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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“Myspace’s ugliness was an anti-cooption force-field, because corporate designers and art directors would, by and large, rather break their fingers and gouge out their eyes than produce pages that looked like that.”
– Author and tech pundit
Cory Doctorow , recalling the DIY aesthetic of
Myspace . In a screed against generative AI, Doctorow contrasts the “ugliness-as-a-feature” of early web counterculture to the homogenized aesthetic of AI art—which he rebukes as “
born coopted.”
“RIP Yves Klein, you would have loved the CrowdStrike outage.”
“We’re seeing a rapid decline in consent to use data across the web that will have ramifications not just for AI companies, but for researchers, academics, and noncommercial entities.”
– MIT Media Lab researcher
Shayne Longpre , on the swift balkanisation of the internet thanks to rampant AI data harvesting. In a
new study published by the MIT-led
Data Provenance Initiative , Longpre and team looked at 14,000 web domains included in three commonly used AI training sets and discovered an “emerging crisis in consent” that calls for “new tools to give website owners more precise ways to control the use of their data.”
Featuring exclusively deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent artists, “Towards New Worlds” opens at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MINA) in North Yorkshire (UK). Leah Clements , Jenni-Juulia Wallinheimo-Heimonen , Seo Hye Lee , and twelve others contribute works about varied “ways of experiencing and navigating the world.” Christopher Samuel ’s The Archive of an Unseen (2022, image), for example, presents a microform archive detailing the artist’s experience with a nerve disorder.
“Can AI improve climate modelling? Yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that AI energy demands are growing disproportionally to any efficiency gains.”
–
Hugging Face ’s Climate and AI Lead
Sasha Luccioni , airing frustrations about AI greenwashing while emissions from Microsoft and Google data centers soar. “AI is a relatively small part of the [climate] solution,” Luccioni tells technology pundit and
Tech Won’t Save Us host
Paris Marx . “The rest is domain expertise—people who actually know what they’re doing.”
Foregrounding the American artist ’s videogame-based practice, “List Projects 30: Jeremy Couillard” opens at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge (US). His first institutional solo show, Couillard presents a new game, Escape from Lavender Island (2023), alongside accompanying media and artifacts. Set in a dystopian city controlled by an unscrupulous corporation, the game models an absurd alternative world to “help us see the contingency and hallucinatory quality of our own social arrangements.”
“Being in the Garden of Forking Paths” opens at Berlin’s Office Impart, hosting “encounters between bodies and machines” with artists Salomé Chatriot , CROSSLUCID , and Pola Sieverding . Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 hypertext precursor , the show explores “touch” and “hybrid gestures” through photography, AI portraiture, and CGI. Chatriot’s video diptych Breathing Patterns and aluminium sculpture Waistgate (Sparks) (both 2023), for example, constitute “pre-fossils” that invoke “techno-mythologies and speculative futures.”
“I’m a maximalist to the highest degree. When it comes to exhibitions, I don’t ease people in. Instead, I drop them straight into the deep end.”
– Digital artist
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley , on the intensity of her current survey exhibition, “
THE SOUL STATION ,” at Berlin’s Halle am Berghain. Commissioned by
LAS Art Foundation and curated by
Mawena Yehouessi , the show presents experimental videogames that confront audiences with Black Trans issues through CGI overload. “I expect people to feel overwhelmed,” Brathwaite-Shirley admits. “In my work, you get as much as you give. The harder you play, the more you’ll see.”
“It challenges the idea of the landmark as a symbol of status and authority, viewing it instead as a place for the transmission of knowledge.”
“Our ever-refreshing social-media timelines actively present us with content that effortlessly competes with the aesthetics, if not the sentiment, of Boomer-era artists. The aphoristic prowess of Jenny Holzer is now shared by teenagers and Millennials alike.”
Statistician Nate Silver joins prediction market Polymarket as an advisor. Founder of the data-focused FiveThirtyEight outlet, Silver is known for his accurate U.S. election forecasts. While a senior political analyst signing on to a (crypto) betting platform may seem odious, the site has become a go-to source for U.S. election sentiment . Polymarket shows “how valuable it is to have a real-time data source about questions like the effects of the debate that are otherwise hard to quantify,” says Silver.
“Can farmed animals be conceptualized as biotechnologies, workers, factories, or products?”
– Architectural historian
Sofia Nannini , on diagrams for
Cedric Price ’s unrealized livestock corral
Westpen (1977, image), the subject of her forthcoming Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) publication
“Instead of adopting broader protection measures for all, which would mean granting the same rights to Latin Americans as those in the European Union, these platforms discriminate based on location.”
– Policy analyst
Agneris Sampieri , on how Big Tech does not extend protections from regulated regions to the Global South. Reporting on how Latin American artists cannot opt out of their artworks posted to Instagram being used to train AI—Europeans can—journalist
Lucila Pinto talks to Sampieri and other experts about how Meta exploits a “jurisdictional gap.”
“He is still habitually referenced by journalists, critics, academics writing about games and art—even when they aren’t directly engaging with his ideas, Roger Ebert still seems to be a go-to starting point or foil.”
A survey of works by Max Hooper Schneider , “Carnival of Gestation” opens at UCCA Dune in Beidaihe (CN). Curated by Luan Shixuan, the show foregrounds the American artist’s credo that there are “no distinct boundaries between life and death, organic and inorganic.” Schneider’s featured experiments with form and materials includes Butter Biocoenosis (2024, image)—a new series of margarine sculptures (of human organs and crumbling civilizations) carefully preserved in refrigerated vitrines.
Ruminating on crises and maintenance work, Yuko Mohri ’s “Moré and Moré” opens at the Aranya Art Center in Beidaihe (CN). Its capstone is Moré and Moré (Leaky): Variations (2024, image), a spin-off of the Japanese artist’s 2024 Venice Biennale installation —an assembly of buckets and tubing arranged to redirect unwanted water. Inspired by solutions employed in Tokyo subway stations, the playful “metaphor for social and ecological dilemmas” is presented alongside a newly commissioned sound sculpture.
“Web3 is going just great because Web2 is going just great.”
– Technology writer, software engineer, and
Web3 Is Going Just Great editor
Molly White , on the ‘house of cards’ that is the current internet and, by extension, decentralized finance after a
DNS attack on domain provider Squarespace left hundreds of crypto projects including, hilariously, Unstoppable Domains compromised
Digging ever deeper into crypto’s dark underbelly, technology writer, software engineer, and Web3 Is Going Just Great editor Molly White launches Follow the Crypto , an online tracker of how the industry is influencing U.S. elections. The website provides real-time updates on political donations by major crypto companies and the billionaire executives behind them that, according to White, spend “millions with a singular goal: to obtain favorable crypto policy, no matter the cost.”
“Once you start to look, danger signs of Old World infrastructure are everywhere. How many blackouts will it take before we realize today’s power grid was built for yesterday’s climate?”
– Journalist and
The Heat Will Kill You First (2023) author
Jeff Goodell , warning that “we have built our world for a climate that no longer exists.” Considering recent extreme weather-induced emergencies like the collapse of the aging Houston power grid and the failure of Manhattan’s historic Third Avenue Bridge, Goodell argues that “we need to rebuild our world.”
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