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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“This is the first major case of weaponizing personal data, shared by shady data brokers. I have been warning for years that there would be consequences for failing to protect Americans’ personal information.”
– U.S. Senator
Ron Wyden , sponsor of the “
Mind Your Own Business ” act, and other privacy-focused legislation, on the
recent outing of a high-ranking Catholic priest as a Gay bar patron based on Grindr location data obtained through a grey market reseller
German artist Hito Steyerl ’s iconic video installation Factory of the Sun opens at the San José Museum of Art (SJMA). Produced for the 2015 Venice Biennale , it’s a homecoming—the work was just aquired by SJMA along with L.A.’s Hammer Museum and MCA Chicago. In an e-flux dispatch , SJMA curator Kathryn Wade describes its central narrative about dance and routine becoming ‘pure light’ as “creating an imaginative reality where modern warfare, corporate culture, and anticapitalist resistance movements are played out.”
“In the metaverse Facebook envisions you are the Neopet, and your in-game activities may affect every sphere of life that Facebook already touches: careers, relationships, politics.”
– Writer
Kyle Chayka , on the looming “blue-and-gray virtual universe.” Chayka considers Zuckerberg’s plans for an “embodied Internet” by looking at its predecessors, including
Fortnite (2017),
Second Life (2003), and
Neopets (1999).
Showcasing seven artists from Japan and China “who are transforming existing narratives into new mythologies,” a screening series entitled “NeoMythos” kicks off at Gray Area , San Francisco. Over the course of three weekends, new media works by, among others, LuYang (image: DOKU , 2020), Shigetoshi Furutani , Yu Miao , and Wang Meng are being presented in large-scale cinema environments. “Together, these works imagine the possibility of human existence beyond current constructs of gender, environment, and aesthetics.”
Rafaël Rozendaal donates 50% of the proceeds (164 ETH, worth $430,000 USD) from his Endless Nameless NFT windfall to Rhizome. Selling out quickly on the Art Blocks platform on July 30th, Rozendaal’s 1,000-edition series of colourful subdivided squares saw individual NFTs going for upwards of 1 ETH. Acknowledging Rhizome’s legacy of valourizing and preserving internet-based art, the gift is the largest benefit donation in the organizations’ history. “The program and preservation teams are currently meeting to figure out how best to use this extraordinary gift with the aim to share initiatives big and small by next month,” writes Rhizome’s Zachary Kaplan. Giving back is in the air, apparently, as this (re)investment in culture comes shortly after fellow NFT artist Dmitri Cherniak’s generous donation to the Processing Foundation .
A durational performance with the sea, AnneMarie Maes ’ Theatrum Algaerium rises from the waves. Metal frames holding fluttering weeds and algae-carrying jars filling up with tidal water create “narratives woven from the threads of past, present, and future,” while a team of performers prepares and offers ocean delicacies. “The waves threaten to swallow up the lab,” the Belgian bio artist notes about the Oostende seaside ritual, “but in a repetitive action, structures, algae and jars are carried past the flood line.”
“A world is that which is inhabitable around a specific game; when the iterated playing of the game forces life support services to emerge around it.”
– CGI artist and AI worldbuilder
Ian Cheng , “testing” a new definition. He continues: “Worlding, then, is the art of picking the damn game, steering the emergent stuff around it to make it inhabitable, managing the ongoing balance of its chaos and order, setting it up for autonomy, and then exiting before your own finitude gets in its way.”
Writer Lucy Ives delves into a 1960-70s project by German curator Johannes Cladders to ‘publish’ limited-edition boxes (of objects and ephemera). Instead of the usual staid catalogue essays that accompany shows, these kassettenkataloge expanded exhibitions by Bernd & Hilla Becher , Jasper Johns , and an emerging Joseph Beuys (image, 1967). Prompted by a new monograph on Cladder’s venture, Ives apraises the initiative as democratization, experimental publishing, and relative to the curator’s driving “anti-museum” mandate.
“I was definitely really fascinated with K-pop and its media fandom, especially BTS and ARMY, as an open interpretive framework of visual content and meaning, and also as a model of organizing for curation that was grounded in generosity and care.”
