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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“One of the key attributes of dreams is that they feel real in the moment. When I looked at my hands and saw the mutant flippers of a Midjourney hallucination, I felt the walls drop. My whole body flushed. Nothing was real here—least of all me .”
– Writer and musician
Claire L. Evans , describing a moment of self-realization when she knew she was dreaming. In her essay on lucid dreaming, Evans shares her nocturnal travelogue and takes stock of related cognitive science research.
“At the heart of Suno and Udio’s argument is that their technology is sufficently transformative in nature. They argue that this is because their AI synthesizes new, original output, rather than copying and reproducing pre-existing songs.”
– Legal scholar
Wellett Potter , on the lawsuit record labels have levied against AI music apps
Suno and
Udio . Alleging copyright violation, the labels argue music generated by the apps bears “striking resemblances” to songs by ABBA, James Brown, Mariah Carey, and other artists—that their songs were training data.
Japanese artist-engineer collective Rhizomatiks opens the black box of AI image generation in “Rhizomatiks Beyond Perception,” a sprawling solo exhibition at KOTARO NUKAGA gallery’s new and expanded Tokyo venue. For this, the group led by Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi trained their own model on 170,000 images of past Rhizomatiks works and reveals the 50 steps it takes to generate a new image. On sale aren’t the five outputs Manabe hand-picked for the show, but the AI Beyond Perception Model (2024).
“Breathing Particles,” the first of two exhibitions featuring the works of the 2024 Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) resident creators, opens at the TOKAS Hongo venue. Cuban media artist Nestor Siré ’s video and hardware installation PC Gamer [GOMA] (2024, image), for example, draws from both local DIY practices and the CubaCreativa he researches back home. The tire-housed gaming PC was inspired by the resiliency of the Havana gaming community, built with locally-sourced second-hand components, and optimized at the Tokyo Hacker Space .
Showcasing installations exploring lust and extractivism, Candace Lin ’s “The Sex Life of Stone” opens at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in Melbourne. The American artist presents works including a new commission (which the show is named after) and Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory (2023, image), which (weirdly) mythologizes lithium battery production. Lin’s work is “often humorous, sometimes trippy, immersive research-based, and material-focused,” says MUMA Director Rebecca Coates.
“I thought about dolls as empathy machines, providing a service, and as some kind of magic object.”
– Artist
Kara Walker , describing the inspiration for the eight robots in her SFMOMA installation
Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) . An exploration of racial trauma and the possibility of salvation through technology, Walker teamed up with the engineering firm
Hypersonic to develop the elaborate animatronic performance.
Showcasing UK artist Anthony McCall ’s multi-decade exploration of sculptural projection, “Solid Light” opens at the Tate in London. Covering the gamut of his Solid Light Works , featured installations span Line Describing a Cone (1973), in which a 16 mm film project traces a conical volume, through Split-Second Mirror (2018, image), in which a mirror interrupts a plane of light. McCall’s recent works push at “reinterpreting sculptural space using cinematic devices,” write curators Gregor Muir and Andrew de Brún.
“Through braces, belts, straps, and medical tubing, the support and treatment of the body is made visible as a jarring domain of restraint and domination.”
– Critic Louis Scherfig, on the materials used by Canadian artist
Panteha Abareshi in their O—Overgaden show “
Impaired Erotics ” (image: Abareshi’s
OBJECT DESIRE , 2024)
A remote summer series about online identity, “Profiling” kicks off at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. Commencing with Mary Stephenson ’s My Director & Me (2024, image), a whimsical home performance about an imaginary film shoot that participants enact by following a provided script, five artist-designed questionnaires and exercises will be issued over email. Subsequent releases from Lauren Lee McCarthy , Kameelah Janan Rasheed , Mariam Suhail , and Anne Le Troter are slated for July and August.
“New art grows with an undeclared agenda. Generative art may be a temporary title, and NFTs might gradually acquire a new narrative reaching for the latest system of identifying authenticity and the right of possession.”
