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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American software artist Ben Grosser updates his Demetricator (2017-) browser extension to hide Twitter’s newly launched view count feature. “View counts, like all of Twitter’s visible metrics, are engagement-inducing dark pattern trash,” Grosser rails against interface elements that are known to amp up polarization and thus harm. Demetricator 1.5.5 is available on Chrome and Firefox and removes all Twitter metrics from the platform.
“‘Wokeism’ is giving way to ‘bossism’—the ascension of the C-Suite taking its power back from employees.”
– Cultural strategist
Linda Ong , on how the recent firings of outspoken Twitter engineers such as
Sasha Solomon signals the (inflation-induced) end of the MeToo era of employee empowerment. “Elon Musk is the poster boy of this, of a doubling down on old fashioned capitalism,” Ong writes.
OUT NOW :
Rhea Myers
Proof of Work
A compendium of essays and fiction, artworks, and “blockchain provocations” produced by the pioneering conceptual artist over the last decade
“This commitment, for the first time perhaps, meaningfully positions artworks that engage with NFTs amidst the rigorous art history that preceded them.”
– Writer and curator
Eileen Isagon Skyers , praising the recent “
Peer to Peer ” NFT exhibition on Feral File. Curated by Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator
Tina Rivers Ryan , the show features new works by 13 key blockchain artists working in response to their ‘peers’—Homer, Magritte, Rothko—in the museum’s collection.
German media artist and composer Robert Henke shares previews of a new video pattern for his CBM 8032 AV (2016-) audiovisual performance project. In the piece, Henke controls five carefully restored Commodore CBM 8032 (aka Commodore PET ) computers to generate sound and images live on stage. “Art = Engineering = Art,” writes Henke about assembly programming the new “Fungi” pattern that will premiere in 2023.
“Quantum computers might one day have the ability to push computational boundaries, allowing us to solve problems that have been intractable thus far, such as integer factorization, which is important for encryption.”
– H.R.7535 – Quantum Computing Cybersecurity Preparedness Act , a bill passed by U.S. Congress sponsoring IT, intellectual property, and software development “that can be easily updated to support cryptographic agility” if codebreaking quantum computing becomes a reality
“When I say profit is the main driver behind this, it’s really important, because this is not necessarily how it needs to be , but it is how these systems are set up.”
– Environmental Media Lab Director
Mél Hogan , describing the extractive and eugenicist tendencies underpinning the data economy. “It’s why all those Big Tech guys are telling everyone to vote Republican … [that and lobbying are] intentional political manoeuvres to maintain those hierarchies.”
“Please Mistake Me for Nobody,” a solo show by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries , opens at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.). Named after the Seoul-based duo’s eponymous 2017 video-dream (image) about glorious anonymity set to off-key jazz, the show surveys their signature text narratives and desire to “exert a dictatorial stranglehold on the reader.” Curated by Arkadij Koscheew , the featured works have been translated to German for local viewers.
“This Current Between Us,” an installation and performance program, opens at the Neo Faliro Steam Power Plant in Piraeus, Greece. Artists including Nikos Alexiou , Hypercomf , and Miriam Simun contribute works exploring energy and production in response to the decommissioned site. The latter’s performance Do Not Break Out of Prior Range (image), for example, draws on a blender, lightbulb, and power cord—and Simun announcing “this isn’t just a milkshake, it’s a crucial north-south energy bridge” into a microphone.
“The only thing that Stability AI can do is algorithmic disgorgement, where they completely destroy their database and all models that have our data in it.”
“Fetishizing the Future,” a survey of visions of tomorrow ranging from aerospace to space colonies, opens at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Included are projects by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg , Tomás Saraceno (image: Launches at White Sands , 2016), Jacolby Satterwhite , and Timur Si-Qin . More than 80 aviation history artifacts complement the artworks, chronicling humanity’s enduring desire for “speed, freedom, peace, immortality, and sustainability.”
“Though there are mushrooms aplenty here, humans are in short supply.”
“World Wind,” a show featuring American artist Marina Zurkow working in collaboration with James Schmitz, opens at bitforms New York. Presenting works that depict “ecological transformation with a style reminiscent of lithography and propaganda,” two software pieces by the duo take centre stage. One, The Breath Eaters (2022, image), combines fossil fuel plant locations with real-time fire and weather data to animate emission currents—‘vintage poster’ style.
“Some institutions are spending more on their energy bills than they are on their exhibition programs, which is crazy.”
– Heath Lowndes, Managing Director of
Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), on the ecological and financial footprint of climate-control systems used in collection management. “The regulations governing them were set in the 1950s and collection managers are still largely tied to these antiquated, irrelevant standards, which means they basically keep art in a fridge.”
OUT NOW :
Stephen Wolfram
Metamathematics
A treatise on how mathematics and physics emerge from the underlying computational structure of what Wolfram calls the
ruliad (“the entangled limit of everything”)
“He launched into a brutally unrelenting and damning litany detailing the state of the planet and the despair he felt—maybe a solid 90 minutes of horror.”
– Artist and designer
Tobias Revell , recalling
Julian Oliver ’s haunting 2018
lecture at Mapping Festival and how it made climate collapse “real and material” to him. “This is why the push back on dark futures and ‘dystopia’ makes me a little uncomfortable,“ Revell notes. “Anger and outrage are powerful tools for action.”
Chronicling all things amorphous, Zach Lieberman ’s An Atlas of Blobs launches. Commissioned by Hong Kong’s M+ , an eclectic cast of artists and educators including Ani Liu , Tiger Wong Ho Lun , Ellen Lupton , James Paterson , and Yehrin Tong lend their voices to a whimsical online resource celebrating the eccentric geometry of undulating forms. Captioning a survey of Lieberman’s playful animated sketches, the contributors collectively articulate “a more blobular way of being.”
London’s V&A Museum announces the acquisition of Sougwen Chung ’s 2017 drawing MEMORY (D.O.U.G. 2) for its permanent collection. Part of the Chinese-Canadian artist’s body of painterly robot collaborations, the acquisition includes the RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) model that Chung trained on years of her own drawings to co-create the piece. It’s the first artifact of its kind to be acquired by a cultural institution, the V&A notes.
“We wanted to evoke water, like a lake at the bottom of the cylinder, reflecting what is happening in the sky above.”
– NONOTAK’s Noemi Schipfer and Takami Nakamoto, on their installation
MOON V.1 (2019, image) [quote edited]
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