1,579 days, 2,409 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
“If the last-ever California tiger salamander shuffles off this mortal coil, the odds are decent that it will happen on rain-slick blacktop one damp spring night.”
– Environmental journalist
Ben Goldfarb , on how traffic accelerates extinction. “Every year American cars hit more than 1 million large animals, such as deer, elk, and moose, and as many as 340 million birds,” Goldfarb writes, with at least 21 species under direct existential threat from traffic. The poster groups for roadkill’s hidden toll: reptiles and amphibians, which are vital for local ecosystems.
Time magazine identifies the 100 people that drive the current AI boom and the conversations around it in a special issue. In addition to staple industry names like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario and Daniela Amodei, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Time 100 AI also highlights the work of AI researchers Kate Crawford , Timnit Gebru , and Meredith Whittaker , and artists Stephanie Dinkins , Sougwen Chun , and Holly Herndon , who “grapple with profound ethical questions” and try to use AI “to address social challenges.”
“What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI” opens at New York’s Ford Foundation Gallery. Curators Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan enlist 16 artists including Algorithmic Justice League , Morehshin Allahyari , Kite , Lauren Lee McCarthy , Mimi Ọnụọha , and Caroline Sinders to counter pervasive “algorithmic worldmaking” models with “feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI.” Allahyari’s series Moon-faced (2022, image), for example, hallucinates genderless Qajar dynasty portraits.
“Alexandra Asanova Elbakyan has strived to shatter academic publishing’s monopoly-like mechanisms in which publishers charge high prices even though authors of articles in academic journals receive no payment.”
– Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) membership advocate
Christian Romero , heralding
Alexandra Asanova Elbakyan as the recipient of the 2023 EFF Award for Access to Scientific Knowledge. Launched in 2011, Elbakyan’s
Sci-Hub platform has opened access to more than 88 million research documents.
The Hole’s yearly thematic group show, “Fembot,” opens at the New York gallery’s Bowery location, celebrating technology and the female form. “Representations of the female body are as vast as the internet, from futuristic robots to porous, sweaty flesh,” writes gallerist Kathy Grayson about the works of Salomé Chatrior , Auriea Harvey , Jordan Homstad , Faith Holland , Nicole Ruggiero , and others that range from “cyborg goddesses” to post-human grotesques. Case in point: CGI artist Emma Stern ’s 3d-printed ‘amphemme’ Brooke (2023, image).
“The beetles reached Ohio in 1869. England in 1875. France, 1922, and wherever they went, a defenceless plant got thoroughly routed.”
– Science writer
Dan Samorodnitsky , on the rapid spread of the
Colorado potato beetle . In his essay about a scientist battling “perhaps the most notorious agricultural pest on the planet,” Samorodnitsky provides a crash course on global potato farming, the history of pesticides, and new
RNAi (RNA interference) gene-targetting formulations used against the stubbornly resilient insect.
American artist Aay Liparato ‘s “Small Acts of Violence,” an exhibition surveying intimate partner violence (IPV) fallout in VR, opens at ARGOS Brussels. Co-producers C0N10UR and V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media join in presenting the immersive piece, which centres testimonials from women, nonbinary, and non-cis male IPV perpetrators from the UK and Belgium. Emotionally challenging, viewers must choose which situations to “gaze on or turn away from” and “assert their boundaries.”
Celebrating the Toronto artist-run centre’s 40th anniversary, “Remember Tomorrow: A Telidon Story” opens at InterAccess. Curator Shauna Jean Doherty present vintage works created with Telidon , a short-lived Canadian teletext and videotext service (similar to Minitel ) that saw a wave of early 1980s artistic exploration. Artists including Paul Petro , Geoffrey Shea , and Nell Tenhaaf share original Telidon works (restored by John Durno ) and contemporary digital artist Jerome Saint-Clair joins in.
“The Haring NFTs demonstrate that the smart contract can be a flexible tool, using metadata and code to accommodate the various needs and contexts of digital art.”
–
Outland ’s Brian Droitcour, on Web3 developers
Digital Practice setting a new standard for the blockchain-based sale and preservation of historical digital art. Having learned from the 2021
Warhol NFT controversy , the
forthcoming NFTs of Keith Haring’s Amiga drawings “offer both flexibility and fidelity, encompassing files suitable for display on today’s screens as well as a faithful replica of the original pixels in contemporary code.”
