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
Year
Month
Tag
Order
Custom
Filter
New Media Gallery in New Westminster (BC/CA) opens “Measure,” a group exhibition that reflects on the “interconnections of time, light, colour, season, and cosmological cycles” with works by Matthew Biederman , Annette S. Lee , Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves , James Nizam , Alan Storey , and Semiconductor . Nizam’s site-specific celestial tracker Earth Spin Moon Orbit (2023, image), for example, traces the movement of our planet’s natural satellite in real-time.
“I thought that the way I had structured it was enough of an extrapolation that I wouldn’t have to deal with precisely the question you’re asking. And that has been obliterated in the last few years. That, to me, is terrifying.”
– Egyptian-Canadian novelist
Omar El Akkad , when pressed on whether his climate dystopia
American War (2017) is starting to come true. Set in 2074, the “all-too-realistic cautionary tale” (
Writer’s Digest ) imagines wide-spread civil unrest set off by a ban on fossil fuels, after Florida has vanished and Louisiana is half-underwater.
OUT NOW :
Pigott, Jones, Parry (eds)
Art and Creativity in an Era of Ecocide
Scholars Anna Pigott, Owain Jones, and Ben Parry compile twelve compelling case studies for emergent modes of creative practice that are embodied, performative, and actively “anti-ecocide.”
“We discussed the idea of the ghost in the machine, Deux ex machina , and the spirituality that emanates from unknown entities. Then we asked: what if that could be trans? What if there was a way to trans that?”
– Poet and educator
Angelic Goldsky , on the inspiration for
The Trancestor , a series of works exploring coded language and queer divine will. Produced with collaborator Mel Racho during a spring 2023
Factory Media Centre (Hamilton, CA) residency, the pair created a benevolent AI that is a “trans ancestor, guide, and friend to trans users.” [quote edited]
The auction for “Keith Haring: Pixel Pioneer” concludes, bringing in $1.6M in sales across five lots. Undeterred by faltering NFT sales, several astute collectors swooped in to acquire the late artist’s trove of Commodore Amiga drawings. Created in the winter and spring of 1987, they showcase Haring’s signature exhuberent figures and vivid colour palettes, as shaped by the limited graphic capabilities (320 x 200 resolution, 32 colours) of the Amiga (image: Untitled #2 (April 16, 1987) ).
OUT NOW :
Kashmir Hill
Your Face Belongs to Us
New York Times tech reporter
Hill chronicles
Clearview AI , the facial recognition company with far right ties that emerged during the Trump era and whose technology has been at the centre of numerous privacy and civil liberties controversies.
“The original Luddites did not hate technology. What they objected to were the specific ways that tech was being used to undermine their status, upend their communities and destroy their livelihoods.”
– Tech journalist
Brian Merchant , on what
actually drove
unrest among textile workers in 19th century England—and why it matters now. “In the age of AI and augmented reality, electric vehicles and Mars rovers, levels of inequality again rival the days of the Industrial Revolution,” Merchant warns. ”
That’s why I’m a Luddite—and why you should be one, too.”
“If a human–pig chimera were brought to term, should we treat it like a pig, like a human, or like something else altogether?”
– Bioethics researcher
Julian Koplin , extrapolating a moral quandary raised by
embryonic stem cell research that blurs the line between human and animal. With research into synthetic embryos and lab-grown biocomputers underway, Koplin underscores that “we are creating entities that are neither one thing nor the other,” and that reflection on the moral status of these hybrids is needed.
Anicka Yi ’s solo exhibition “A Shimmer Through The Quantum Foam” opens at Esther Schipper, Berlin, evolving the Korean-American artist’s notion of the “biologized machine” with new works. Visitors enter a hybrid ecosystem of fleshy landscapes created with machine learning models and suspended luminescent pods resembling Radiolaria . As the soft glow of an aqueous ooze—indicative of life’s marine origins—sprawls across the gallery floor, a custom-made scent by perfumer Barnabé Fillion fills the air.
