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What Just Happened :
Claire L. Evans Assembles Fifty Key Sci-Fi Voices to “Terraform” Futurity
The Los Angeles-based writer discusses her new science fiction anthology, that she co-edited with Brian Merchant
“We’re both physicists—we quit our jobs as researchers and decided to do it.”
– Daniel Rayneau-Kirkhope and Arianna Casiragh, on feeling motivated to bike a zigzag route across 7 countries (GPS plotting a 7,250 km drawing in the process) to promote cycling as a climate crisis mitigation strategy
“We’re faced with a triple obsolescence: the death of the individual unit, the disappearance of manufacturers and suppliers, and the loss of knowledge of how they work and can be repaired.”
– CRT specialist
Jochen Saueracker , on the challenges of conserving Cathode-Ray Tube monitors. As part of the
Colorvac workshop (now part of the
ZKM ), the German artist who was once
Nam June Paik ’s video art roadie advocates for moving from ‘repair’ to ‘prepare for future use’ culture.
OUT NOW :
Merchant & Evans (Eds.)
Terraform
Brian Merchant and
Claire L. Evans’ formidable anthology compiles sci-fi short stories from 50 erudite writers
“I found myself wondering whether this ratio of governance participants to members is similar to past social institutions like bowling leagues, rotary societies, 4-H clubs, and others.”
–
Kickstarter and
Metalabel co-founder Yancey Strickler, reflecting on social DAO
Friends with Benefits ’ recent
festival . Ruminating on what is new and familiar about DAOs he asks “is this how social institutions like this have always been run, with a 10:1 worker-to-participant ratio?” [quote edited]
“We hear more of the story told from the perspective of an alligator refusing to leave the park, and an AI-resurrected Bald Cypress Tree, than the delusional architect and real estate company brokering that world.”
– CGI artist
Alice Bucknell , on the nonhuman voices in
Swamp City (2021). In her dark eco-fiction, Bucknell satirizes the “booming market of ecotourism and half-baked ecological theories that stem from neoliberal fantasies of a ‘hypernature.’”
DOSSIER :
Art historian
Zsofi Valyi-Nagy enters Vera Molnar’s “alternative exhibition spaces,” from research groups, to journals, to self-published books. By exploring ways of circulating her works and ideas outside of traditional art venues, the generative art luminary garnered an international, more open-minded audience. “I suggest we broaden this idea of showing work to
sharing work,” Valyi-Nagy writes.
“He is suspected of concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralized Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash. Multiple arrests are not ruled out.”
– Netherlands Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD), on the arrest of developer
Alexey Pertsev . A go-to transaction anonymizer used by money launderers, Tornado Cash also has benign
use cases ; the arrest and deplatforming of its developers has some
asking “is writing open source code illegal now?”
“The Fable of Net in Earth,” the 2022 ARKO Art & Tech Festival kicks off in Seoul. Inspired by decentralization (mycology, Web3), it brings together Morehshin Allahyari , SunJeong Hwang , and Young Joo Lee , and others. Featured works include Eobchaecoin (2022), Nahee Kim’s unabashedly ponzi cryptocurrency (it will be very profitable in 2082), and De Anima (2018-21, image), Clara Jo’s film probing humanity’s relationship with nature, that draws on footage from Kenya, Myanmar, and France.
“Using fear-mongering about package theft and suburban crime, a surveillance company has convinced countless homes to affix a surveillance network node. Now they want us to laugh about it all in our (ideally) Ring-surveilled homes.“
–
Motherboard staff writer
Edward Ongweso Jr , on the upcoming launch of
Ring Nation , Amazon’s new tv show featuring videos taken from Amazon Ring surveillance cameras
Dutch crypto artist Harm van den Dorpel releases the Mutant Garden Seeder desktop app to the general public. The software, previously exclusive to holders of his well-known NFT project, helps “aid the greater plan of decentralisation,” the website states. “This ‘read-only sidechain’ synchronises to Ethereum Mainnet, and lets your mutants live and grow on your own local computer.” Released in 2021, Mutant Garden Seeder comprises 512 generative unique Ethereum NFTs that evolve over time.
“When we look at AI images, we’re unable to match our subjectivity as viewers with the artist’s subjectivity as a creator. Instead of a particular human experience, we’re shown only averages.”
– Design strategist, curator, and writer
Kevin Buist , parsing the deluge of digital art created with AI image generators like
DALL-E . “AI is not exactly copying artists,” writes Buist. “It’s using their images to generalize visual depictions of everything language can express.”
An ethnographic exploration of the work and daily life of non-playable characters, Total Refusal ’s meta-documentary Hardly Working premieres (and wins best direction) at Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland. The film follows four digital extras—a laundress, a stableman, a street sweeper, a handyman—toiling away in the videogame Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). “Their labour loops, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.”
“Bodies are made up of this substance, which existed before bodies existed. Your water is the same as mine inside, but we’re very different people. Skin both links us to the outside world and separates us from it.”
What Just Happened :
Kyriaki Goni Weaves Counter-Narratives to Colonial Cosmologies and Space Expansionism
The Greek artist discusses the interplanetary ethics at the heart of her Warsaw Biennale installation
“In this framing, no one viewpoint is favored over another, not even the biological over the mineral or mechanical.”
– Writer and
In Search of Mycotopia (2021) author
Doug Bierend , on James Bridle invoking the “more-than-human” as a “mega-category” in their new book
Ways of Being . “It is a grouping so vast,” Bierend writes, “the category disappears, and the interactions within it are what matters.”
American logistics company UPS begins installing in-truck surveillance cameras. This summer drivers are reporting back-of-truck cargo area temperatures of 49° C, and in a move that made workers bristle, UPS rolled out Lytx telemetry cameras (image), which track GPS and monitor for “behaviours associated with collisions”—not air conditioning. “Whatever its capabilities, the mere presence of the camera has stoked fear and paranoia among my coworkers,” writes driver Matt Leichenger .
Pushing the vintage tv text and graphics standard into overdrive, 420 Years of Teletext is released at the Evoke demoparty in Cologne. Coder Losso managed to software-generate a teletext signal from a Raspberry Pi that, hooked up to an old-fashioned CRT television set, uses hardware exploits for nifty frame-buffering tricks (more on GitHub ). The result: a zany teletext origin story featuring smooth animations, pixel graphics, demoscene in-jokes, and a rocking chiptune track.
“If we look back to the beginnings of cinema, then perhaps Man With a Movie Camera might stack up as a strong critical reflection on the medium itself, but we wouldn’t ignore Metropolis and Battleship Potemkin .”
– Elliot Woods of the Seoul-based light art studio
Kimchi and Chips , on the merit of different kinds of (AI) art. “Value does not come from a work being critical, but instead from being ‘articulate,’ i.e. capable of processing and producing meaning,” writes Woods.
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