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 what the term Anthropocene was supposed to name. It wasn’t supposed to tell us how powerful we are. It was supposed to remind us of our subordination to the material universe around us because suddenly it’s suiciding itself.”
– Climate theorist
Tom Cohen , explaining his frustration with
Anthropocene discourse. Rather than articulating a need for environmental responsibility or care, he says the term bleakly signals that “it’s not about us anymore” and “we’re uploading ourselves to an imaginary that’s detached from the material world.”
In her new lecture performance, How to Petrify the World in One Hundred and Twenty-Four Acts, Spanish artist and researcher Joana Moll reenacts the twisted history of extactivism, geopolitics, and ecocide from the year 1900 to now, one news item at a time. Premiered as part of “100 New Words for Weather ” at Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, Berlin, Moll’s mantric, increasingly distorted countdown calls attention to the shifting—creeping—baselines that have us, unwittingly, turn our world to stone.
“It’s time to reject the neoliberal consensus that’s dominated the internet and create public bodies whose job it is to develop technology in the public interest—not to serve founders or shareholders.”
– Canadian tech journalist and critic
Paris Marx , making the case for the
splinternet —a Web governed by open protocols, forced interoperability, and publicly funded alternatives to monopolized walled gardens. “Three decades into the commercialized internet, it’s time to take back control.”
London-based artist and musician Yuri Suzuki releases AI Acid : Digital Echoes of Second Summer (2024), a compilation of 22 synthetic compositions inspired by—trained on—1990s UK acid house (see Second Summer of Love ). Chaining Google’s MusicLM to an AI DJ mix software, Suzuki merged 500 AI-generated sound fragments into a “harmonious symphony that blurs the boundaries of intentional curation and the whims of the machine.” AI Acid is available as digital download and on tape.
Simone C Niquille ’s CGI film Beauty and The Beep (2024) premieres at EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival (IT), completing the Dutch artist’s trilogy on cohabitation with computer vision. Following an AI-trained computer model of a ‘smart chair’ trying—struggling—to find a place to sit, the film playfully collages evidence of the modern datafied home: The chair is designed after Bertil, the first IKEA product advertized with synthetic imagery while the parcour resembles Boston Dynamics’ model home for robot dogs.
“When I envision the web, I picture an infinite expanse of empty space that stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s full of fertile soil, but no seeds have taken root. That is, except for about an acre of it.”
– American software engineer and writer
Molly White , reminding us that the “good old web”—before corporate surveillance and walled gardens—isn’t gone. “Nothing prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier.
We can return ,” White urges in her newsletter
[citation needed] .
LA-based writer, musician, and internet culture connoisseur Claire L. Evans issues the phone accessory you didn’t know you needed: bumper stickers. “It’s a dumb idea but unfortunately it took hold of me,” the author of Broad Band (2018) and Terraform (2022) writes on X, announcing a (supremely affordable) edition of 250. Signalling relatable sentiments like “Pinch Me, I’m Zooming” and “Beep Boop, I have No Idea How this Shit Works,” the stickers were an instant hit, Evans notes, and vol 2 is already in production.
“For a quarter-century, this mother-daughter relationship was strained by geopolitical circumstances, kept alive only through these messages—which, due to practices of censorship, could not say much at all. We cannot help but wonder what was left unsaid.”
– Art historian
Zsofi Valyi-Nagy , on the letters
Vera Molnar received from her Mother between 1947 and 1971. In a feature, Valyi-Nagy reads deep into
Lettres de ma mère main et machine (1981-91), an artwork inspired by the missives, and uses media archaeological methods to analyze the legacy of the late generative artist.
A newly commissioned, site-specific staging of Troika ’s climate dystopia, Terminal Beach (2020), opens at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) as part of the first Klima Biennale Wien . In it, the London-based artist collective extends the film’s CGI world around an animalistic robot chopping down the last tree on Earth into an immersive, spatial installation: A flooded landscape accentuates the robot’s unsettling efforts while a series of 3D-printed hybrid creatures, Grenzgänger (2024), bask in the reflection.
