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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“We expect that our decision will encourage other developers to bring animal biotechnology products forward for the FDA’s risk determination, paving the way for [genome-edited] animals to more efficiently reach the marketplace.”
– The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA)
Steven Solomon , on the agency’s approval of the first
CRISPR cows. The new breed was ‘engineered’ to endure climate change: their slick, short hair is said to help the animals cope with hot weather.
“When I was pregnant, I had this powerful experience of understanding myself as a vessel or a container for another voice.”
– Sound artist
Aura Satz , reflecting on
Ventriloqua (2003-4), a performance in which the artist played the electromagnetic waves of her (late pregnancy) belly using a
theremin
OUT NOW :
Wershler, Emerson & Parikka
The Lab Book
Darren Wershler ,
Lori Emerson , and
Jussi Parikka reveal the history of media labs, sites where the “materials and aesthetics of technical modernity were developed”
A solo show by Russian digital artist Olia Lialina opens at Pasadena, California’s And/Or Gallery. Mixing long term project Online Newspapers (2004-18) with newer ones including False Memories (2020) and Lossless (2018-22, image)—browser studies, GIF fragmentation—the exhibition draws a through line connecting Lialina’s interests past and present. “She has become an expert and champion of free-form early net culture and aesthetics,” write the And/Or team.
After ‘squatting’ the Ethereum domain of Germany’s Bundeskunsthalle in July 2021, provoking questions about ownership of public art institutions, German artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl and the Berlin-based Department of Decentralization launch Strike DAO , an “experiment in participatory governance of blockchain art institutions.” Three models are put up for a vote, and visualized through a vote-based re-edit of Steyerl’s eponymous 2010 video piece .
“It’s really tough to find the right words that really mean anything in a situation like this.”
– Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, acknowledging the grim situation in Ukraine to a
South by Southwest audience, before hyping up the metaverse
American artist Molly Soda ’s Cleaning My Desktop (2018) opens at /rosa in Berlin. In the cheeky video -based work, Soda green screens herself onto her computer and performs various acts of handiwork and space organizing—conflating knowledge work and domestic labour. The case study of how “the figure of the artist treats the desktop as a physical space” is installed at panke.gallery and Zentrum für Netzkunst ’s project space through April 9th.
“Our expansion as a company over the years was made possible by our work with government agencies in the military and intelligence sectors in the United States, whose leaders took an interest in software and understood its potential to reshape national defense.”
– Palantir CEO
Alexander C. Karp , analyzing post-Ukraine invasion geopolitics and calling for for Europe to wake up to the (what
he describes as) necessary partnership between Big Tech and the liberal democratic state
An installation version of Timothy Thomasson ’s CGI film Slow Track (2021) opens at Montreal’s ELEKTRA Gallery. Putting the self-described “slow CGI” artist’s philosophy into (in)action, the film scans mundane, messy, and unremarkable scenes—to contrast the bombastic VFX and gleaming product shots the medium is often associated with. “Rather than a CG image that seduces us with excess, this one asks for patience,” writes Thomasson.
“My memory now feels like a memory of a real place. I remember the time of day, the weather, who was there, what we were wearing, and the excitement I felt seeing a giant grey cube floating above the landscape.”
–
Kalonica Quigley , Australian indie game-maker and part of the
Red Dead Online (2018) playing foursome in the new documentary
The Grannies , on exploring the game’s forbidden reaches before developer Rockstar Games patched them out of existence
At 94 years of age, Austrian computer art pioneer Herbert W. Franke sends his first tweet. Wowing his (quickly accumulating) followers with one of his Oszillogramme , a series of photographic captures of oscilloscope forms Franke generated with a DIY analog computer in 1954, the artist, scientist, writer, and Ars Electronica co-founder pledges to share more of his art on social media—much to the delight of Twitter’s digital art community.
“It shows us how the software structures of social media change not only what we read but how we read. As an aesthetic reductive interface experience, it provides renewed opportunities for agency within the systems we all find ourselves stuck inside.”
–
Ben Grosser , reflecting on “Software, Interface, and
The Endless Doomscroller .” In the paper, the American software artist discusses reactions to his 2020
internet artwork and “reduction as a strategy that shows rather than hides.”
“The economy didn’t burn down, energy prices didn’t soar, the GDP didn’t drop, and unemployment didn’t spike. The economists making these estimates are the true alarmists in the debate.”
– Climate scientist
Andrew Dessler , rejecting cost-benefit analyses when it comes to climate action. The first step towards saving the planet, writes Dessler, is ignoring “economists who have relentlessly downplayed the seriousness of climate change and overstated the costs of solving it.”
Kimchi and Chips co-founder Elliot Woods shares stunning simulation views of Another Moon , the studio’s outdoor light art installation that premiered at the 2021 NEW NOW Festival in Essen, Germany. Created in the 3D software Blender, the technical visualization shows how the architecture of 40 solar-powered laser projectors rendered a perfect sphere into the nights sky—a “second moon” visible from up to 1km away.
“This experiment could, therefore, confirm both information conjectures and the existence of information as the fifth state of matter in the universe.”
–
Melvin M. Vopson , physicist and University of Portsmouth senior lecturer, proposing an experimental protocol for measuring the information content of elementary particles. The method, Vopson claims, validates his 2019
theory that “a bit of information is not only physical, but has a finite and quantifiable mass” with profound implications for the digital data we create on a planetary scale.
Part of a series on AI in everyday life, Steve Lohr explores the quest to end chatbot’s “spiral of misery.” The technology journalist notes that despite the fact that players including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle saw decent growth in their chatbot markets this year, frustrating user experiences—a bot can’t discern or misinterprets commands—continue to mar interactions with AI. Surprisingly, training customer service chatbots is the frontline of making AI more competent, due to the vast number of call centre recordings and text interactions available to data scientists—systems like GM Financial’s chatbot Nanci are moving towards 75 percent query resolution. And where will this newfound efficiency be deployed? Healthcare. AI can “help us move from reactive sick care to proactive, predictive and personalized care,” says Anthem.ai ’s Rajeev Ronanki.
Ełexiìtǫ ; Ehts’ǫǫ̀ / Connected ; Apart From Each Other , Casey Koycan ’s installation about cultural transmission and memory, opens at Toronto’s InterAccess. In the work, speaker-containing logs are suspended from trusses, and pipe a mix of Dene drum, electronic instruments, guitar, and chanting into the gallery. “The resonance of sound and song from within the logs emphasize the steps towards finding the connection to culture,” writes the Tlicho Dene artist.
Exposing the deep links between technocapitalism and ecocide, Joana Moll ’s newest installation Inanimate Species premieres at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) as part of her eponymous solo show. The Spanish artist and researcher correlates the exponential growth of CPUs with the dramatic decline of insect species in recent decades by arranging 19,125 pinned specimen images—from Intel’s 4004 to the Orchid Bee—into a large-scale mural.
Findings from “Beyond Matter: Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality,” a project by ZKM , Centre Pompidou , Museum Ludwig , and others, are posted. Hatched during the pandemic, they include research on exhibition web design and commissioning ‘born digital’ content. The initiative also fostered digitization experiments, including a playful AR version of Komar & Melamid ’s Project For Lenin’s Statue (1993).
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