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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British artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg commemorates the evolution of chloroplasts —the plant organelles that capture sunlight and convert it into energy—in a new stained glass commission for Barcelona’s Manifesta 15. Every Thing Eats Light (2024) depicts Proterocladus antiquus , a microscopic seaweed fossil considered the ancestor of all green plants. Installed at the iconic former power station Tres Chimeneas , the vibrant shadow play seeks to remind visitors of the site’s troubled environmental and social history.
“For now, AI doesn’t exist autonomously. Humans make art with AI models trained on humans. We train our own models on our own datasets. I see making models as art.”
– American singer and composer
Holly Herndon , firing back at Ted Chiang’s recent
New Yorker essay, in which the science fiction writer suggests AI has no capacity for making true art. Celebrated for her pioneering
AI voice model experimentation with partner
Mat Dryhurst , Herndon bolsters her argument for the artistic merits of AI with a sample of hauntingly beautiful “sumbliminAI lyrics” that she writes “took 18 months to prompt.”
Munich’s LOHAUS SOMINSKY gallery juxtapozes a series of new plotter drawings by generative artist Harm van den Dorpel with genre classics by the late Vera Molnar in a new duo exhibition. “Angles Morts” is inspired by the Dutch artist’s own roots and influences, drawing connections to the early female trailblazers in the field. “Reflecting on the historical role of women in computational art and their often overlooked contributions, van den Dorpel honours the rigorous and visionary work of these pioneers.”
Fashion collabs, streaming, NFTs, immersive experiences: Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen’s group exhibition “ALL I EAT IN A DAY” pokes fun at “the growing spectacle of contemporary art formats.” Curated by Giovanni Carmine in collaboration with artist Cory Arcangel , who contributes a “cheap, fly-by-night version” of a Picasso light show (image), the exhibition explores media contexts, hype cycles, and art as entertainment with playful provocations by Emily Sundblad , Jayson Musson , Laurel Schwulst , Sanko GameCorp © , and others.
“Naming hurricanes but not heat waves leaves no doubt about which threat our government, culture and society take more seriously.”
– Sociologist and
Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (2002) author Eric Klinenberg, warning that “heat is a silent and invisible killer.” Far deadlier than other weather extremes, “it usually fails to generate the kind of spectacular imagery that lands wether on prime-time television or a newspaper’s front page.” Between 1999 and 2023, heat deaths in the United States more than doubled, Klinenberg explains. The 2023
Phoenix heatwave , for example, claimed over 600 lives.
New York’s Public Works Administration (PWC) examines “artworks as physical and digital storage” with “Incidental Container,” a meta-exhibition that presents works from nine artists including Jake Brush , Sarah Friend , Xavier McFarlin , Rebecca Millsop , and Molly Soda exclusively through documentation. Originally installed in an off-limits CubeSmart self-storage unit for the duration of a “First Month Free” promo, the works now surface as 3D scans and videos on monitors, streamed from a “Free 30-Day” Dropbox account.
FACT Liverpool opens “Art Plays Games,” a rotating showcase of artists and indie developers creating videogames for cultural commentary and experimentation. The show kicks off with works by Rachel Maclean , Sahej Rahal , Angela Washko , and Loopntale , asking questions about screen culture, representation, and our collapsing ecosphere. In Rahal’s Distributed Mind Test (2023, image), for example, players explore a post-apocalyptic future by “thinking as and with the non-human to uncover stories of the world left behind.”
“The reconstruction carries on back through time. Pangaea and Gondwana were themselves formed from older plate collisions. As time rolls back, an earlier supercontinent called Rodinia appears. It doesn’t stop here.”
– Geologist
Alan Collins , narrating an animation showing “a beautiful continental dance” of the last 1.8 billion years of shifting plate tectonics on Earth. Collins and a team of researchers led by
Xianzhi Cao recently published the visualization in
Geoscience Frontiers .
An extension of its “find.select.transform – Resilient Networks in a Wounded World” program, Berlin’s panke.gallery opens “Alt Nets,” a group exhibition offering powerful counter-narratives to extractive, hyper-capitalist technologies. Panke curators Noemi Garay and Sakrowski bring together seven works by Tega Brain with Benedetta Piantella & Alex Nathanson , James Bridle , eeefff , Ursula Endlicher , Matthias Fritsch , Everest Pipkin , and Alice Yuan Zhang that promote community, social justice, and environmental stewardship.