“Alluding to the physical laws of propagation of light particles and sound waves,” Carsten Nicolai ’s solo show “Strahlen / Raggi” opens at the Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (FMAV) in Modena (IT). Displayed are tributes to the German artist’s late friend and collaborator Ryuichi Sakamoto , a Geiger counter-driven reinterpretation of a Japanese Zen garden, and a pair of installations where sound causes water in rotating parabolic basins to ripple—cleverly warping reflected light (image: reflektor distortion , 2016).
David Golumbia (1963-2023)
Fierce digital culture critic David Golumbia dies after a battle with cancer. Author of
The Politics of Bitcoin (2016) and the forthcoming
Cyberlibertarianism , the American researcher examined financialization, language, and software. Golumbia was an Associate Professor in the English Department at
Virginia Commonwealth University .
Combining video, dance, and a flute quartet, Marianna Simnett ’s opera GORGON premieres at Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) in Berlin. Director Simnett’s narrative weighs “distresses and transformations” brought on by AI (tech writ large) by teaming up its namesake wailing mythic creature with a bored doughnut store employee. Technologist Moisés Horta Valenzuela puts the live flautists in conversation with AI-generated sound, and Holly Herndon ’s voice model Holly+ also makes a cameo.
“Neither communities or rivers need AI ‘to speak for them.’ This promotes ‘ecological AI’ by theoretically-informed sleight of hand, gesturing to the more-than-human while materially relying on Large Language Models.”
– British AI critic
Dan McQuillan , on the ventriloquism and limitations of Superflux’ aspirational
Ecological Intelligence Agency (2023). Whereas the speculative governance model suggests that AI can make river health legible and aid policy, McQuillan argues that “you can’t discuss sewage without mentioning privatization and debt.” [quote edited]
OUT NOW :
Sanela Jahić
Under the Calculative Gaze
The paperback adaptation of
Jahić ’s artistic research
shown at Aksioma in early 2023 expands on the entanglement of socially-applied technologies, systemic injustices, and creeping authoritarianism. Included: an essay by prominent AI critic
Dan McQuillan .
“As U.S. et al. v. Google goes to trial, the echoes of the landmark federal suit against Microsoft, a quarter-century ago, are unmistakable.”
– Tech journalist
Steve Lohr , reminiscing the last major American
antitrust trial (1998). Once again “a tech giant is accused of using its overwhelming market power to unfairly cut competitors off from potential customers,” Lohr writes, noting Google is not
quite as audacious though (a Microsoft exec famously planned to “cut off Netscape’s air supply”).
“The institution is drawn toward those who can leverage their racial identity into a curatorial practice, which the institution can then leverage (or co-opt) into its brand.”
– Writer and designer
Simon Wu , on the catch-22 of the art world finally embracing racialized curators. Drawing on his time at MoMA, Wu observes that the desire to confront labour and ethics issues within institutions often gets trumped by the stability (“healthcare, a living wage, parental leave”) that many curators of colour have only
just got access to for the first time.
“GEN/GEN: Generative Generations,” a generative art survey linking practitioners past and present, opens at Gazelli Art House London. Artists including Sougwen Chung , Licia He , Tyler Hobbs , Rhea Myers , Piter Pasma , Melissa Wiederrecht , and Stephen Willats contribute prints, plots, screen-based works, and NFTs. Multi-generational, visitors can take in 1980s paintings by Harold Cohen ’s prescient AARON program in one glance and Brendan Dawes’ sculpture You, Me And The Machine (2022), the next.
Load More
To dive deeper into Stream, please
Log-In or become a
HOLO Reader .
Daily discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture: Get full access by becoming a HOLO Reader !
Perspective : research, long-form analysis, and critical commentaryEncounters : in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovatorsStream : a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and countingEdition : HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print
Become a HOLO Reader