– Curator
Jasia Reichardt , considering recent popular narratives in digital art from the perspective of someone who was there at the beginning. In her short text for Le Random, the “
Cybernetic Serendipity ” (1968) curator muses about AI, artistic categories, and the late
Herbert W. Franke .
“It is possible that future administrations could take this case as encouragement to pursue the press under the Espionage Act. It is likely that an emboldened second Trump administration would do so.”
–
The Guardian editors, expressing grave concern that the deal to free
WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange in exchange for a guilty plea is “good for Assange, not journalism.” Now precedent, the U.S. can prosecute journalists who surface or distribute damning information under the archaic
Espionage Act , they warn.
“Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis” opens at Framer Framed, Amsterdam, parsing post-truth infrastructures—the 24-hour news cycle, social media—“where manipulation and obfuscation is the norm rather than the exception.” Seven artists and collectives including Paolo Cirio , Anna Engelhardt & Mark Cinkevich, Ho Tzu Nyen , and UKRAiNATV present works that create new ways of knowing. Cirio’s Climate History (2024, image), for example, compiles a 100-year timeline of economic and political wrong-doing.
“The game’s grotesque, hyper-synthetic eats are a critique of a near-future capitalist consumer culture that places next to no value on nutrition. [The] plastic-texture pizzas are so unappetising they became a point of gamer outcry.”
– Artist and writer
Alice Bucknell , examining videogame worlds, here
Cyperpunk 2077 (2020), as rich containers for mapping food’s relationship with human and nonhuman labour, ecological precarity, identity, grief, and care. “They prompt deeper, if weirder, understandings of the food systems we are a part of, extract from, and ultimately, must return to.”
Offering both utopian and dystopian visions of tomorrow, “Future Memoria” opens at Surrey Art Gallery in British Columbia (CA). Curated by Rhys Edwards , the show draws on the gallery’s permanent collection to present three dozen artists, including Vikky Alexander , FASTWÜRMS , Myfanwy MacLeod , Alex McLeod , and Jer Thorp , whose works imagine everything from idyllic techno futures and functioning democracies “to the hells of economic scarcity, ecological catastrophe, and social breakdown.”
Brazillian developer Luizão releases schematics for a scaled-down version of the core rope memory module used by NASA in the 1960s. Deployed in interplanetary probes and the Apollo Guidance Computer , core rope memory is woven read-only memory that uses magnetic cores and wires to store data. Luizão’s implementation has 12 addresses x 8 bit values (96 bit memory)—a rotary dial cycles between data stored in each core, which is indicated by varying light combinations at the top of his assembly.
A show about how information “manipulation and obfuscation is the norm rather than the exception” in public discourse, “Really? Art & Knowledge in Time of Crisis” opens at Framer Framed in Amsterdam. Paolo Cirio , Zheng Mahler , Ho Tzu Nyen , and others present works on post-truth knowledge flows for curators David Garcia and Mi You. Anna Engelhardt & Mark Cinkevich’s Terror Element (2024, image), for example, is a CGI documentary “exploring the investigative method and fallibility of truth.”
“It had been a while since I last felt attacked in an exhibition, but the serpent made a move and the situation could’ve ended up a lot messier than it did.”
– Editor
Andy Battaglia , describing an encounter with a robotic snake at Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s show “
Āmantēcayōtl ” as a brush with death. Assessing the craft of the
many robots that populate the Canal Projects NYC exhibition, Battaglia notes the Mexican artist’s crude aesthetic “suggests that some things can be taken apart—and perhaps reassembled anew.”
Geospatial data scientist Derek Taylor launches Climate Zones , a web-based visual essay that shows how the climate classifications of major cities will shift over the next half-century due to rising temperatures. Unsurprisingly, the prognosis is grim. “In the near future, people might brag about their luxurious beachside resort in Copenhagen,” writes Taylor, imagining a ‘Scandanavian Riveria’ as an outcome of the northern region heating up from a cold to a temperate climate by 2070.
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