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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“Talking to the user interface layer rather than to the AI layer is like talking to Robocop when really you’re trying to talk to Murphy.”
–
Kimchi and Chips co-founder Elliot Woods, critiquing Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s
ChatGPT interview style. The Channel 4 News host merely scratched the tool’s semi-scripted surface to reveal what creator
OpenAI wants people to see, Woods notes. “In order to get past that mask you must
not ask it a question that it is programmed to answer, but one that requires all of its unconscious thinking to respond to.” [quote edited]
The 2022 Kochi-Muziris Biennale opens in Kochi, India, proclaiming “In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire.” Featuring 100 contributing artists including CAMP (image: Bombay Tilts Down , 2022), Christine Sun Kim , Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR), DISNOVATION.ORG , and Sahil Naik , the truly global roster of practices shows how ‘a commons’ is not “in stasis till activated” but “prolific, shapeshifting, and impure,” writes curator Shubigi Rao .
“Metaverse homeowners associations. Metaverse building permit red tape. Metaverse NIMBYs. Metaverse property liens. Metaverse neighbourhood watch.”
– Software engineer and Web3 watchdog
Molly White , anticipating “other horrific parts of the system of homeownership get recreated virtually” after Decentraland
announced it now allows land owners to rent out property
“Data Relations,“ a group show addressing contemporary mediated social and power relations in “profound, humorous, poetic“ ways, opens at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne. Curated by Miriam Kelly , artists including Zach Blas , Lauren Lee McCarthy , Machine Listening , Mimi Ọnụọha (image: These Networks In Our Skin , 2021), and Winnie Soon contribute data-focused projects that look “beyond the technological mirage of abstraction, false neutrality, and obfuscation.“
“Cognitive assemblages are collectivities—not exclusively human, not exclusively organic—through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate.”
– Scholar
N. Katherine Hayles , explaining her terminology for thinking systems that does not privilege thought by organisms or “leave machines out of the picture.” Her lecture “Detoxifying Cybernetics: From Homeostasis to Autopoiesis and Beyond,” caps a
series reconsidering cybernetics for the 21st century.
Jan Robert Leegte ’s solo exhibition “Document Performance | Permanence” opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. Juxtapozing the Dutch artist’s Repositions (2018) series and Window #219 from the eponymous NFT collection (2022), the show explores software as performance and, conversely, sculpture. Both series are web-based constructs made in HTML DOM . The former renders dynamic documents in your browser, the latter lives on-chain and “behaves and feels like hardware.”
A self-survey of Berlin-based bioartists Margherita Pevere , Theresa Schubert , and Karolina Żyniewicz , “Membranes Out of Order” opens at Kunstquartier Bethanien, bringing their research practices into conversation. The show presents key works that explore the ethics of emergent biotechnology and life’s tendency for “uncertainty, failure, surprise, and disobedience.” Also on view: a plethora of production paraphernalia that reveals the “unseen materials” of bioart.
“There’s this terror, but there’s also this opportunity for this whole new breed of democratic technologies—that can help govern the very technologies that are causing the problems.”
– AI and tech policy researcher
Aviv Ovadya , on how post-
ChatGPT language models have the
potential to be democratic ‘consensus engines,’ if during creation and governance, they engage (rather than mine) broad publics
A solo show featuring Beeple ’s HUMAN ONE opens at M+ Hong Kong. Better known for its $29 million price tag than its gravitas, Mike Winkelmann’s wrap-around 16K video sculpture depicts “the first human born in the metaverse.” A beneficiary of the 2021 bull market and NFT boom, the work is now touring globally despite the fact the market that launched Beeple has tanked. Fittingly, Winkelmann will deliver a keynote titled “Beeple Crashes the Art World,” the day after the opening.
“The Google Street View data set is often stunning and often useful. But as a project, it was a grotesque violation of worldwide privacy norms that absolutely never should have happened.”
– American writer
Joanne McNeil , reminding us that
between 2007-10 , Street View cars
also collected emails, passwords, and other private information from WiFi networks in more than 30 countries. “We should never take a project at such a scale at face value,” McNeil warns.
“A dreamy Edisonian wonderland awaits, where a rolling landscape of electrical conduits and vintage-style lightbulbs undulates like waves, or like gentle hills or playground jungle gyms.”
– Art critic
Shana Nys Dambrot , describing
Nancy Holt ’s
Electrical Systems (1982) at
Sprüth Magers Los Angeles. “It feels good to see this erasure being corrected,” Dambrot says of the inclusion of 1960s photo series by the land artist, noting similar work by Holt’s male peers has (historically) received more attention.
OUT NOW :
Metalabel x co—matter
After the Creator Economy
A physical and digital zine with contributors including
Amber Case ,
Kei Kreutler , and
Mat Dryhurst exploring new ways to produce, distribute, and monetize creative work online
“Remember when your teacher showed super old films in art class? Showing students digital art from 15 years ago feels exactly like that. In my memory these pieces are giants but you only find tiny JPGs or 360p YouTube videos.”
– Artist and educator
Aram Bartholl , lamenting the poor documentation of much of digital art’s history
“Abstain from romanticized post-rationalizations.”
– Software artist
Karsten Schmidt , in “Personal Considerations for Creating Generative Art,” an itemized collection of methods and models to aid algorithmic creativity.
Not a dogmatist, he notes his suggestions are “fluid, incomplete, and highly subjective.”
The Hong Kong Design Institute (HKDI) Gallery opens “Hylozoism,” a group exhibition of five “neo-nature” ecologies. The included works by Philip Beesley , Keith Lam , Ellen Pau , Ryuichi Sakamoto & Daito Manabe , and fuse* propose a state of techno-symbiosis—“an endless cycle of mutual benefits and coexistence.” Lam’s newly commissioned TTTV Garden , for example, reimagines Nam June Paik’s 1974 TV Garden as a vertical farm that feeds on the 24-hour news cycle.
“…I am prone to circumnavigate video installations. Are monitors curved or flat, LED or liquid crystal? Power cords—are they a tangle, discreetly bundled, altogether hidden?”
– Artist and educator
Sowon Kwon , sharing her rubric for evaluating the installation of video-based work, in an attentive review of Paul Pfeiffer’s
Red Green Blue (2022) at Paula Cooper Gallery
“Chronos/Synthesis,” a solo show by Canadian artist Oliver Pauk , opens at Toronto’s J Spot Gallery . For the window gallery show, Pauk presents an array of 3D printed, CNC milled, and hand carved sculptures alongside video and AR works. The selection underscores two driving interests: rendering pure digital form, and his efforts “to replicate the patterns and aesthetics of automated, computerized processes” in more traditional mediums (image: Object #90 , 2017).
“Handles like ‘Gorgon Horror,’ ‘The Wizard,’ and ‘Einstein’ were common. My brother’s name was ‘Blue Dragon,’ and his favourite colour was blue. My favourite colour was red, so I picked ‘Red Wolf.’ I liked wolves.”
– Journalist and tech historian
Benji Edwards , on the 1992 kickoff of his “secret life as an 11-year-old
BBS sysop ,” in a memoir about his (pre-World Wide Web) introduction to online culture
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