1,578 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“With all of its superlatives, this book describes something bordering on the divine, which bears no resemblance to the automated decision systems that are currently developed by AI companies.”
–
Meredith Whittaker and
Lucy Suchman , shredding Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher’s new book
The Age of AI . It frames AI as inevitable and Big Tech as “too important to the American national interest to regulate or to break up,” they write.
“Neural networks are anti-fragile. Attacking makes them stronger. So-called adversarial attacks are rarely adversarial in nature. Most often they are used to fortify a neural network.”
– American artist and anti-surveillance researcher
Adam Harvey , admitting defeat in the face of AI-powered computer vision systems. In his landmark project
CV Dazzle (2010), Harvey famously defeated the CCTV-era
Viola–Jones Haar Cascade face detection algorithm with low-cost makeup and hair hacks—a tactic he now deems no longer relevant. “Resistance can only happen at a collective level,” Harvey argues.
“Sculpted in Our Image, Forged in Our Minds,” an online exhibition curated by Tristan Sauer , launches as part of the InterAccess Current program. Featured artists Mads Brimble , Benjamin Chang , Cezar Mocan , and others explore “the erosion between digital and physical spaces” with works spanning animation and interactive embeds. Sarah Boo ’s Zoom Princess (2021, image), for example, transforms video chat tedium into visual recursion, and an unruly subject escaping the grid.
“The sunniest place in the world, Azerbaijan, is only four times sunnier than the cloudiest place in the world, Norway. Contrast this with how oil is distributed, you’ll see that the places with the most oil have a million times as much as the places with the least.”
“Talking about building this city beside a volcano is like thinking you are rich because you live next to a bank.”
–
Ricardo Navarro , El Salvadoran ecologist and head of the country’s Center of Appropriate Technology (CESTA), on President Nayib Bukele’s plans for a “Bitcoin City” powered by volcanoes. “Geothermal still costs more than oil, otherwise we would already be using more of it,” Navarro notes. Geothermal energy also needs steam and groundwater, Navarro adds, “but we already have problems with not enough water in El Salvador.”
Clemenger BBDO and University of Tasmania researchers announce the construction of Earth’s Black Box , a steel monolith filled with solar-powered tech for documenting the planetary crisis. “If the Earth does crash as a result of climate change, this indestructible recording device will be there for whoever’s left to learn from that,” states Clemenger BBDO’s Jim Curtis. Due for completion on the west coast of Tasmania in 2022, data collection has already begun.
A new site-specific iteration of Robert Irwin ’s iconic Light and Space installation opens at Kraftwerk Berlin. Commissioned by the LAS Foundation, the American artist who pioneered the Light and Space movement of the 1960s intervenes in Kraftwerk’s notable brutalist architecture with a 16 x 16 metre matrix of white and, for the first time, blue fluorescent light tubes to immerse audiences and explore, in his own words, “how art structures the way we see the world.”
“The revival of pixel art may be a quest for the kind of variety and texture that massive social-media networks have gradually banished, a harkening back to a messier, more human moment in our digital lives.”
Danja Vasiliev announces that Vending Private Network (2018), an artwork he created with fellow critical engineer Julian Oliver , was banned from display at Moscow’s soon-to-open Cryptography Museum . The installation sets up a virtual private network (VPN) as publicly funded infrastructure (taking cues from condom vending machines). A way around government censorship and surveillance, VPNs are deemed illegal by the Russian state, Vasiliev explains on Twitter.
“This is the case of someone that thinks they’re just messing around on a computer but is actually changing the world. These days AI is a lot of people insisting that they’re changing the world while really just fooling around on a computer.”
–
Os Keyes , PhD student at the University of Washington’s Department of Human Centred Design & Engineering, on the 1983 American Cold War classic
WarGames
OUT NOW :
Flash Art #337
Includes a special section entitled “Crypto Art‘s New Ecology,” featuring a roundtable, a rumination on the prehistory of crypto, and a conversation with
Simon Denny
“Cities are the result of a meticulously managed infrastructure. They need a sanitation department to make sure that garbage doesn’t pile up in the streets, and transit authorities to keep the trains on time. They need bureaucrats, not visionaries.”
– Writer
Charlie Warzel , commenting on Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg’s retreat “from their bloated, boring second incarnations of the internet” for
Web3 ’s greener pastures. “It’s the dreamers moving on,” he writes of the CEO duo, abandoning the mess of Twitter and Facebook for shiny new vistas.
Curated by Chris Clarke and Anaïs Nony, “Data Streams: Art, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence,” opens at The Glucksman in Cork, Ireland. Featuring work from Benjamin Gaulon , Addie Wagenknecht , and Suzanne Treister (image: Post-Surveillance Art/NSA on Drugs , 2014) the show collects work from an eclectic mix of artists who explore lived experience after AI and data collection—practitioners who show “how these technologies are silently transforming our surroundings.”
In a post on his blog, designer Matt Webb offers unflinching analysis of the metaverse. Hashing out a rough definition that it is immersive , multiplayer , and has an economy , he challenges some widely held assumptions about what technologies are required (e.g. VR plus crypto does not a metaverse make). Beyond the obligatory Snow Crash vs. Meta commentary, he draws on his former studio ’s work during the web 2.0 era and his experience establishing London’s Silicon Roundabout tech cluster, noting how common goals create strange bedfellows. Now, Webb sees the same thing with the metaverse, observing “we have crypto-libertarians tech nerds from Web3 somehow aligned with platform monopolist VR-maximalists from Facebook. Their values couldn’t be more opposed yet they are boosters for the same trend.”
“AI needs to be brought back down to earth. It has been elevated to a superhuman level that leads us to believe it is both inevitable and beyond our control.”
– Ethiopian American AI scholar and computer scientist Dr.
Timnit Gebru , on the launch of her new Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research institute (DAIR). “When AI research, development and deployment is rooted in people and communities from the start, we can get in front of these harms and create a future that values equity and humanity,” she notes in the DAIR press release
Ethiopian American AI scholar and computer scientist Dr. Timnit Gebru announces the launch of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research institute (DAIR). With $3.7 million in funding from several foundations, the independent, community-rooted institute aims to “counter Big Tech’s pervasive influence on the research, development and deployment of AI.” The announcement comes on the one-year anniversary of her sudden ouster from Google, where she co-led the Ethical AI team.
“McKenna was dreaming new ways of being but he was also a technophile. He saw technology as producing the context for new consciousness and culture, a vision that was commercialized and amplified by Silicon Valley, and yielded our contemporary dystopia.”
Kyle McDonald shares a “bottom-up” estimate and tracker of Ethereum emissions and energy use that considers key variables such as hashrate and hashing efficiency, hardware and data centre overhead, grid loss, and power supply efficiency. According to the artist’s analysis, the popular cryptocurrency network consumes around 23 terawatt hours per year—as much as the entire state of Massachusets. “Ethereum is effectively operating two to three coal power plants,” McDonald writes on Medium.
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