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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As part of an Inke Arns -curated show on Galerie Barbara Thumm’s New Viewings online platform, exhibiting artist Aram Bartholl installs the first-ever USB-C Dead Drop outside the gallery’s Berlin exhibition space. An ongoing series of interventions launched in 2010, Bartholl embeds empty USB flash drives into the urban landscape to encourage spontaneous and anonymous acts of peer to peer file sharing. To date, over 1,400 of these ‘dead letterboxes’ have been set up in dozens of countries around the world.
ENCOUNTER :
“We just accept that as a truth, that estrogen produces femininity and we don’t question it. For me, the best strategy as citizens is to reject these categories and to create room for more definitions, for more subjectivities.”
Artist and biohacker
Mary Maggic , on how they use hormones—a key material in their practice—to challenge monolithic conceptions of gender and biopower
ENCOUNTER :
Packing a lab in a suitcase and treating hormones as material, the Chinese-American artist brings punk rock energy and radical gender politics to biohacking and citizen science.
DOSSIER :
“As we are trawled within these wildly enmeshed algorithmic nets, how do we draw on these patterns, of mystification and predictive capture, to see the next ship approaching?”
– Guest editor
Nora N. Khan , on the struggle for autonomy and legibility within the uncharted waters of Big Tech. In
HOLO 3 , she and a list of invited contributors will plot paths forward.
“When we talk about the practice of worldbuilding, particularly in videogames, one significant strategy when we choose to use these pre-existing worlds is that the game space forms its own poetic architecture for a critique of the present.”
– Artist and writer
Alice Bucknell , parsing the potency of (alternate) videogame realities during the opening session of “Reassemble: Weaving With Worlds,” a two-year laboratory for imagining desirable more-than-human futures hosted by
FIBER Festival
Life After BOB: The Chalice Study , Ian Cheng ’s latest AI narrative, premieres at LUMA Arles in France. Continuing his work with BOB (Bag of Beliefs) , “an AI creature whose personality, body, and life script evolve across exhibitions,” this new anime series centres on a 10-year-old girl who receives BOB as a neural implant. Not your usual coming-of-age story, Cheng describes it as offering ”new archetypal characters for our ever-weirdening times.” In Arles for the summer, Life After BOB will show at The Shed in New York this fall.
“We pivot from Disney Prince to a Jesus Christ Superstar rock anthem to Star Trek scenes, film noir, and shady outer space. And all of a sudden, Elon has gone from being an optimistic dreamer, to an idealistic radical, to a scheming villain.”
– Sound designer and music director
Liam Bellman-Sharpe , on the genres and tropes he referenced in his score for
Elon Musk and the Plan to Blow Up Mars , a musical staged at the
Yale Cabaret last year
Counting 3,158 submissions “despite a pandemic and a temporary shutdown of the art world,” Ars Electronica announces the winners of this year’s Prix Awards. Golden Nicas go to Forensic Architecture ’s airborne violence analysis Cloud Studies (image), Alexander Schubert ’s AI ensemble Convergence , and Guangli Liu ’s When the Sea Sends Forth a Forest , a CGI lesson in Cambodian “lost history” under Khmer Rouge rule. In addition to the three main prizes, the jury also granted six awards of distinction and 36 honorary mentions.
“Our findings suggest that language loss will be even more critical to the extinction of medicinal knowledge than biodiversity loss.”
– Researchers
Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and
Jordi Bascompte , examining the “high uniqueness in indigenous knowledge and strong coupling with threatened languages” in a recent
PNAS paper . “Each indigenous language is a unique reservoir of medicinal knowledge,” they write, ”a Rosetta stone for unravelling and conserving nature’s contributions to people.”
Curated by Alice Russotti, Meg Webster ’s ”Wave” opens at the Upper Gallery at The Arts Center on Governors Island in New York. Beyond environmental studies spanning sound and video like Nearest Virgin Forest (1987) and Waterfall (1996), the solo show includes new pieces (re)engaging foundational Webster motifs including Moss Mound (building on the 1986 work Moss Bed ), and Pollinating Garden , for which viewers trek 1 km southwest to a GrowNYC site to take in a durational piece—a plot recently seeded by the artist.
A shrine to IBM’s midcentury corporate aesthetic, Rayyan Tabet’s “Deep Blues” opens at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Illuminated by the melancholic glow of IBM’s 10 shades of blue, the installation references Eero Saarinen’s IBM Rochester design and Charles and Ray Eames work for the multinational—a matrix of their chairs hang overhead. Tabet’s nods to IBM’s design patronage coupled with AI-trained text-to-speech narration foreground the affect of knowledge work, and of a singular corporate identity.
Seoul-based light artists Kimchi and Chips install Halo at the local National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) as part of the institution’s “Multiverse” marathon. In the piece, 99 robotic mirrors follow the Sun’s movement and focus its light into a glistening halo within a cloud of fine water mist. First shown at London’s Somerset House in 2018, the MMCA edition features a new ‘solar farm’ system that uses machine learning for tracking and calibration.
“Payment terms, usage rights—the things bundled into an NFT were already possible through contracts. Now what’s fascinating to me is the way the NFT hype might force Christie’s to rethink how they handle secondary markets, and for artists to demand residual rights.”
–
Artengine Artistic Director
Ryan Stec , in conversation with Remco Volmer, Susan Johnston, and Dan Monafu about the collision of NFT platform capitalism and the commercial art market [quote edited]
Curated by Sabine Schaschl und Eliza Lips, Bernese sound artist Zimoun opens two immersive installations at Zurich’s Haus Konstruktiv, his biggest solo show in a Swiss museum yet. 295 prepared dc-motors, 39 kg wood and 825 cardboard boxes 35 x 32.5 x 32.5 cm comprise architectural configurations of myriad motorised components of everyday materials. Once activated, they “immerse the observer in a delightful monotony that is repetitive and multifaceted at the same time.”
DOSSIER :
“You just can’t make decisions without identifying who you and who your mentors are, not necessarily elders, but people who are already doing what you’re doing in a good way, and then you can begin to identify need.”
– DEL Resident
Suzanne Kite , on how her
Artist’s Almanac project to compile resources for marginalized artists was, first and foremost, a process of consultation
Most recently shown at “METAMORPHOSIS ” at Hyundai Motor Studio Seoul last year, Matthew Biederman ’s Serial Mutations (z-axis) v04 (2019) opens at Montreal’s ELEKTRA Gallery. Emerging from the vein of Biederman’s work that pushes at the limits of geometry and perception, it deploys the Necker cube optical illusion as the basis of an indeterminate shifting field that reconfigures itself ad infinitum, outside of perspectival space. Installed in ELEKTRA Gallery’s window vitrine, the animation will be displayed through June 19.
“These categories of art and technology and artists and engineers are dynamic, they are historically contingent and change over time. So, sure, you can go into MoMA and see video or a light and sound piece—but in 1965 the context was entirely different, the art world struggled to accept this work.”
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