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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Berlin-based generative artist and prolific Twitch streamer Raphaël de Courville releases a Chrome browser extension that rids Twitter of ‘Chief Twit’ Elon Musk’s latest attempt at humour. “DogeBeGone saves your precious eyes from the scourge of Doge,” writes de Courville about undoing the platform’s sudden logo swap for the Dogecoin mascot dog on April 3 (that may be related to a $258-billion racketeering lawsuit against Musk). Thanks to de Courville’s hack, the bird is back—“just like nature intended.”
OUT NOW :
Katie Holten
The Language of Trees
Inspired by forests, trees, leaves, and seeds,
Holten compiles an illustrated “Rewilding of Literature and Landscape” featuring writings from over 50 contributors including Ursula K. Le Guin, Ada Limón, Robert Macfarlane, Zadie Smith, Radiohead, and Elizabeth Kolbert.
“The food banks in New York were in serious trouble due to food scarcity. And then all the while, people were focusing on this super rare digital object.”
– Automation artist
Dmitri Cherniak , on the furor around
Dead Ringers (2022), which sent NFTs to random Ethereum addresses rather than making them available to rabid collectors. Chatting with
Jason Bailey , the Canadian artist shares that (some of) his works are a “a response to people treating me like an object or a way to make money.”
What Just Happened :
Akil Kumarasamy Parses Quantum Plotlines and Large Language Models
The American writer provides insight into the (messy) collision of AI and the human condition in her deeply affecting debut novel
Curated by Kyle Duffield and Terry Anastasiadis, “IA 360° Showcase” opens, debuting the new surround projection system installed in the gallery of Toronto’s InterAccess. Éric Filion & Michael Trommer , Tori Foster , Adrienne Matheuszik , Silvia Ruzanka , and 16 other local and international artists contribute to a program of immersive CGI and video (and accompanying spatial audio) that brings “real and synthesized realms, cosmic awe, the microscopic made monolithic” into focus.
“There are many reasons to be skeptical of the PhD-in-fine-art boom. One is that it exacerbates hierarchies of economic privilege already endemic to art education. Another is that art, under the pressure of academicization, becomes tame, systematic, and professional.”
–
Artforum Contributing Editor
Claire Bishop , (warily) setting up a survey of the types of knowledge production that occur in research-based art
Basel’s House of Electronic Arts (HEK) premieres new works by Pe Lang , Johanna Bruckner , and Jennifer Merlyn Scherler —three Swiss media artists and winners of the 2022 Pax Art Awards—in parallel solo exhibitions. Veteran Lang translated a scene from his forthcoming sci-fi novel into a kinetic light installation, whereas emerging talents Bruckner and Scherler authored CGI video and sculptural works that explore techno-bodies (image: Body Obfuscations , 2023) and climate anxiety.
OUT NOW :
Andrés Burbano
Different Machines
In his investigation of the emergence of Latin American media technologies, the Colombian
artist and scholar constructs a “historiographical and theoretical framework for understanding the work of creators who have been geographically and historically marginalized.”
“Oversight boards and ethics teams at big tech companies have always been a fig leaf. Their purpose is to convince regulators that the companies can regulate themselves. That’s it.”
– American writer
Joanne McNeil , critiquing Silicon Valley’s ethics shell game, as tech leaders call for an
AI moratorium . “Good work can be done and good people can be hired,” McNeil continues. “Doesn’t change the purpose and ultimate goals of these departments.”
Completing the NFT-release-to-exhibition trajectory in just six months, Tyler Hobbs ’ “QQL: Analogs” opens at Pace New York. The American artist describes his solo show as “an examination of ways to integrate the hand and the machine in painting,” and explores the texture and imperfections introduced when using oil and acrylic paint to plot selected outputs of his eponymous circle packing algorithm. Closing the loop, each of the 12 large paintings on sale are bundled with the NFT used to generate it (e.g. )
“We should not be using AI to generate more ‘diverse’ models. Use the AI to invent new races, new genders, new forms that transcend the body! Like everyone’s trying to make the perfect plant-based salmon—JUST INVENT A NEW FUCKING FISH.”
Named after a line of predictive text poetry, Travess Smalley ’s solo exhibition “Number colors burn randomly” opens at Foxy Production, New York. Comprising new textile works (literal pixel rugs ), plotter drawings, silk screen prints, and videos, the show expands upon the American artist’s use of code and scripts to plant “seeds of chance” for visual production. “It might not be the mark of my hand that is interesting,” notes Smalley, “but the exact inverse, the absence, the ghost, the memory.”
Amsterdam’s NEMO Science Museum unveils a giant meatball made from cultivated woolly mammoth flesh. Created to spark conversations about sustainable meat alternatives, food engineers from the Australian cultured meat company Vow inserted sheep cells with the mammoth myoglobin gene. “When it comes to meat, myoglobin is responsible for the aroma, the colour and the taste,” James Ryall, Vow’s Chief Scientific Officer explains. Where Vow’s mammoth DNA sequence had gaps, African elephant DNA was spliced in for completion.
“Starting April 15th, only white nationalists with 30 followers will be in ‘For You’ recommendations.”
–
Eve 6 band leader and
Buzzfeed columnist Max Collins,
responding to Elon Musk’s announcement of Twitter Blue favouritism. Cited in
Mashable reporter Matt Binder’s analysis of the social media company’s flailing subscription game, Collin’s tweet rings true: Half of Twitter Blue users have less than 1,000 followers and comprise “far right wing accounts, cryptocurrency scammers, and hardcore Elon Musk supporters.”
Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023)
Japanese composer
Ryuichi Sakamoto dies after a battle with cancer. Co-founder of
Yellow Magic Orchestra in the 1970s, his film scores earned an Oscar and a Grammy, and he was a fierce post-
Fukushima disaster climate activist. Collaborator
Carsten Nicolai lauds Sakamoto for recognizing “conversations between different and unusual styles may be the future.”
“We conclude that LLMs such as GPTs exhibit traits of general-purpose technologies, indicating that they could have considerable economic, social, and policy implications.”
–
OpenAI ,
OpenResearch , and
UPenn researchers, on the potential impacts of recent AI advances. “With access to a large language model (LLM), about 15% of all worker tasks in the U.S. could be completed significantly faster at the same level of quality,” they suggest in a new paper. “When incorporating software and tooling built on top of LLMs, this share increases to between 47-56% of all tasks.”
“People think that everything lasts forever on the internet but it falls apart. Without real caretaking and maintenance, everything you make is destined to disappear.”
–
DIS Magazine ’s
Lauren Boyle , on the struggle to keep online content presentable. “Three years is about the shelf life of any piece—before you start to get some kind of digital rot,” adds
New Models ’
Caroline Busta , in conversation about the publication and
curatorial collective Boyle co-founded in 2010.
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