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
Amsterdam’s NEMO Science Museum unveils a giant meatball made from cultivated woolly mammoth flesh. Created to spark conversations about sustainable meat alternatives, food engineers from the Australian cultured meat company Vow inserted sheep cells with the mammoth myoglobin gene. “When it comes to meat, myoglobin is responsible for the aroma, the colour and the taste,” James Ryall, Vow’s Chief Scientific Officer explains. Where Vow’s mammoth DNA sequence had gaps, African elephant DNA was spliced in for completion.
“Starting April 15th, only white nationalists with 30 followers will be in ‘For You’ recommendations.”
–
Eve 6 band leader and
Buzzfeed columnist Max Collins,
responding to Elon Musk’s announcement of Twitter Blue favouritism. Cited in
Mashable reporter Matt Binder’s analysis of the social media company’s flailing subscription game, Collin’s tweet rings true: Half of Twitter Blue users have less than 1,000 followers and comprise “far right wing accounts, cryptocurrency scammers, and hardcore Elon Musk supporters.”
Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023)
Japanese composer
Ryuichi Sakamoto dies after a battle with cancer. Co-founder of
Yellow Magic Orchestra in the 1970s, his film scores earned an Oscar and a Grammy, and he was a fierce post-
Fukushima disaster climate activist. Collaborator
Carsten Nicolai lauds Sakamoto for recognizing “conversations between different and unusual styles may be the future.”
“We conclude that LLMs such as GPTs exhibit traits of general-purpose technologies, indicating that they could have considerable economic, social, and policy implications.”
–
OpenAI ,
OpenResearch , and
UPenn researchers, on the potential impacts of recent AI advances. “With access to a large language model (LLM), about 15% of all worker tasks in the U.S. could be completed significantly faster at the same level of quality,” they suggest in a new paper. “When incorporating software and tooling built on top of LLMs, this share increases to between 47-56% of all tasks.”
“People think that everything lasts forever on the internet but it falls apart. Without real caretaking and maintenance, everything you make is destined to disappear.”
–
DIS Magazine ’s
Lauren Boyle , on the struggle to keep online content presentable. “Three years is about the shelf life of any piece—before you start to get some kind of digital rot,” adds
New Models ’
Caroline Busta , in conversation about the publication and
curatorial collective Boyle co-founded in 2010.
“In the same way that English language emotion concepts have colonized psychology, AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions.”
– American UX designer and health futurist
Jenka Gurfinkel , on the proliferation of the American smile as “distinct cultural histories and meanings of facial expressions become mischaracterized, homogenized, subsumed under the dominant dataset”
Celebrating her pioneering “seer-like spaces and live surveillance situations,” the retrospective “Julia Scher: Maximum Security Society” opens at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach (DE). The “essayistic survey” scans the American artist’s entire oeuvre of power and gaze-focused works, from Predictive Engineering , her live camera installations iterated at SFMOMA over the years (1993-2016), through Delta (Radio) and Planet Greyhound , both produced for her recent Kunsthalle Gießen exhibition (2022).
ZKM Karlsruhe opens “Renaissance 3.0,” a major celebration of “new alliances of art and science in the 21st century.” The last exhibition curated by ZKM’s late director Peter Weibel brings together 35 artistic positions by Tega Brain , James Bridle , Anna Dumitriu , Tomás Saraceno , and Saša Spačal that “open up multidisciplinary knowledge bases” and “new fields of research.” A visualization of such entanglements offers Wissensfeld (2023, image), Weibel’s final artistic collaboration.
“Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society—owning, preserving, and lending books.”
– Internet Archive founder
Brewster Kahle , responding to a federal judge siding with four major publishers in a lawsuit against the nonprofit digital library over its Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program. “This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors,” states Kahle, “and we plan to appeal it.”
”New Surroundings: Approaching the Untouchable,” an exhibition organized by Molior that delves deep into the digital sublime, opens at Montreal’s Livart . Curated by Nathalie Bachand , it features artists including Caroline Gagné , Olivia McGilchrist , François Quévillon (image: MÉTÉORES , 2017-18), and Sabrina Ratté presenting works in print, installation, video, and VR that explore extreme tensions between ”modified, reorganized, and augmented” digitality and nature.
Resurfacing fabled 18th century partially-dissected wax figures used in the study of anatomy, “Cere Anatomiche” opens at Fondazione Prada Milan, presenting four anatomical venuses and 72 drawings from the La Specola collection alongside a companion film by David Cronenberg . Entitled Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection , the Canadian director’s short dwells on how the figures’ uncanny “body language and facial expressions do not display pain or agony.”
“Grids are emblematic of the array—the fundamental data structure around which all computer hardware and software is built. So, the grid is a natural visual form for computer–based digital art, and the aesthetic implications of this are far-reaching.”
– Generative artist
Tyler Hobbs , on the enduring technological relevance of (the often grid-based works of)
Agnes Martin . Reflecting on the late American painter in advance of his show “
QQL: Analogs ,” Hobbes enthuses “her work has taught me to take a closer look.”
The final instalment in a trilogy of exhibitions fixating on highrises, Jesse Colin Jackson ’s “Mackenzie Place” opens at Toronto’s Pari Nadimi Gallery. Venturing to Hay River in the Northwest Territories, the Canadian artist shot a year of time-lapse photography atop Mackenzie Place—the near arctic town’s lone skyscraper. The resulting panoramic video tracks daily and seasonal flux and is bolstered by audio of oral histories about the mining town collected by anthropologist Lindsay Bell .
Foregrounding daylight and circadian rhythms in an era of deleterious screen time, “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time” opens at EPFL Pavillions in Lausanne (CH). Featured are works both evocative and therapeutic, “to remind us of the necessity of regular light exposure for a healthy life,” from artists including Kirell Benzi , Olafur Eliasson , and Anna Ridler . Helga Schmid presents a full-on sleep pod (image: Circadian Dreams , 2022), in which visitors laze and soak up LED lighting calibrated to optimize natural body phases.
“If TurboTax is Dark UI, Tax Heaven 3000 is Pink UI, the nightcore of tax software.”
–
MSCHF co-founder Dan Greenberg, on
Tax Heaven 3000 (image, 2023), a forthcoming dating simulator that allows Americans to court Iris, “a cheerful and easygoing girl who is oddly interested in your personal finances,” while doing their taxes
“Wanna talk about ‘PC music?’ It’s one cello sample and a computer, baby.”
–
100 gecs ’ Dylan Brady and Laura Les, enthusing about the origins of the
THX deep note , the characterful chord that sounds before many motion pictures. Gushing about getting clearance to use it to kickoff their
new album , Les describes the
soundmark as “beautiful and terrifying.”
Eliot Higgins , Founder and Creative Director of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat , rattles Twitter with a series of deepfakes depicting Donald Trump’s arrest. Created using the latest version of Midjourney in anticipation of the rumoured bust, the AI-generated images show dramatic (and dramatically convincing) scenes of the former U.S. president wrangling cops and being taken in. In the real world, the Manhattan grand jury investigating Trump has yet to vote on an indictment.
“Just as quarantining helped slow the spread of the virus and prevent a sharp spike in cases that could have overwhelmed hospitals’ capacity, investing more in safety would slow the development of AI and prevent a sharp spike in progress that could overwhelm society’s capacity to adapt.”
–
Vox senior reporter
Sigal Samuel , making the case for “flattening the curve” of AI progress
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