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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“Unfortunately it has become too late to save Arctic summer sea ice. This is now the first major component of the Earth system that we are going to lose because of global warming.”
– German climatologist
Dirk Notz , on the inevitability of breaching a major climate tipping point. In a
new paper published in
Nature Communications , Notz and team project that, even with dramatic emission cuts, Arctic sea ice will fully melt during the summer months as soon as the 2030s—much sooner than expected.
As part of LINZ FMR, a biennial festival for art in digital contexts and public spaces in Linz (AT), artist-activists Julian Oliver and Gordan Savičić turn their PerMillion (2022) CO2 web counter into a billboard. Every morning, the parts-per-million value is updated manually to match the website in what FRM calls “a non-digital performance.” Designed as a tool for protest, the website gets its numbers directly from the continuous readings at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory , the atmospheric CO2 baseline station.
“I believe that we’re moving away from surveillance capitalism and into PSYOP capitalism, where the media we consume will be increasingly not only targeted at us, but generated for us by AI systems. And being done in a way that’s intended to manipulate us.”
– American artist
Trevor Paglen , on the dangers of next level extractivism. In talking about “
Hide the Real, Show the False ,” his upcoming solo exhibition at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Paglen parses next generation “psychological and deception operations” and why they terrify him.
The London-based artist duo dmstfctn launches GODMODE EPOCHS (2023), a “multi-player AI frustration game.” Set among the lined shelves of an infinite, simulated supermarket, players race against time to train an AI to identify products. When frustrated, the AI seeks refuge in its memories—a separate game map where players can collaborate to cheat. The “reciprocal training program”—players train and are trained—is part of a long-term research project supported by the Alan Turing Institute and Serpentine Galleries .
“Introducing iPhone, on your face,” quips ‘Famous New Media Artist’ Jeremy Bailey about the reveal of Apple’s Vision Pro. Bailey anticipated the company’s mixed-reality goggles after coming across a 2015 patent (image), while patenting (whimsical) AR interfaces of his own . “Current AR and VR patents,” Bailey wrote in 2016 , “are hilariously broad and forecast a future where culture itself belongs to the world’s largest tech companies.” The new Apple face computer still gets a thumbs-up (“this is incredible”).
“We may one day possess tools that keep us plugged in all the time, yet trick us into believing we’re not. The beauty of these ugly goggles is that they show what’s really going on.”
– Tech reporter Molly Roberts, on Apple’s newly announced
Vision Pro mixed-reality goggles. “We will be able to be not present while also being present—to fail to pay full attention to what’s around us without technically having to look away from it,” Roberts writes. “Welcome to the future.” [quote edited]
Basel’s House of Electronic Arts (HEK) opens “Collective Worldbuilding,” an international group exhibition of “Art in the Metaverse.” 16 artists including Ian Cheng , Simon Denny , Sarah Friend , Holly Herndon , LaTurbo Avedon , Jonas Lund , and Omsk Social Club explore how—or if—a decentralized internet advances self-determination. In her new video piece Untitled (2023, image), for example, Friend explores market edge cases and identity boundaries with NSFW (not safe for work) AI images fine-tuned on herself.
“Thus far, this has been an extractivist discussion. Instead of only focusing on what we festival makers need, maybe we should also ask ourselves what we can give.”
– Naomi Johnson, Executive Director of
imagineNATIVE Toronto, the world’s largest indigenous film and media arts festival, during the first Future Festivals Lab at
NEW NOW in Essen (DE). Over the next 18 months, the
MUTEK -led think tank brings together seven organizations from Canada, Germany, and Mexico to prototype festival futures.
A show parsing post large-language model (LLM) “shared discourse,” Sarah Rothberg ’s “SUPERPROMPT” opens at Bitforms San Francisco. Through several performances, the American artist takes aim at the veracity of statements made by ChatGPT and its ilk, as well as virtualized social convention. In NEW MEETINGS (2021-, image), for example, Rothberg and mystery guests convene in VR to engage in a conversational game that demonstrates “how architecture and social arrangements distribute power.”
“Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings” opens at Akademie der Künste, Berlin, concluding JUNGE AKADEMIE’s AI Anarchies fellowship program with an evocative exhibition. Ten fellows including Sarah Ciston , Petja Ivanova , Sahej Rahal , SONDER , Aarti Sunder , and Natasha Tontey present new works that counter extractivist logic, algorithmic violence, and techno-solutionism. In Rahal’s video installation Anhad (2023, image), for example, an audio-reactive AI program interacts with the cacophony of the outside world—and falters.
“The result is a fantasy—or nightmare—of computers as both preternatural agents of their own histories and autocratic engines of meaning.”
– Art historian and Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator
Tina Rivers Ryan , on Lowell Nesbitt’s 1965 painting
I.B.M. Disc Pack . The piece is part of a series of “deadpan enlargements of IBM materials” and currently on view at the Leslie Jones-curated LACMA exhibition “
Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age ”—a “necessary survey” that “argues that early computer art
is art,” as Ryan writes in her review.
NEW NOW Festival returns to the industrial world heritage site of Zeche Zollverein in Essen (DE), once the world’s largest colliery, to conjure “Hypernatural Forces” in a major exhibition. Ten resident artists including AATB , Cinzia Campolese , Daniel Franke , Ali Phi , Sabrina Ratté , and Pinar Yoldas present new works that ponder the site’s political and environmental legacy. As visitors wander the caverns of the Mixing Plant, they encounter roaming robot packs and AI-generated ecosystems.
Swiss artist collective Fragmentin premieres G80 (2023), a Mudac -commissioned interactive installation, within the London Design Biennale “Global Game” exhibition at Somerset House. A console interpretation of Buckminster Fuller’s “World Game ” of equitable resource distribution, G80 challenges notions of total control and technocracy. 80 correlated sliders invite negotiation of societal values—freedom, GDP, ecology etc.—and taunt viewers with a motorized choreography when left alone.
“Extinction would directly affect the elite, which is why they care about mitigating risks. ‘Sub-extinction’ risks from AI that harm marginalized peoples don’t get signatures like this.”
– Journalist and philosopher
Émile P. Torres , on the Center for AI Safety (CAIS)
open letter signed by prominent international thinkers. “If AGI kills everyone, then marginalized groups lose along with everyone else,” Torres argues on Twitter. “If resources are poured into preventing hypothetical AGI dystopias, marginalized groups ALSO lose, because they’ll continue to be ignored.” [quote edited]
Danish interaction designer Bjørn Karmann premieres Paragraphica (2023), a camera that ‘captures’ images with location data (address, weather, time of day, etc.) and AI. Three dials control the data and Stable Diffusion parameters while the viewfinder displays a real-time text description of the place you’re at. Upon pressing the trigger, the AI will generate a ‘photo’ from that prompt. The project exists both as a physical, star-nosed mole -inspired prototype and a virtual camera for you to try .
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
– 350+ AI executives, researchers, and engineers from, for example, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, in a one-sentence open letter released by the Center for AI Safety (CAIS). The brevity of the statement—a “coming-out” for some industry leaders who thus far had only expressed concerns in private—was to unite experts who might disagree on specifics, CAIS director Dan Hendrycks
tells the New York Times .
Theta’s World (2023, image), an experimental videogame created by Lawrence Lek in the X Virtual incubator program, launches online. Commissioned by Beijing’s X Museum, the self-described simulation artist and sinofuturist is true to form here, presenting an imagined smart city—SimBeijing—that can be navigated in-browser. Between the floating architectural forms, urban geometries, and scattered text fragments, the experience presents “whispering stories that shift and morph with every journey undertaken.”
“The obsolescence regime is a world where it’s very hard to have any power if you were to refuse to listen to AI systems and insist on doing everything with just human intelligence.”
– AI researcher
Ajeya Cotra , on a “potential future end point with AI systems” outlined in her and Kelsey Piper’s blog
Planned Obsolescence . “If you are a military general in a hot war you’ll have to listen to your AI advisor; if you’re an engineer you’ll have to make use of AI scientists,” explains Cotra. “It’s a world where it’s impossible to compete without AI.”
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