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
Year
Month
Tag
Order
Custom
Filter
Trevor Paglen ’s solo exhibition “A Color Notation” opens at Pace’s recently expanded arts complex in Seoul. The show presents new and recent landscape photography (image: Near Bodega Bay Deep Semantic Image Segments , 2022) the American artist interpreted through custom-built computer vision systems and AI. “Through his masterful manipulation of these technologies, Paglen brings questions of perception to the fore of his image making practice,” Pace notes.
As the lacklustre presentation of NFTs even at major exhibitions and conferences continues to disappoint , Swiss software artist Andreas Gysin shares an “opinionated” mini-guide for newly-minted curators and organizers. Works that use the popular square aspect ratio, for example, suffer in particular on standard 16:9 screens, Gysin notes and offers three simple tricks that improve the overall composition. “The important thing is to NOT put it in the center!” (example on left).
“These cycles of boom and bust are incredibly destructive within organizations because people employed there feel like they don’t know where they stand.”
– Harvard Business School Professor
Sandra J. Sucher , commenting on Meta laying off 11,000 employees, the latest in a series of major Big Tech cutbacks
The V&A launches an online resource to explore their 3,000+ item Digital Art & Design collection. Thus far 574 items are posted, with initial highlights including Vera Molnar’s plotter drawing Structure of Squares (1974) and Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Radical Love (2016), a 3D-printed mask of Chelsea Manning’s face. Additional tools for researchers include two ‘selection boxes’ of noteworthy items, an incisive history of digital art, and a glossary of technical nomenclature.
“The rumours for this blowup seem so egregious and unnecessary to me. I can’t imagine running an exchange that makes mid-8 figures per day in revenue and thinking ‘how can we leverage this for more?’”
Artists Vladan Joler , Gordan Savičić , and scholar Felix Stalder launch Infrastructures of a Migratory Bird (2022), a data visualization of rewilding efforts of the Northern Bald Ibis in the European Alps. The iconic bird, regionally extinct since 1621, was reintroduced into its historic habitat in 2013. Hatched within ZHdK’s Latent Spaces research project, the map reveals the extent of the conservation infrastructure, from GPS satellite tracking, to data analysis, to cost.
“Big social media reduces interface friction to increase user engagement. The smoother your experience the more likely you’re the product. Celebrate moments of friction as opportunities to see, feel, grasp what the system is, who it works for, and who it makes most vulnerable.”
– American software artist
Ben Grosser , on the platform capitalism game plan—and how to navigate it
For Artnet , Vivienne Chow delves into South Korean projections of ‘soft power’ in the cultural sector. Patrons of recent exhibitions worldwide, South Korean corporations are praised for “listening to what we want to do,” by LACMA Director Michael Govan. Of note: Chow’s discussion of Hyundai , who, beyond pumping money into the sector, use the language of digital art (image: Hyundai Motorstudio Goyang ) to communicate brand values in concept showrooms worldwide.
“The good news is that we are halfway to making a true NerveGear. The bad news is that so far, I have only figured out the half that kills you.”
–
Oculus founder
Palmer Luckey , working on a new VR headset that will kill the user if they die in-game. Inspired by the NerveGear helmets in the
Sword Art Online anime, Luckey’s prototype features three explosive charges aimed at the player’s brain. “At this point, it’s just a piece of office art,” he reveals in his
personal blog , “a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design.”
OUT NOW :
Ilan Manouach
Fastwalkers
Co-created with AI (GAN, GPT-3) and a team of experts, Manouach’s
synthetic manga is a nonlinear meditation on deep learning that explores the inherent computational qualities of comics to play with the latent space lurking in the reader’s cognition.
Milan’s MEET Digital Culture Center launches a new exhibition series on digital art history with “GMM RELOADED,” a retrospective of the Italian multimedia art group Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici . Active from 1984 to 2004, GMM pioneered the genre of computer comics (using Apple IIs), video art, and performances. The show presents a complete history with all their works as well as an immersive re-actualization of their 1991 video installation Tecnomaya in Infotown .
“One of my co-workers described it as ‘like hack week, but with a gun to your head.’”
– Anonymous Twitter employee, on the intense pressure of (unachievable) 3-4 day software engineering deadlines imposed by Elon Musk as part of the billionaire’s frenzied shake-up of his newly acquired social media platform
The first-ever solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF opens at Perrotin, New York, presenting elaborate interventions that leverage the absurdity of late-stage capitalism. Transforming the gallery into an interactive strip mall, “No More Tears, I’m Lovin’ It” showcases the group’s art as merchandize. Spot’s Revenge (2022, image), for example, trolls Boston Dynamics with a heavily armed robot dog, after the manufacturer disabled the legally purchased unit remotely.
“When you hit corporate America, it hits back—MSCHF have been subject to innumerable cease and desist decrees and being de-platformed from social media and online payment services.”
“The Flipper Zero is not going to turn a legion of IT guys into Watch Dogs protagonists.”
– Tech journalist Chris Person, joking the wireless, NFC, and RFID-capable
Flipper Zero multi-tool (aka ‘Tamagotchi for hackers’) will
not transform its users into
clichéd cyberpunks
The New Angel , a digital image by Cao Fei and the latest edition of the “Safety Curtain” series, debuts in Vienna. Yearly since 1998, artists including Tauba Auerbach , Matthew Barney , and Joan Jonas have turned the Vienna State Opera house safety curtain into a temporary exhibition space—Fei shared her CGI avatar. “She silently observes the real world through the heavy layer of the stage curtain, without giving any answer,” says the Chinese artist.
“These works consisted of painted boxes and floppy disks describing the imaginary software, which was so hypothetical that it could only be suggested by invented titles and handmade images.”
“SIREN,” a solo exhibition by Canadian-German-Jamaican artist nichola feldman-kiss , opens at Toronto’s Koffler Gallery. Extending her ongoing critique of colonialism, it presents eponymous Siren III (2022, image), underwater video with ambisonic recordings of vocal ululations to capture the migratory flows across the “geo-cultural corridor that is the north Atlantic,” and Siren IV (2021, image left), glacial CGI forms rendered on digital tapestries.
Central London live music venue Outernet debuts a new kinetic identity designed by type and motion studios NaN and DBLG . Dense and dynamic, a grid of animated wordmarks and mutating colourful 3D forms scroll across the venue’s prominent 200 m media façade. NaN describes their contributed custom tilted display monospace typeface as drawing inspiration from “coding vernacular,” a graphic “doubling down on the tech-oriented physical internet identity of the venue.”
Load More
To dive deeper into Stream, please
Log-In or become a
HOLO Reader .
Daily discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture: Get full access by becoming a HOLO Reader !
Perspective : research, long-form analysis, and critical commentaryEncounters : in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovatorsStream : a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and countingEdition : HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print
Become a HOLO Reader