American software artist Casey Reas returns to Berlin’s DAM Projects with “Conjured Terrain,” a solo exhibition of new Untitled Film Stills and Compressed Cinema digital video works set to (and driven by) the electroacoustic soundscapes of German artist and composer Jan St. Werner. Building on a body of images ‘conjured’ from feature films fed to generative adversarial networks (GANs) in 2018, Reas revisits—and celebrates—the raw visual grammar of early machine learning experiments from that era.
“Slapping Pythagoras,” Angela Bulloch ’s first solo exhibition in Korea, opens at Esther Schipper, Seoul. Premiering new works alongside iconic historical pieces (e.g. from the Drawing Machine series), the show manifests Bulloch’s interest in “classical geometry, mathematics, and system theory.” Abacus Tablet (2023), for example, is a new series of glass sculptures that translates the motif of the ancient analogue computing device into an illuminated grid of 25 moveable cubes, waiting for input.
“The Amiga drawings are significant because they were created at the dawn of the consumer computer age. Even then, Keith knew that computers were going to be important to people’s lives as their capabilities continued to advance.”
– Gil Vazquez, executive director and president of
Keith Haring Foundation , on the forthcoming Christie’s
NFT auction of the pop art icon’s pixelations from the late 1980s. “Long stored on floppy disks, the drawings had never seen the light of day—until now,”
Artnet ’s Min Chen writes.
“While the view from above has historically been aligned to an imperial gaze, the use of commercial drones has co-opted this sightline as a part of protest against imperialism and colonisation.”
London-based future connoisseurs Superflux reveal The Ecological Intelligence Agency (EIA) (2023), a speculative proposal for an autonomous inter-departmental government agency that uses localised AI models to align labour, climate and data justice for eco advocacy. Commissioned by the UK Policy Lab and Defra Futures , and shown at “Changing Course” in June, EIA gives voice to fresh water systems to aid decision-making by “making river health sense-able and situating policies within wider contextual ecosystems.”
“Could Richard Spencer getting punched in the face be the new default sample material for image and video processing demonstrations? Only time will tell.”
– American artist
Sam Lavigne , on his bid to make a clip of smug white supremacist Richard Spencer
getting slugged (after the 2017 Trump Inauguration) a default in video processing tests. Contemplating how
Lena Forsén became a standard test image in computer vision contexts, Lavigne muses over using the Spencer clip for demos because it has “colour, motion, a human face, and embraces rather than shies away from the element of pleasure.”
“(Re)connecting.earth (02)—Beyond Water” the second Biennial of Art and Urban Nature opens in Geneva (CH). Building on the 2021 urban gardening theme, water ecologies are foregrounded through programming that activates shoreline Lake Geneva sites. Artists including Marie Griesmar , Carmen Perrin (image: Lignes de fuites , 2023), and Pinar Yoldas present works addressing aquatic biodiversity. Of note: the staging of Life Airborne System (1965) and two 1970s works by Hans Haacke .
“I’m not opposed to satellite imaging, but I’ve been in quite a few climate meetings where people suggested that if only we had more data and better images we’d finally address the crisis. That’s not true.”
– Canadian tech critic, author, and
Tech Won’t Save Us host
Paris Marx , pushing against the notion that better tools like
Satlas , the Allen Institute for AI’s machine learning-powered forest monitor, will lead to climate action. “Our data has been getting better for decades,” Marx argues, “and emissions have kept rising that whole time.”
“Exploring the Decentralized Web – Art on the Blockchain” opens at Basel’s HEK (House of Electronic Arts), concluding the institution’s recent excursion into Web3. HEK’s Sabine Himmelbach and Boris Magrini gather some of crypto art’s finest including Simon Denny , Mario Klingemann & Botto , Sarah Friend , Chloé Michel , Rhea Myers , Operator , Lukas Truniger and others, to lay bare the politics and potentials of the metaverse. Of note: Kyle McDonald’s Amends (2022), a potent eco-critical work that’s on view for the very first time.
“These billionaires purchased 55,000 acres to build their John Galt paradise, but they won’t pay a human artist to design it for them.”
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