdity of late-stage capitalism. Transforming the gallery into an interactive strip mall, “No More Tears, I’m Lovin’ It” showcases the group’s art as merchandize. Spot’s Revenge (2022, image), for example, trolls Boston Dynamics with a heavily armed robot dog, after the manufacturer disabled the legally purchased unit remotely.
“When you hit corporate America, it hits back—MSCHF have been subject to innumerable cease and desist decrees and being de-platformed from social media and online payment services.”
“The Flipper Zero is not going to turn a legion of IT guys into Watch Dogs protagonists.”
– Tech journalist Chris Person, joking the wireless, NFC, and RFID-capable
Flipper Zero multi-tool (aka ‘Tamagotchi for hackers’) will
not transform its users into
clichéd cyberpunks
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