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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“How many people do you need to put together a Manhattan Project? The relevant question is: how large of a population do you need to draw from in order to recruit enough scientists to staff such an effort?”
– Sci-fi writer
Ted Chiang , on why people and not AI, are the key to the fabled
intelligence explosion . “This is how recursive self-improvement takes place—not at the level of individuals but at the level of human civilization as a whole.”
Indigenous computational media artist Jon M. R. Corbett is the subject of a fascinating interview with Daniel Temkin at Esoteric.Codes. Corbett delves into the syntax and epistomology underpinning his Cree#, Ancestral Code, and Wisakecak coding languages, which all circumvent the eurocentric (and latin alphabet) origins of “not just programming, but computing technologies in general.” His ambitious extending beyond software, he also speaks to his alt-keyboard design—based on the Cree Star Chart (image).
“Flare gas could just as well power carbon capture machines, water desalination plants, or data centres that support more widely used applications. There’s a social value in those things that I don’t see for Bitcoin.”
Commissioned for transmediale’s “For Refusal ” program, !Mediengruppe Bitnik releases Refuse to be Human , a web extension that changes your browser settings to that of a Yandex bot. Like Google, Russia’s primary search engine Yandex uses web crawlers to index online content. “Surfing as a bot gives you access to the grey web,” write the Bitniks, “a layer of content only visible to bots.” Image: RYBN’s Double Negative Captchas (2020)—the bot test that directly inspired Bitnik’s work.
“Arcane financial maneuvers, only nominally attached to physical objects, regularly achieve a level of dematerialized abstraction to which most conceptual art only aspires: the transubstantiation of nothing into something.”
–
Travis Diehl , on the “metaphysical appeals” of NFTs and other high-stakes schemes attached to art
“Only off by a factor of roughly 125 trillion.”
– YouTuber
stacksmashing , on how his Game Boy-powered Bitcoin mining rig compares to the competition. Whereas modern hardware mines at ~100 terahashes per second, the 1989 Nintendo handheld (controlled via a Raspberry Pi Pico) clocks in at 0.8. “It would take several quadrillion years to mine a single coin.”
“Sites like these are where online shopping leaves its physical footprint—where capital, battling over space, inscribes itself in the landscape.”
–
Charlie Jarvis , on how spaces of logistics keep eating into public lands to satisfy friction-free capitalism. “According to the real estate firm Knight Frank, every £1 billion spent online demands 1.3 million square feet of further warehousing.”
Jean-Pierre Hébert (1939-2021)
An explorer of algorithmic aesthetics since the 1970s, computer art pioneer
Jean-Pierre Hébert passes away in Santa Barbara, California. Known for his minimalist plotter drawings, sound and mixed media installations, the trained computer engineer also co-founded famed digital art group
The Algorists in 1995. In 2012, SIGGRAPH recognized Hébert’s
Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art .
“Light and Language,” an exhibition showcasing the late land and conceptual artist Nancy Holt , opens at Ireland’s Lismore Castle Arts. Focused on 1960-80s works, it notably includes Electrical System (1982, image), a room-scale illuminated network shown for the first time in three decades that makes the gallery it is presented in “part of open-ended systems, part of the world.” The Lisa Le Feuvre -curated show also includes related (light)works by Dennis McNulty , Charlotte Moth , and Katie Paterson .
“When Stewart Brand sets out to help the commune folks of the late 1960s and early 1970s, what does he choose as his vehicle? A catalog. For Brand and the people around him, business was a good way to change the world. Politics were bankrupt, but business was great.”
A juxtaposition of ‘infinite’ new media sculptural works, Alex Czetwertynski ’s second solo show “Loop Point” opens at K10 Media Arts, Bogota. “The digital no longer needs to feed off of the physical to create its internal codes and narratives,” states Czetwertynski about the current era of tokenized digital derivatives that reference themselves like memes about memes. “What happens when the loop closes on itself and the chain of content is rich enough to feed off of its own image ad infinitum?”
“There is only one space currently showing a serious commitment to democratically governed user-owned protocols, fair payment for digital labour, data unions and revaluing the arts, and that is the Web3 space.”
– American musician and technologist
Mat Dryhurst , on why he believes in the blockchain future
The latest in his 4-part series of “phenomenological” environments, Kurt Hentschläger’s SUB (2019) opens at iMAL, Brussels, for its European premiere. Set in complete darkness and augmented by ambient surround sound, an LED wall erupts with animated 1/3 sec bursts of intensely bright light, “tingling your senses by skippering between depriving and overloading them.” Available photos capture those bursts, as the intense retinal after-images viewers experience—the actual artwork—can’t be documented.
“While efforts to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts are the first line of defence, the United States should develop a transdisciplinary research program to advance understanding of solar geoengineering’s technical feasibility and effectiveness.”
– The
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering. and Medicine (NASEM), recommending federal research into climate intervention strategies in a new report
Prolific technology critic, curator, and educator
Nora N. Khan will steer the next HOLO print edition as Editorial Lead
“Just as technology is not politically neutral, it isn’t geographically neutral. In the coming years, I hope we will see more new work that doesn’t just pay attention to the weather, but the soil too.”
– Arts writer and critic
Rahel Aima , considering the “rocky terroir” of new media art and the genre’s historical silence towards the extractive tendencies that make it possible
“We realized we had to make our own supercomputer. So we built an AI which runs on custom hardware—/roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ —that looks at the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood game and tries to make sense of what it’s seeing.”
–
Cory Arcangel , on
/roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD (2017-21), the “
Century 21 ” centrepiece on view at New York’s Greene Naftali gallery. “It originated from a note I made in 2016: ‘Deep Blue playing Kim K game.’ I imagined a huge server that you could see playing the game.”
SHOP :
An illustrated compilation of hybrid creatures of our time, equally inspired by medieval bestiaries and observations of our damaged planet
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