– Curator
Rea McNamara , on how the fact
BTS fandom (aka ARMY) is bolstered by the curious combination of print ephemera and online community dynamics inspired her curatorial approach for “
dis-ease ,” Vector Festival’s flagship exhibition
OUT NOW :
Jacob Gaboury
Image Objects
A prehistory of computer graphics told through examinations of five technical objects: an algorithm, interface, object standard, programming paradigm, and hardware platform
As part of its research into early cybernetics, architecture, and 1960s socialism, Berlin’s Zentrum für Netzkunst looks into Czechoslovakia’s 1967 plans for a “happy city.” Run by computers and featuring an underground delivery system, Etarea was a never-realized vision for a 350,000-strong community near Prague. “Its goal was a more balanced way of life through cybernetics and automation,” writes urbanist Maroš Krivý . “It should provide a sense of home and belonging, otherwise lost in the rapidly transforming socialist society.”
“From AI bots to water purification systems, much of Hershman Leeson’s oeuvre has simultaneously paid homage to the radical creative power of the female body and alluded to the thorny widespread feminization of ‘service’ bots. ”
– Arts writer
Cassie Packard , on Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “criminally belated”
retrospective at the New Museum in New York. “A foremother to young new media artists working today, Hershman Leeson has blazed a trail for more than five decades, engaging with cutting-edge technologies ranging from interactive video to AI to genetic modification.”
“There is one life and we take everything from it, our business does not harm individuals and is aimed only at companies—and companies always have the ability to pay funds to restore their data.”
– Anonymous representative from the ransomware group BlackMatter, reminding the public that hacking and holding corporate data for ransom is a victimless crime
“Moving Castles: Modular and Portable Multiplayer Miniverses,” a whitepaper by the Trust Berlin hive mind, is published. Activating the chasm between commercial platforms and dark forests and the cozyweb (semi-private enclaves), moving castles are “an organizational metaphor and real-time media type” that are collective, portable, modular, and interoperable. The authors argue convincingly for portable communities (growth without getting trapped on specific platforms), and outline related experiments in game mechanics and governance.
Strategist Patrick Tanguay weighs in on the metaverse , moving beyond stock claims on and critiques of the term. The problem, with ‘the metaverse,’ is it’s whatever you want it to be; VR or videogame developers see problems of interaction and immersion, crypto boosters and the web3 crowd see economic empowerment and decentralization. Here, Tanguay uses the early days of the web to think about open standards and platform capitalism, and his reading is better off for it. Of note: his description of “a full world, at movie quality,” which imagines the blockbuster media property as a new kind of persistent experience. He is spot-on, in stating “the merging of the tools and interim steps are actually much more interesting … and offer much more varied potential than those 4-5-6 futures currently vying for the word metaverse.”
First in a series of new works exploring techno-capitalism and biodiversity loss, Joana Moll ’s 4004 launches at TPG, London, and online . In the piece, the Spanish artist draws parallels between microprocessors and insects, “both small but key components of larger systems.” Over the show’s duration, a generative tapestry of bugs and bees is gradually superseded by microprocessors, echoing the dramatic decline seen since the first commercial CPU, the Intel 4004 the work is named after, was introduced in 1971.
As part of the Dialogfelder initiative, DIY connoisseurs Niklas Roy and Kati Hyyppä take to the streets of Chemnitz, Germany, to engage the public in pop-up machine drawing sessions. As participants wrestle Vektor Kollektor , a crude plotter with a joystick as input device, the drawing’s meta data is collected on a vintage Robotron typewriter. While the Etch A Sketch -style outputs are for the creators to take home, the vector and meta data feed an animated online archive at vektorkollektor.com (image).
“Most plants develop a leaf, and that’s it. This plant can live thousands of years, and it never stops growing. When it does stop growing, it’s dead.”
– Queen Mary University of London plant geneticist
Andrew Leitch , on his research into the improbable longevity of the
Welwitschia , a plant native to the inhospitable Namib Desert in Southern Africa that lives upwards of 3,000 years
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