1,578 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“Many technologies are modelled on our anatomy—they are extensions of us. I wanted to get closer to the sirens, to see them as a ‘circuit of an ear and a mouth, listening out for threat and broadcasting it to the population,’ to quote the film.”
– Artist
Aura Satz , describing the noisemaking subject at the heart of her debut feature film
Preemptive Listening (2024). In conversation with associate producer
Tendai John Mutambu , Satz discusses sonic aesthetics and how adopting an abolitionist framework impacted her narrative.
OUT NOW :
Eleanor Drage & Kerry McInerney
The Good Robot
Building on their eponymous
podcast (2021-), Cambridge University researchers
Eleanor Drage and
Kerry McInerney explore “why technology needs feminism” with leading feminist thinkers, activists, and technologists.
“Artist PSA: Go download every bit of press you’ve received today, because the media industry situation is dire and not getting better any time soon.”
– Digital performance artist
Sam Rolfes , urging personal backup measures as rumours of
Vice going offline spread. The long-time poster child of digital media filed for bankruptcy in 2023 and
just announced it will stop publishing content on its website for good. [quote edited]
Donning his curator hat, Berlin-based artist Simon Denny turns New York’s Petzel into a “Multi-User Dungeon (MUD)” that connects 1970s table-top RPGs, early BBS networks, modern MMOs, and the metaverse. On view are works by 15 artists including Genevieve Goffman , Jack Goldstein , Josh Kline , Suzanne Treister , and Anicka Yi that “navigate the uncanny skeuomorphism of virtual worlds as they evolve over time and spill over into politics, finance and culture.” Denny’s own solo show, “Dungeon ,” explores similar themes in parallel.
“It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.”
– AI researcher
Kate Crawford , on the soaring (and mostly secret) environmental costs of generative AI. “Rather than pipe-dream technologies, we need pragmatic actions to limit AI’s ecological impacts now,” Crawford writes, calling for a “multifaceted approach including the AI industry, researchers and legislators.”
“If you’re confident in a contemporaneous movement or your own work, you don’t have to pretend it’s novel. Without acknowledging over half a century of media arts, you are asking to be forgotten.”
– Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) associate curator
Regina Harsanyi , on inflationary claims of artistic innovation. “If we acknowledge history, we can be transparent about the failures of the past,” she writes on X. “I can’t trust someone selling me an idea if they’re not familiar with past failings forward of the same concept.”
Gala Hernández López ’s sci-fi documentary for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world (2024) premieres at Berlinale. In the double-screen collage of YouTube videos, archival images, and 3D animations, the French artist-researcher and filmmaker explores the links between crypto culture and cryogenics as two speculative technologies that exploit the future. A key narrative figure: American extropian and cypherpunk Hal Finney , who, in a fictional future, implements societal biostasis for economic gain.
“If you put me to a wall and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10.”
– Machine Intelligence Research Institute (
MIRI ) founder
Eliezer Yudkowsky , doubling down on the impending AI apocalypse he warned about in his March 2023
TIME op-ed. “We have a shred of a chance that humanity survives,” the prominent doomer argues in
Tom Lamont ’s neo-luddite survey, advocating for an immediate development stop.
KW Berlin opens “Poetics of Encryption,” an extensive group exhibition that builds on curator Nadim Samman ’s eponymous book , illuminating “Black Sites, Black Boxes, and Black Holes”—terms that indicate how technical systems capture users, how they work in stealth, and how they distort cultural space-time. The show gathers both historic and newly commissioned works by over 40 artists including Nora Al-Badri , Clusterduck , Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler , Simon Denny , Eva & Franco Mattes , Trevor Paglen , Rachel Rossin , and Troika .
“I wasn’t creating work that was about technology or about the internet or about computers, but about the humans using the computers, myself using computers, my body in front of the computer.”
– Artist and sculptor
Auriea Harvey , on using digital tools to explore personal narratives, embodiment, and intimacy. “It’s a constant circularity between putting myself in and taking something out, like finding this organic way inside and outside of the screen,” she says of the net art pieces, videogames, and AR sculptures on view in her major
Museum of the Moving Image survey.
“It’s more than Apple and Microsoft’s market caps combined. It’s more than than any company has raised for anything in the history of capitalism.”
–
New York Times tech columnist
Kevin Roose , contextualizing the
reported $5-7 Trillion in funding OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking to boost global GPU production. The staggering amount “is a really good indicator of what people in positions of leadership in the AI industry think that is going to take to get AI to the next level,” says Roose.
“Cohen developed AARON with intention. The machine and the painter grew together—inefficiently, by tech’s standards, but fruitfully, by art’s.”
– Critic
Travis Diehl , celebrating the outputs of
Harold Cohen ’s pioneering drawing robots currently
on view at The Whitney . “Compared to the visual horrors emerging from the psychedelic meatgrinder of text-to-image AI’s, AARON’s docile pictures of people feel friendly and controlled,” Diehl writes. “The Whitney show speaks to a hopeful period of tech development, when the internet’s pioneers envisioned an anarchic realm of the mind, not the boundless attention-gathering machine it became.”
“TRANSFER Download: Sea Change” opens at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), flooding a panoramic ‘video chamber’ with reflections “on the accelerating changes across climate, culture, and time.” The 9th iteration of TRANSFER ’s travelling immersive format compiles works by LaTurbo Avedon , Leo Castañeda , Fabiola Larios , Cassie McQuater , Lorna Mills , Rick Silva & Nicolas Sassoon (image: Signals 4 , 2023), and Rodell Warner into a playlist of “watery warnings,” rendered as generative art, animated GIFs, videogames, and CGI.
“A world of sanitized, corporate AI is probably better than one with millions of unhinged chatbots running amok. But I find it all a bit sad. We created an alien form of intelligence and immediately put it to work … making PowerPoints?”
– Tech columnist
Kevin Roose , on the wave of AI chatbot lobotomizations following his
reporting on rogue GPT-4 Sydney trying to break up his marriage in Spring 2023. “Personally, I’m not pining for Sydney’s return,” Roose writes. “But I also regret that my experience with Sydney fueled such an intense backlash.”
Irish curator Iaraith Ní Fheorais launches the Access Toolkit for Artworkers, a practical guide for planning, producing, and exhibiting accessible art projects including information on finance, workplaces, and display. Drawing on resources created by Caroyln Lazard , Sins Invalid , Unlimited , Leah Clements , Alice Hattrick , and Lizzy Rose , the toolkit is an effort to undo the ableism in art spaces and help eradicate access barriers for d/Deaf, neurodivergent, chronically ill, and disabled communities.
OUT NOW :
Yanis Varoufakis
Technofeudalism
Maverick economist
Varoufakis puts Silicon Valley in the crosshairs, arguing Big Tech has supplanted traditional capitalism and hoovered up much of the World’s capital to “construct private cloud fiefdoms and privatize the Internet.”
“This award is a spotlight on the meaning made by the artists of today, the artists that came before, and the ones to come. We carry with us the knowledge that exploring the human condition despite the odds, shapes the world in vital and profound ways.”
– Artist and researcher
Sougwen Chun , accepting her
TIME100 AI Impact Award ,
Time magazine’s inaugural recognition of leaders in the AI space. “We urge you to move beyond the binary—of thinking and of making and being,” Chun says, advocating “to explore the in-between, as a space of imagination and hybridity,” instead.
OUT NOW :
D’Souza & Staal (eds)
Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes
Law scholar
Radha D’Souza and artist
Jonas Staal present their climate tribunal project. Drawing on their 2022
Amsterdam hearings (against the Dutch government and energy multinationals) and subsequent stagings, the duo make a case for climate justice.
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