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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Field Observatory , a “site-sensitive” installation by Finnish artist Teemu Lehmusruusu opens in Kirjurinluoto park in Pori (FI). Inspired by the root systems of alfalfa and other plants, Lehmusruusu’s “underground weather station” monitors underlying soil conditions and translates that data into a generative animation and soundscape. Drawing on dialogue with farmers and researchers developing carbon farming practices, the installation is a “portal into the volumes of the ground.”
Turning his eponymous 2021 NFT collection into an immersive video installation, Memo Akten ’s solo exhibition “Distributed Consciousness” opens at ACMI, Melbourne (AU). 256 AI-generated octopi, each containing a hidden verse, invite meditation on non-human intelligence and human-machine co-creation. “Staged as a place of worship, our tentacular deities invite us to face our final Copernican Trauma, the reality that humans may not be the sole keepers of intelligence, creativity or even consciousness.”
“The Goose looks like nothing in the collection and however many times you would have run the algorithm before or afterwards, you would not expect to replicate it.”
– Pseudonymous digital art collector
6529 , contextualizing his $6.2M purchase of
Dmitri Cherniak ‘s NFT
Ringers #879 (The Goose) in a Sotheby’s
auction
Ringers #879 (The Goose) , from Canadian artist Dmitri Cherniak ’s 2021 Art Blocks NFT series , is sold at a Sotheby’s London auction for $6.2M. The sale to collector 6529 completes an ‘only in crypto’ journey, as the NFT was amongst the liquidated assets of collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital . ‘The Goose’ is perhaps Ringers most beloved output, for the avian neck, beak, and eye that serendipitously peeks out from an algorithmic exploration of the myriad ways to wrap pegs with string.
“I would pick a subject, write something on it, and then shrink the text to what I hoped were the essentials—banishing adjectives and dreck.”
– Conceptual artist
Jenny Holzer , on the wordsmithing that propelled her to fame. In conversation with
Artnet Europe editor Kate Brown about her
retrosepctive at Düsseldorf’s K21, the American artist discusses her formative years, the writers she draws on, and archival research.
“This new study is different because it measures tiny variations in the way that Bitcoin mining equipment generates random numbers. These variations serve as a fingerprint allowing us to directly estimate the proportion of different machines.”
– American media artist
Kyle McDonald , parsing the methodology of a new
Coinmetrics study on Bitcoin energy use that offers the most accurate picture yet. “It basically confirms what we already knew,” writes McDonald, “Bitcoin is using about as much energy as the entire internet (around 12GW or 100TWh/year).”
What Just Happened? :
Total Refusal Collective Casts NPC Workers in Critique of Contemporary Labour
The Austrian pseudo-marxist media guerilla discusses their award-winning Machinima film Hardly Working (2022) and videogame interventions writ large
“This study could pave the way for a transformative shift in climate communications and science communications in general. Highlighting the power of art to provoke emotions and promote self-reflection.”
– University of Wisconsin researcher
Nan Li , discussing her team’s
analysis of the real-world impact of eco art. In their survey, Li and team tasked 671 people to look at both
Diane Burko ’s
SUMMER HEAT (2020) mixed-media series and the
Keeling Curve it is based on. The result: Burko’s artwork was perceived just as credible, sparked positive emotions, and moved participants to the middle, politically.
Ars Electronica announces the 2023 winners of the prestigious Golden Nica media art prize, awarded in New Animation Art, Digital Musics & Sound Art, AI & Life Art, and other categories. Winning projects, selected from 3,176 submissions, include Atractor Studios and Semántica Productions ’ sonification of Colombian agricultural soils, A Tale of Two Seeds (2022), and Winnie Soon ’s Unerasable Characters Series (2022, image), that reveals the chilling scale of censorship on China’s biggest social media platform, Weibo.
“Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah.”
– Security engineering expert
Ross Anderson , on the dangers of
model collapse as AI trains on AI-generated content. In a
new paper , Anderson and team demonstrate a rapid degenerative AI feedback loop where “true underlying data distribution” is forgotten. “This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web,”
Anderson warns , “giving an advantage to firms that already did, or that control access to human interfaces at scale.”
Trevor Paglen ’s solo exhibition “Hide the Real, Show the False” opens at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), presenting new works on mind control, disinformation, and psychological operations (PSYOPS). Case in point: Doty (2023, image), a video installation and the show’s centrepiece, features testimony by former US Air Force counterintelligence officer Richard Doty, who recounts his efforts targeting UFO researchers in disinformation campaigns while actual UFO programs ran in secret.
“Shouldn’t You Be Working? 100 Years of Working from Home,” a group show about the blurring of domesticity and labour, opens at Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum in East Lansing (US). Featured are photos of 20th-century domestic labour from the museum’s archives alongside works contrasting “newfound freedom” and “the threat of total digital surveillance and exploitation” by contemporary artists including Keiichi Matsuda , Marisa Olson , Theo Triantafyllidis , Jon Rafman , and Angela Washko .
“I’m so grateful that the AI revolution came along if for no other reason than that it showed us what it looks like when consumers actually get excited about something. It truly revealed that the crypto story was about 98% hype.”
– Tech columnist
Casey Newton , chiding crypto boosters who keep saying that ‘it’s time to build!’ “There is not one crypto product to my knowledge that has, say, 100 million users,” Newton vents. “Meanwhile, ChatGPT comes along and gets 100 million users, allegedly, within the first couple of months or so.”
“I think the Bitcoiners that are celebrating these enforcement actions tend to be later on the adoption curve and lower on the IQ spectrum than folks that actually know what’s going on. They’re cultists.”
– Crypto analyst
Ryan Selkis , on the Bitcoin purists vocally celebrating recent SEC
lawsuits that claim (at least as far as America is concerned)
other leading cryptocurrencies are securities
“Chasing the Devil to the Moon: Art Under Lunar Occupation Today” opens at Tallinn Art Hall (ES), constructing post-colonial cosmic imaginaries. Inspired by the 19th-century Estonian folk tale The Moon Painters , curator Corina L. Apostol presents six artists including Agate Tūna, Amélie Laurence Fortin , and Pau/a that explore social and political notions of “recolouring” the Moon. Fortin’s new CGI video The Blue Moon Project (2023, image), for example, offers a utopian vision of sustainable (blue) energy.
German media artist and Post-Internet purveyor Aram Bartholl unveals Delusion And Survival (2023), a collection of custom-made steel paper clips in @ sign form. Created in collaboration with The Internet Shop for an upcoming group show at Berlin’s A:D: Curatorial , the whimsical artifact fuses two concepts whose overlapping histories permeate contemporary digital culture—the paper clip that lives on in our interfaces and as a metaphor for AI dystopia , and the now ubiquitous @ sign , first introduced in 1971.
“If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cyberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns.”
–
LA Times tech columnist
Brian Merchant , channelling media scholar
David Karpf ’s critique of Apple’s “anti-metaverse,” where people disappear into a “totally immersive computer on their face”—alone. “If the world keeps getting worse,” Karpf says, “this will eventually have a lot of appeal.”
German AI artist Mario Klingemann releases A.I.C.C.A. , short for Artificially Intelligent Critical Canine (2023), into the current exhibition of Madrid’s Colección SOLO. Equipped with a camera, thermal printer, and ChatGPT, the furry AI art critic on wheels is designed to roam galleries and offer analysis—from its butt. The performative sculpture pokes fun at punditry but isn’t cynical, Klingemann assures. “Art critics play a very important role. The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be ignored.”
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