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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Carl Zimmer
Life’s Edge
An eccentric survey spanning “protocells to brains … zygotes to pandemic viruses” that asks where exactly life begins (and ends)
”Most of these offerings look extremely similar to Clubhouse—as well as each other—even including details like the ‘leave quietly’ button. Some even borrow the name: I’ve come across Clubhorse, Clubchat, and Clubtalk.”
– Hong Kong-based technology journalist
Zheping Huang , on the myriad
Clubhouse clones he’s encountered since the Chinese government blocked access to the popular audio chat app in February
Adding several new works to his body of perceptual hacks, Olafur Eliasson ’s “Your Ocular Relief” opens at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. The show’s eponymous centerpiece is an evocative light show generated by an orchestra of lenses, prisms, mirrors, and colour-effect filters carefully configured behind a curved screen. “We live in an age of the proliferation of lenses,” says Eliasson, “not only in the surveillance cameras that pepper our urban space but also in the hands of activists who are aiming them back at the instruments of power.”
“We started last May, initially tokenizing physical art and goods—which, it turns out, is not an amazing business model in the middle of a pandemic.”
–
Lindsay Howard , independent curator and
Foundation ’s Head of Community, on the origins of the now prominent crypto art marketplace. “We launched three weeks ago. Since then, 1,500 NFTs have been minted, generating over $1.5 million in sales.”
“In the science of optics, a flare is like the waste product, light not being used for what it’s supposed to be used. I thought that’s a nice narrative because it’s so exceptionally beautiful, but it’s a little bit like homeless light.”
– Icelandic–Danish installation artist
Olafur Eliasson , discussing his newest spectacle,
Your Ocular Relief (2021), on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, with writer Devorah Lauter
“The more Extremely Online you are, the better placed you are to identify what’s going to be the new hotness. To be able to jump on the pump and exit before the dump.”
– British-American financial journalist
Felix Salmon , on the current cultural clash of YOLO, internet humour, and short-term greed. “In order to identify objects that will soar in value, connoisseurship is worthless,” Salmon writes about Dogecoin, the GameStop frenzy, and Beeple NFTs. “Art, for instance, is valued not on its intrinsic qualities but on its status as a meme.”
Her first solo show with Steven Sacks’ digital art imprint, Auriea Harvey ’s “Year Zero” opens at bitforms gallery, New York. Alongside samples from the net artist’s long collaborative career, “Year Zero” introduces a new body of mixed-media sculptural work. Amalgamations of 3D body scans, 3D models of her clay sculptures, and historic museum artifacts, these digital and 3D-printed objects are hybrid products, made in Western Europe but borrowing from its colonies. “My sculptures are born broken,” states Harvey. “It is up to me to mend them.”
“Executives generally spin these bots as being good for everyone, ‘streamlining operations’ while ‘liberating workers’ from mundane and repetitive tasks. But they are also liberating plenty of people from their jobs.”
– Technology journalist Kevin Roose, on how bots and automation are deskilling (once irreplaceable) white-collar workers
“Solar Mountains and Broken Hearts,” a solo show by Israeli multidisicplinary artist Maya Attoun opens at Tel Aviv’s Magasin III Jaffa . Putting her favoured motifs—knots, hands and digits, tarot and alchemical esoterica—into dialogue with solar panels and terrestrial projections, Attoun offers an oblique meditation on catastrophe and futurity. Entirely devoid of humans, the mixed media works evoke “a gothic tradition that does not distinguish the beautiful from the terrifying,” notes Karmit Galili in her curatorial essay.
“Digital artists have media that can proliferate over a network and be held by many people at once without cheapening or breaking the aura of a first-hand experience. It is the one true benefit to working in digital space.”
–
Everest Pipkin , dismissing the concept of artificial digital scarcity. In a fiery op-ed, the artist rebuts a whole slate of arguments presented by crypto art advocates. “The value system a fully functioning NFT marketplace creates is reprehensible,” asserts Pipkin. “The only viable option is total moral rejection.”
“We refer to these attacks as typographic attacks . They’re far from simply an academic concern.”
–
OpenAI researchers, on the ‘blindspots’ of the lab’s latest computer vision model
CLIP . While CLIP shows remarkable capacity for abstraction—its multimodal neurons respond to literal, symbolic, and conceptual representations—it is also easily fooled: “when we put a label saying ‘iPod’ on this Granny Smith apple, the model erroneously classifies it as an iPod.”
DOSSIER :
“When one of our clients manages to sell their first work or discover that their work in another medium is financially viable after years of stress and confusion, that motivates us to keep going.”
“It turns the picture into a puzzle—an enigma in a way,” says Jean-Jacques Calbayrac , one of five Game Boy Camera enthusiasts writer Raymond Wong interviewed about the allure of taking 128 x 112-pixel photos in the Instagram age. “It’s like going back in time, back to the birth of digital photography.”
“A series of time-traveling children books by Rush Limbaugh; a Carroll-esque fantasy story featuring a young Baron Trump written in 1885; a comic depicting Kanye West and Trump aboard a Space Force starship.”
– Researcher and book curator
Oscar Salguero , on media hatched within his
Presidential Libraries project, which imagined publications to capture the tenor of the Trump era
After months of lockdown, Basel’s HeK reopens with “Shaping the Invisible World,” a group exhibition that explores digital cartography as an instrument of knowledge. Curated by Boris Magrini and Christine Schranz , the show unfolds “spectacular panoramas and virtual scenarios” by James Bridle , Lukács & Broersen (image: Forest on Location , 2018), Trevor Paglen , Fei Jun , and others, that subvert contemporary cartographic practices to ask pressing questions about privacy, authorship, economic interests, and data aggregation.
“Tactical finance and tokenization is not just an act of resistance against financial institutions—I refused to get into NFTs, and yet my work and name have entered the blockchain, where they will now reside indefinitely.”
– Artist
Rosa Menkman , on discovering four of her works were co-opted and traded on NFT marketplaces [quote edited]
OUT NOW :
Whitney Phillips & Ryan M. Milner
You Are Here
A post-truth roadmap for navigating the strange terrain of “polarized speech, conspiracy theories, and our polluted media landscape.”
“We hope this will accelerate the transition towards more durable and repairable product design … it is crucial, both in terms of environmental and consumer protection, to be able to repair and keep devices for as long as possible.”
–
iFixit Communications Manager Dorothea Kessler, on new laws stipulating that new washing machines, hairdryers, refrigerators, and displays and televisions sold within the EU must be repairable for a decade. Her next target: smartphones and laptops.
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