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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“After starting an entire field of kinetic sculpture, his ideas have been remixed, taught, and copied into countless flagship installations, the world’s largest products, and many many artists’ work. I absolutely admire Joachim, and appreciate being in the wake of his influence.”
Damien Hirst releases his first NFT collection. In The Currency , the British artist riffs on artist multiple and NFT conventions with a physical-digital hybrid drop. Taking place through the Palm platform, NFTs representing 10,000 20 x 30 cm polka dot paintings (authenticated with custom paper, a hologram, and Hirst’s signature) are on (pre)sale for $2,000 USD; buyers ultimately choose to keep the NFT or receive the original painting—the remaining tokens and paintings will be burned.
“After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight, and artificially enforced scarcity.”
–
Dogecoin creator
Jackson Palmer , doubling down on his crypto exit in a rare public Twitter thread that ‘burns’ an industry “controlled by a powerful cartel of wealthy figures, bought influencers, and pay-for-play media outlets”
“For all the things that we could use it for—astronomy, earth sciences, climate research—the fact that we have chosen to deploy planetary-scale computation for the modelling and prediction of consumer behaviour is one of the world-historical misuses of a technology.”
– Theorist, author, and educator
Benjamin Bratton , in coversation with
Politics Theory Other podcast host Alex Doherty [quote edited]
As California’s Salton Sea emerges as a hotspot for U.S. lithium mining, Vice ’s Audrey Carleton digs into the pros and cons of turning the toxic lake into “Lithium Valley.” Whereas General Motors argues it could supply “a significant portion ” of the lithium needed for its electric cars, helping curb climate change, locals fear the impacts. “I’m a huge advocate for doing things right,” states environmental justice organizer Miguel Hernandez. “Let’s assume it’s gonna be part of our communities. Then, let’s make lithium a good neighbor.”
“To witness rich boys using space travel for touristic amusement shows how much the modernist project of limitless expansion has come to a clownish end. Time to land.”
– French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist
Bruno Latour , on Virgin Galactic owner Richard Branson beating fellow space race billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to orbit
Joachim Sauter (1959-2021)
German media art pioneer and
ART+COM co-founder
Joachim Sauter dies at the age of 62 in Berlin. Innovating kinetic sculpture and new media architecture for over 30 years, Sauter helped set the stage for the today’s immersive installations and interdisciplinary practice as ART+COM’s Head of Design and Professor for New Media Art at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).
“Founders, investors, futurists and executives have all tried to stake their claim in the metaverse, expounding on its potential for social connection, experimentation, entertainment and, crucially, profit.”
– Technology journalists
John Herrman &
Kellen Browning , in “What is the Metaverse?,” a general audience friendly primer on that most nebulous of terms
A computational resurrection of Berlin’s swampy origins, Jakob Kudsk Steensen ’s “Berl-Berl”—‘Berl’ being the ancient Slavic word for swamp—turns Halle am Berghain into a luminous wetland. Large-scale projections invite visitors into an “immersive, absolute landscape” composed of macro photogrammetry of the region’s remaining wetlands. “Berl-Berl is a song for the swamp, a place for the undefinable—morphing, liminal and mystical,” says the Danish CGI artist. “Berl-Berl mourns what is lost and embraces what is new.”
OUT NOW :
New Models
NM CODEX Y2K20
Editors
Caroline Busta , Daniel Keller, and
LIL INTERNET marshal the New Models community yielding a “collective distillation” of the madness of 2020
“The Phillipines are a great test market for games, because there is a high level of English knowledge and the cost of labour is quite cheap.”
–
Sky Mavis co-founder Aleksander Larsen, on how
Axie Infinity was rolled out and tested in Southeast Asia. With its governance token surging 400% (to $18 USD) in recent weeks alongside the game’s expontential growth, Filipino workers are
capitalizing on its increasingly lucurative “play to earn” NFT economy, echoing
World of Warcraft -era
gold farming in the Global South.
Ten years after Secret Service agents raided his apartment following People Staring at Computers , a 2011 software intervention that published photos taken with the laptops at two New York City Apple Stores, artist Kyle McDonald releases the investigators’ report obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The 100-page file reveals “scrawled notes on the phone with Apple, descriptions of a Special Agent scrolling through my social media, justifications for a search warrant,” and “boards of profile pics .”
DOSSIER :
“My Research Partner would have to pose a real challenge to my own thinking. They’d sit outside of the inertia that can set in, as a field of inquiry and a mode of practice becomes known well, lauded, praised. This is when I thought of Peli Grietzer.”
– Guest editor
Nora N. Khan , on selecting the “brilliant scholar, writer, theorist, and philosopher” as foil for her work on the forthcoming
HOLO 3
For the New York Times , Sabrina Imbler chronicles the quest to understand the fractal forms of romanesco broccoli and cauliflower. Focusing on Irnia researcher Christopher Godin and plant biologist François Parcy’s work modelling “nested spirals and logarithmic chartreuse fractals” of the vegetables over 15 years, she details both missteps and breakthroughs. While their work is far from complete, the duo have honed in on the meristem region of plant tissue, “a stem with no inhibition,” as a source of the eccentric geometries.
DOSSIER :
“I’ve got nothing against the hustle, nothing against the start-up world. It’s when those moral positions become hegemonic for everywhere else and start to define everything, like access to water and knowledge—then they become problematic.”
– DEL Resident
Jerrold McGrath , on how the rhetoric of productivity and the “scarcity mindset” can be dangerous
In the aftermath of “Yacht Metaphor ,” an online and Bard College -hosted solo exhibition, Jenson Leonard delves into his process with curator Georgie Payne . During the exchange Leonard details his work as @CoryIntheAbyss , where he has embraced internet vernacular—‘poor’ images, virality—since 2015. Notably, he describes the exhibition’s “meme schematic” feature, which gives the viewer something they never get on everyday social media: an opportunity to “look under the hood” of his images via a didactic explanation of the references at play.
Two years after Flemish Minister-President Jan Jambon caused outrage for playing Angry Birds during a policy discussion, Belgian media artist Dries Depoorter launches The Flemish Scrollers , an AI bot that monitors the livestreams of the region’s government meetings for politicians who are on their phones. Once the system’s facial recognition detects a distracted lawmaker, it will call them out in public: a video clip is posted to Instagram and Twitter , tagging the official’s social media handle with the request to “pls stay focused!”
“It’s not the type of show where you just roll in as an art world figure. You have to embrace what the building has been as a nightclub, and what it might become, without alienating its history and existing community, without appearing to gentrify yet another space in a city that used to have all this energy.”
“Composed,” a joint show between Robert Bean and Barbara Lounder opens at Hermes Gallery in Halifax, Canada. Combining the pair’s interest in text and encoding, the show collects recent inscription, writing machine, score and diagram work by Bean, and debuts a composition by Lounder. Performed on a 1967 Smith Corona Super Sterling portable typewriter (image) at intervals throughout the show’s run, Super Sterling features Lounder translating fiction and walk transcriptions—live in-gallery—into visual scores.
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