“Incredibly skilled, talented, qualified, very passionate people are leaving because no matter what they say, what they do, how many papers they publish … It doesn’t matter.”
–
Adrift Lab researcher
Jennifer Lavers , on marine scientists leaving the field in droves. Mass die-offs of sealife have surged dramatically as a result of extreme heat in a third of the world’s oceans, and so has the despair amongst experts. “That’s the case for me,” Lavers says. “I have to literally say to people that my job is to describe the extinction of a species.”
Curated by Dallas Fellini , “Indiscernible thresholds, escaped veillances” opens at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto. Featured “invisible, illegible, and opaque” alternatives to trans hypervisibility include WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT (2020-22, image), Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s playable trans archive, and a video derived from QT.bot (2020-), Lucas LaRochelle’s LGBTQ+ large language model. Joshua Schwebel , Chelsea Thompto , and Lan ‘Florence’ Yee also present works.
“How does your scenario dismantle or reproduce (neo)colonial continuities?”
– Researcher Quincey Stumptner, sharing one of twenty questions developed to interrogate scenarios generated in foresight workshops. The power and equity-focused questions “build on the fantastic work of activists, intellectuals, and researchers who have pioneered intersectional and decolonial perspectives, like the
Combahee River Collective or
Frantz Fanon ,” writes Stumptner.
“Territory,“ a group show that “questions the vast definitions of borders and boundaries,“ opens at Sprüth Magers Berlin. Tan Jing , Mire Lee , Gala Porras-Kim , Zhang Ruyi , and Liu Yujia present works exploring nature and materiality. Beijing-based Yujia showcases her mycological interests in a pair of films: Mushrooms (2023, image right), which documents interactions between fungi and the inhabitants of a Northeast Asia forest, and Harvesting (2023), which depicts Korean women labourers picking jelly ear fungus .
“The way I design an audio system is not the way most high-end audio manufacturers would. I design equipment that delivers more emotional content, not necessarily better specifications.”
– American audio engineer Devon Turnbull aka
OJAS , on creating
HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 2 (2024) for SFMOMA’s forthcoming “
Art of Noise ” exhibition. Turnbull’s immersive audio installation offers exceptionally high-fidelity music playback on a custom-built sound system. “It’s as if he’s not building speakers so much as ears,” says Joseph Becker, SFMOMA’s associate curator.
A joint venture between Rectangle and Wouters Gallery, the group show “Guardians” opens in Brussels. Exploring notions of guardianship from “mythological figures to contemporary societal and corporate control,” Auriea Harvey , Joan Heemskerk , JODI , and Lynn Hershman Leeson contribute works. American artist Julia Scher presents sculptural forms from a speculative “bus station for humanoid and extraterrestrial life” (image left), first explored in her 2022 Kunsthalle Giessen “Planet Greyhound ” exhibition.
“The logic is that TikTok is the beating heart of a social-media industrial complex that mines our data and uses them to manipulate our behavior, and, as such, it is very bad for an authoritarian country to have access to these tools.”
– Tech columnist
Charlie Warzel , encapsulating the U.S. bill demanding that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, sell its app or be banned in America. Skeptical that ‘ties to China’ is the real problem, Warzel notes “if the government believes this is true, should anyone have access to these tools?”
Inviting five artists to reimagine existing video and installation works, “Live Stream” opens at Berlin’s Fluentum. Patricia L. Boyd , Nina Könnemann , Michael E. Smith , and Matt Welch adapt past works to the neoclassical aesthetics, (stone-heavy) materiality, and spatial idiosyncrasies of the former Luftwaffe facility. Jason Hirata ’s Floaters (2020, image), for example, panoramically projects the American artist’s deadpan “negative media environment ” into the void of a space once used for administration.
The 60th International Venice Biennale opens in Italy with its usual dynamic roster of global talent. Excitingly, Archie Moore populates Australia’s pavilion with kith and kin (2024, image), a dizzying “holographic map of relations” charting 2,400 generations of the artist’s Indigenous ancestry and its many ties to the living world. Other pavilions of note include Hungary (Márton Nemes), Iceland (Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir), and Lithuania (Pakui Hardware & Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė).
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