Jan Robert Leegte ’s solo exhibition “Selection” opens at Office Impart, Berlin, presenting a series of digital artifacts such as scrollbars, JPG compression, and—all new—selection marquees as material objects, sculptures, and prints. “This ‘drag and drop’ creates a transformation from one semantic reality to another,” critic Sanneke Huisman writes about the Dutch artist’s signature practice of decontexualization. “By isolating digital elements, Leegte quietly monumentalizes them.”
“You do not need to demonstrate hours of toil, make a lot of decisions, or even express thoughts and feelings to make art. Assuming that you do impoverishes human creativity.”
–
The Atlantic staff writer
Matteo Wong , rebuking science fiction author
Ted Chiang’s recent assertion that AI will never make art because it’s decoupled from (agonizing) creative labour. To Wong, “there isn’t a binary between asking a AI model for a complete output and sweating long hours before a blank page or canvas.”
Bridging software and bacteria, Anicka Yi ’s “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One” opens at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul. The Korean-American artist debuts a new video work, Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Light of the Moon (2024, image), created by “a ‘digital twin’ of her practice”—software trained on a decade of her work. Also debuting: Another You (2024), a bacteria genetically engineered “to express a subtle palette of colours” that incorporates DNA from jellyfish and coral.
“Scent has maybe been a precursor to art … Scent is described as mysterious, inscrutable because it’s invisible. You can’t see the molecules.”
– Korean-American artist
Anicka Yi , on the fragrance that is part of her multisensory artwork
Walking on Two Paths at Once . Created in collaboration with French perfumer
Barnabé Fillion , it provides a sensory awakening that prepares visitors for a deeper exploration of the connections between biology and power, writes critic Kwon Mee-yoo. The piece is currently on view at Yi’s
solo exhibition at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul (KR).
Iranian-American artist Morehshin Allahyari explores the rich history of Middle-Eastern astronomy in a new CGI film at London’s V&A. Presented alongside archival material, Speculations on Capture (2024) expands on the fragmentary stories of astronomical instruments made in Iran and Pakistan (1200s–1700s) and now held at the V&A. Allahyari “deliberately combines fact and fiction to speculate on the encounters that have been lost, the knowledge that has been diverted and the cultural histories rendered inaccessible.”
“If my job when educating people about Bitcoin is to answer questions like ‘what about all these frauds and scams and scandals in the crypto space?’ adding Donald Trump to the conversation does not help my cause at all.”
–
A Progressive’s Case for Bitcoin (2023) author Jason Maier, expressing frustration that Donald Trump’s capture of ‘the crypto vote’ hurts efforts to evangelize Bitcoin within left-wing circles given the U.S. Presidential Candidate’s reputation as “a conman and a grifter” [quote edited]
OUT NOW :
Borioli & Césard
Apian Gazette
Edited by
Aladin Borioli and
Nicolas Césard , the first issue of the Ministry of Bees’ official bulletin charts “a brief history of honey hunting” and critically examines economic and cultural practices that benefit from “the fruits of bee labour (honey, wax, and much more).”
Calling attention to the fading “collective memory” of World War II, panGenerator ’s media sculpture Erosion (2024) confronts visitors to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate with telling survey data. The piece, a fractured object covered in custom alphanumeric display units, draws on research conducted on behalf of the Pilecki Institute (that also commissioned the installation), highlighting “the mutability of historical knowledge and the seemingly inevitable process of forgetting.”
“Our modern machines feel too much like the anonymous, minimalist interior of a business hotel. Small wonder, then, that we yearn for the soulful log cabins of yore.”
– Swedish software developer and blogger Carl Svensson, on the lost pleasures of “cosy” home computing—the sublime resistance of a power button, the satisfying ‘clonk’ when a drive accepts a disk, the warm glow of a CRT electron beam. “Heck, these days most of us aren’t even treated to the subtle ‘click’ of plugging in an 8P8C Ethernet connector.”
“This petal is a sonic staff,” Chilean transdisciplinary artist and researcher Nicole L’Huillier writes about her latest listening device, Pétalo (2024). Introduced in a performative procession during LAS Art Foundation’s Pollinator Pathmaker Summer Programme on July 29, “it is a guiding structure that aims to hold us,” L’Huillier notes. “It holds us with the sounds that touch its membrane. And as it holds us it teaches us to attune and practice vibrational ways of paying attention.”
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