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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“So we’re in a very psychotic moment, where we’re trying to figure out consequences. Humanity itself may soon be ‘cancelled’ by climate change … the fish are going to get cancelled in a couple decades and then we’re fucked, right? That’s all looming over this—death is the great canceller.”
Combining photography, poetry, and monumental pixel builds, Ender Gallery’s inaugural resident Cat Haine opens the Minecraft exhibition space with a “playful transfeminist intervention.” Exploring the platform’s potential for queer and trans intimacies, Haine’s “(g)Ender Gallery” features a colossal reconstruction of the artist’s surgically-constructed vagina that contains text and images reflecting upon her transition.
”These gangs figure out, here’s a bunch of internet-facing devices, here are vulnerabilities that give us access to them, and here are the IP ranges of a bunch of big industrial companies. Cool, let’s go big game hunting .”
– Critical infrastructure security firm
Dragos CEO Rob Lee, on the Colonial Pipeline hacking, an “extreme randsomware” attack causing fuel shortages across the U.S. East Coast
SFMOMA’s “Nam June Paik” presents 200 works by the pioneering video and installation artist in a major retrospective. It takes a show of this scale to weigh Paik’s influence on media art, and key works like TV Chair (1968), TV Garden (1974, image), and Sistine Chapel (1993) are included. The middle work of that trio “epitomizes one of Paik’s great strengths,” says co-curator Andrea Nitsche-Krupp , “the ability to revisit, permutate, and recombine ideas, images, and concepts into newly generative work.”
Opening at Jane Lombard Gallery, New York, “Doku: Digital Alaya” puts Chinese CGI artist LuYang ’s latest digital avatar front and centre. Created with a team of scientists, technologists, and 3D animators using motion capture, the non-binary, androgynous Doku appears in six virtual environments, each representing a Buddhist realm of reincarnation. Displayed on light-boxes, in videos, and installations, “the artist is reborn repeatedly,” extending life’s cycle into cyberspace.
“Those ten years are also ten years of my life, a trajectory from books to web to art and round and round and round again, drones, datacentres, self-driving cars and flamingos; unnumbered conferences, weird conversations and C-Beams glittering in the dark.”
–
James Bridle , reflecting on a decade of
The New Aesthetic , their (highly influential) research blog that documents “new ways of seeing the world” under the current technological regime
An output of this year’s entirely online edition of Rewire festival (NL), Instance Terrain Crawler launches. A browser-based offshoot of MSHR ’s (Birch Cooper & Brenna Murphy ) “sculptural electronic systems,” its wonky 3D environs are both explorable and interactive. Full of blocky totemic forms—objects and waveforms oscillate in unison—its loud polychromy and gloppy synthesized sounds evoke a demented Minecraft world, the likes of which could only emerge from the Pacific Northwest.
“The mainstream capial-A Art institutions are the Titanic , and crowdfunding, Discord, and the communities we’re trying to cultivate are a liferaft. In the long term, my objective is to re-dock with the institutions, once they’ve course-corrected to avoid the giant neoliberal iceberg.”
– Online subculture researcher
Joshua Citarella , on how major institutions are asleep at the wheel and have neither the knowledge nor capacity to engage important grassroots cultural production
OUT NOW :
Jer Thorp
Living in Data
Canadian data artist
Jer Thorp compiles “A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future” that charts hopeful paths through the age of surveillance capitalism wherein our data is mined for profit, power, and political gain.
“It’s like a perpetual project that refers to the labour of building an archive that can sustain itself, and also being open to revision forever as a feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial project.”
Known for translating complex cultural matter into tantalizing visualizations, data artist Jer Thorp shares a tongue-in-cheek Venn diagram that suggests a strong correlation between early Flash euphoria and the current NFT boom. Thorp also provides a data point for exceptions to the rule: “I had a Flash ‘experiments’ website in 2001,“ he disclaims on Twitter, ”and I am not really into NFTs.”
“By asking his collectors to immolate their receipts, Klein took his immaterial works out of circulation, leaving the buyer with nothing but a sensibility; the NFT is the receipt’s revenge, leaving its collector with nothing but an asset.”
–
Tina Rivers Ryan , media art historian and curator at Buffalo’s
Albright-Knox Art Gallery , invoking Yves Klein’s
Zones de sensibilité picturale immaterielle (1959–62) to elicidate “the true perversity of using NFTs to sell digital art”
“Who’s the spacesuit behind the wheel? Well, that’s the Kybernaut, of course.”
–
Zentrum für Netzkunst ’s Anneliese Ostertag, answering visitor questions about
KYBERNET , a programmable toy car included in the “Calculating Control” exhibition. Manufactured in East Germany in the 1970s, KYBERNET was supposed to introduce kids to the concept of cybernetics—which, at the time, was viewed as vital for the success of socialism.
“As much as we celebrate digital art and its democratization—where’s the acknowledgement from the NFT crowd of the thousands of people who develop the tools used to make the hot-selling works NFT platforms are being flooded with?”
Marking the wrap-up of “Recent Sculpture ” at David Kordansky Gallery Los Angeles, Natalie Haddad reflects on Fred Eversley for Hyperallergic. Associated with the 1960s Light and Space movement, Eversley has explored lens-forms, related materialities, colour, and refraction for five decades. Losing herself in the parabolic sculptures, Haddad writes they “…appear to float in space; looking through the deep royal blue of one work feels like staring into the cosmos or an oceanic abyss.”
“It’s dated January 17th 1995, which means that three weeks after I started thinking about networks, my instinct was to visualize them.”
– Network scientist
Albert-László Barabási , tells the tale of his very first visualization during a digital opening of “
BarabásiLab. Hidden Patterns ” at ZKM Karlsruhe. A 2D lattice, the 26-year old graphic he describes mathematically models how water seeps into the ground [quote edited].
To demonstrate Ethereum’s greener future, software engineer and Rocket Pool contributor Joe Clapis runs lightweight proof of stake validator Nimbus on a Rasberry Pi, a 10,000 mAh power bank, and SSD—powering 10 validators for 10 hours. “The Pi consumes 5 watts, so that comes to around 0.1 KWh of energy per day, or 0.01KWh per validator,” notes the Status Network. “In other words, 3600 times more energy efficient than Bitcoin proof of work—a 99.97% reduction in power.”
“What did the chicken say after he got hit by a bus? ‘I’m gonna be fine!’ ”
– Martins Frolovs’ unfunny
GPT-2 comedian , quoted by data scientist
Thomas Winters in “Computers Learning Humor Is No Joke,” a consideration of computational humour’s many challenges. A tough room unto themselves, Winters’ critique of GPT-2 comedy: “the generated jokes are reminiscent of the ones children make, who understand the format of a joke but do not yet understand the formation of a punchline.”
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