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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Software engineer and electronics hacker Ian Hanschen shares his vast bitmap font collection that he pulled from various demoscene archives over the years. The catalog includes hundreds of glorious pixel letterform sheets created on the Commodore 64, Atari, and Amiga home computers in the late 1980s and early ’90s. “I don’t remember where much of this collection came from,” Hanschen writes about the missing metadata. “I just thought after finding a few of these [archives] had died that I should make it available.”
DOSSIER :
“[At the start of the pandemic] governments were quick to talk about bailing out cruise operators and airlines, what does it say about art’s value to society that we didn’t move as swiftly or generously to bail out artists, too?”
–
Matthew Braga , asking why the arts are never deemed ‘too big to fail’
“After the Phantom Dream Car bust through the wall, four hundred spectators rushed forward to further demolish the smoldering cabinets and cathode-rays.”
– Writer and video artist
Theodora Walsh , on the enduring impact of
Ant Farm ’s classic video art stunt
Media Burn (1975)
Global tech giants including Alphabet, Apple, and Facebook may soon pay higher taxes worldwide. After a deadlock between the Trump Administration and the EU prevented progress, momentum is growing thanks to a more cooperative Biden administration. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is brokering discussions among 140 countries, so they may form a united front in demanding higher taxes from Big Tech. “I’m very confident we will be able to do it,” says German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz after a call with Biden’s Treasury secretary pick, Janet Yellen, last week.
“In my mind, for the last few years, the hand axe had been a stand-in for technology influencing human cognition. So when GPT-3 came up with that image, I was like ‘wow!’”
–
K Allado-McDowell , in conversation with
Holly Herndon and
Mat Dryhurst , on co-writing the book
Pharmako-AI (2020) with OpenAI’s autoregressive language model. “Not only were my ideas being continued and added to in seemingly novel ways—it almost felt like the AI reflected things I was subconsciously putting in the text.“
OUT NOW :
Golan Levin & Tega Brain
Code as Creative Medium
A deep resource for teachers focused on the expressive potential of code, loaded with syllabi suggestions, road-tested assignments, and interviews with leading educators including
Daniel Shiffman ,
Lauren McCarthy , and
Taeyoon Choi
Sabrina Ratté ’s new video series Floralia premieres at Centre Pompidou, Paris, as part of Hors Pistes Festival . Inspired by the writings of Donna J. Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Greg Egan, the Canadian CGI artist simulates four ecosystems “born from the fusion of technology and organic matter, where past and future coexist in a perpetual tension of the present.” Each ecosystem, created using photography, 3D animation and analogue technologies, constitutes an archive, where samples of extinct plant species are preserved and displayed in virtual dioramas.
“The music of the Scottish-born artist combined pop instincts, uncompromisingly experimental musical ideas … a body of work that was essentially hopeful, like a roadmap to a better world in which to be vulnerable was, ironically, synonymous with becoming indestructible.”
– Electronic music critic
Philip Sherburne , weighing in on the legacy of hyperpop pioneer Sophie, in the aftermath of her tragic death
Postponed twice due to lockdown, “Sculpture in Search of Place” opens at Warsaw’s Zachęta National Gallery of Art, featuring the 2018 reassembly of Edward Ihnatowicz’ Senster . From 1970-4, the iconic robotic sculpture was the highlight at Evoluon , a Philips-run science museum in Eindhoven, where it wowed visitors with its uncanny responses to sound and movement. After disassembly, Senster was lost to time until art historian Anna Olszewska and team restored it to former glory.
“This whiff of insider trading presents the future as a commodity, an exercise in temporal arbitrage in which knowledge of new developments yields a financial edge.”
–
Samantha Culp , on the 50-year legacy of Alvin Troffler’s
Future Shock (1970), the first of three books that—for better or worse—helped popularize “futurism” as a concept in mainstream culture and business
Drawing from the IDPW online community they’ve marshalled over the years, extremely online artist duo exonemo launches “Art Homepage Fair.” The online exhibition resurrects the bygone webring format, and offers an interface for navigating 100 bespoke websites. Including sites by forevermidi.com , Garry Ing , Lee Tusman , and dozens more, the show is organized around the rallying cry “to express yourself on the internet is not about being constrained by terms and conditions … while growing enslaved to numbers of likes.“
“People need to realize that some of their most intimate moments have been weaponized.”
– Liz O’Sullivan, technology director at the
Surveillance Technology Oversight Project , on how companies, universities, and government labs harvested people’s public photos for (biased) AI training sets.
Exposing.AI , an online tool O’Sullivan developed together with artist-researcher
Adam Harvey , offers transparency: use it to find out if
your photos have been “weaponised.”
Artist-researchers Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace , in collaboration with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), launch Exposing.AI , an online tool that lets users find out whether their Flickr photos have been used for training commercial face recognition and biometric analysis systems. The web app scans across twelve notorious datasets and provides deep analysis: MegaFace (image), for example, includes 3,311,471 Flickr photos used by Amazon, Google, and other corporate giants.
“Pas froid aux yeux,” an extensive retrospective of digital art pioneer Vera Molnar , opens at Espace de l’Art Concret (EAC) in Mouans-Sartoux, France. Curated by director Fabienne Grasser-Fulchéri in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts of Rennes , the show surveys seventy years of generative geometry, from Molnar’s earliest pencil drawings to her latest commission: Orthogonal (image) is a room-sized, glow-in-the-dark rendition of an eponymous line drawing series from 2011-13.
Capping r/wallstreetbets ’s triumphant pump of videogame retailer Game Stop’s stock (that torpedoed hedge fund Melvin Capital in the process), digital marketer Matei Psatta celebrates IRL.
“To be ready for 2035, I need to build battery plants, I need to do battery development, I need to develop electric vehicles.”
– General Motors executive Dane Parker, articulating the automaker’s gameplan to hit their target of only producing zero-emission cars within 15 years
Ralf Baecker premieres A Natural History of Networks (SoftMachine) , a performance streaming live from Berlin’s STATE Studio as part of CTM Festival . Inspired by the work of British cybernetician Gordon Pask, Baecker devised an electrochemical instrument—the SoftMachine —to modulate a liquid metal alloy inside an electrode-equipped petri dish. The emerging fractal patterns, controlled via algorithmic electrical signals, reveal what Baecker describes as an “alternative computational and technological material regime.”
DOSSIER :
“What if, instead of using ethology to reaffirm our human-centric perspective on life, we looked to nature for ideas of how to do things better—particularly when it comes to growth?”
–
Chloe Stead , gesturing towards kinship rather than ‘survival of the fittest’ models of competition, as a path forward for humanity
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