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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“3D analysis shows patterns of radial fragmentation on the southwest side of the impact crater, as well as a shallow channel leading into the crater from the northeast. Such patterns indicate a likely projectile trajectory with northeast origins.”
Presented across digital screens and prints spanning the façade of the South West Wing of Bush House, “The Quiet Enchanting” opens at King’s College London. In the outdoor show design studio Superflux provoke passersby with—tower blocks enveloped in foliage, wildlife and humans side-by-siide—speculative imagery of a rewilded Borough of Westminster. Informed by interviews with local residents, the renderings romanticize “pre-modern poetics, pagan folklore, and animist societies.”
OUT NOW :
Deb Chachra
How Infrastructure Works
Engineer and materials scientist
Chachra makes the case that the pipes, cables, and power lines that make civil society possible should not only be functional and well maintained, but more “equitable, resilient, and sustainable.”
“Interreality,” a group show involving many leading digital artists, opens at The Desmond Tower in Los Angeles. Produced by bitforms and PR For Artists , it presents works by participants including Refik Anadol , Claudia Hart , Auriea Harvey , Tyler Hobbs , Rafael Lozano-Hemmer , Maya Man , and Manfred Mohr . Focused on the gap between ‘digital’ and ‘physical,’ its artists demonstrate how realms “commonly perceived as separate, can be unified because the divisions between them are illusory,” writes curator Mieke Marple .
“In the end, we need to ask more of museums and we need to ask more of DAOs (and of emerging technologies more broadly). For either to earn our trust, they need to continually define their terms and defend their motives.”
– Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator
Tina Rivers Ryan , questioning the rhetoric of decentralization. “Trust is not simply the product of technological protocols (no matter how transparent),” she writes in her essay for HEK’s
Algorithmic Imaginary , “but also of a ‘social layer’ of legal and professional codes and specialized knowledge bases.”
Capping a two-year project by Art Hub Copenhagen , Tropical Papers , and others, “Attention After Technology” opens at Kunsthall Trondheim (NO). Artists including biarritzzz , Kyriaki Goni , and Femke Herregraven explore “how algorithms affect us and how we could imagine them otherwise.” Johannesburg-based CUSS Group ’s The Pursuit of a True and Only Heaven (Disintegration Cycle) (2023, image), for example, recast Instagram’s Explore page as a trauma-inducing “snapshot of South African society.”
“We are in a quandary that demands careful critique, not easy derision, nor pat rejection. In terms of AI—the panoply of algorithmic softwares, predictive and surveillance technologies that the term represents—this is our 1970.”
– American arts writer and visual culture scholar
Charlotte Kent , drawing parallels between the birth of the U.S. environmental movement (1970 produced the Clean Air Act, Earth Day, and the EPA) and the difficulties to meaningfully engage around and regulate the AI revolution
“Synchronicity,” the largest-ever survey of United Visual Artists (UVA) sophisticated immersive installations, opens at London’s 180 Studios. Curated by Julia Kaganskiy , the exhibition presents works including the cosmic geometries of Musica Universalis (2016, image) alongside a new collaboration with Massive Attack’s Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja , which renders a deluge of algorithmically-generated data and headlines to disrupt the “sense of time, coherence, narrative, and consensus reality” of viewers.
“Digital art was already ‘canonized at MoMA’—fifty-five years ago, when they acquired Charles Csuri’s Hummingbird film in 1968, after showing it as part of their survey ‘The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.’”
– Buffalo AKG Art Museum Curator
Tina Rivers Ryan , refuting NFT collector
Cozomo de’ Medici ’s hyperbolic claim that the MoMA acquisition of Refik Anadol’s
Unsupervised (2022) marks a
new age of institutional recognition for digital art. “There’s no need to erase the many digital artists already in their collection,”
says Ryan.
At the New York trial of disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried , co-founder Gary Wang testifies the crypto exchange used a random number generator to create fake daily deposit values for an ‘insurance fund’ to reassure investors. Calculated by taking an arbitrary number around 7,500 multiplied by the platform’s daily volume and divided by a billion, the greatly embellished fund “was intended to protect FTX and its customers from losses due to unprofitable liquidations,” says Web3 critic Molly White.
“If you’re driving under the influence you can have your license revoked. These are the kinds of measures we need to see.”
– Space lawyer
Michelle Hanlon , endorsing the $150,000 USD
fine levied against American TV provider
DISH by the Federal Communications Commission for failing to move one of its satellites into a safe orbit. Hanlon and other experts herald the first ‘space junk’ fine as encouraging, given the dangerous mass of (2,000 and counting) dead satellites orbiting Earth.
“Market Makers,” the largest IRL exhibition curated by the JPG curatorial collective yet, opens at Studio Knecht/Wendelin in Berlin. A sub-exhibition within a bigger Berliner Volksbank initiative, the show assembles 30 digital artists working in the NFT space, including Mitchell F. Chan , Simon Denny , Sarah Friend , Jan-Robert Leegte , and Harm van den Dorpel to “surface and educate about the lore, history, and contemporary tensions between cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance.”
“The mirroring technique used by the editor is integrated with the use of silver ink and foil text on the front and back cover. It’s almost like the text is asking us to reflect on how much of ourselves we project into the machine.”
–
Neural editors, discussing
HOLO ’s third periodical,
Mirror Stage: Between Computability and Its Opposite (2022), in issue 72. Edited by writer and curator
Nora N. Khan ,
HOLO 3 “moves away from an obsession with the state of the art” and “reflects on the most pressing questions surrounding AI” and how they’re being discussed.
“Historically, civilizations can’t bear a 50% GDP loss. The stakes? Our very existence. This isn’t a drill—it’s a clarion call for our age. The real threat of civilizational collapse is closer than we think. Act now, or our future might be history.”
“ABORT, RETRY, FAIL,” Farah Al Qasimi ’s first London solo show, opens at the Delfina Foundation. Taking inspiration from Al Qasimi’s 1990s family computer, a major thread in the exhibition is works playfully exploring the “autonomy and disembodiment” of gaming and the early internet. In Anood Playing Sims (2023, image), for example, the UAE-born photographer depicts the self-referential loop of a vibrantly attired young woman with her attention fixed on a CGI desktop—much like her own.
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