1,578 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“It felt like it was taking away the power of computing from people. I could see that this was slowly eating away at people’s ability to see the computer for what it was: an open a box of tricks.”
– American artist
Auriea Harvey , on how the convenience of Web 2.0 disempowered users and, ultimately, ended Net Art. “Now ‘good navigation’ is expected, whereas we were all about crashing the browser and making people think.”
OUT NOW :
Mark Peter Wright
Listening After Nature
An excursion into field recording, ecology, and critical practice that grapples with the thresholds of sensory perception and what we are not hearing
Bloomberg ’s Allyson Versprille and Bill Allison report that US political donations from the crypto sector surged to more than $26 million during 2021 and early 2022—a rise of 5,200%. Faced with increased scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators, the digital-asset industry outspent internet giants ($20M), drug makers ($7M), and the defense industry ($18.6M). “It has come out of nowhere to spend a significant amount of money on politics,” said OpenSecrets senior researcher Dan Auble.
“I don’t subscribe to the view that flipping is a bad thing, partly because this art form is not pure art. It’s a strange combination of community, cult, Robin Hood, slot machine, and status game all in one.”
– Galaxy Interactive Managing Director
Richard Kim , answering a fiercely debated question:
is buying and then quickly reselling NFTs to profit on the money (and greed) in the cryptoart space gross ?
Three Doors—Forensic Architecture/Forensis, Initiative 19 opens at Frankfurter Kunstverein (FKV). Featuring London-based Forensic Architecture working with local partners, the show (re)presents evidence in three instances of racially motivated violence in Germany. Oury Jalloh’s Cell: Smoke Traces (2022, image), demonstrates the central architectural motif, by modelling the circumstances of an African asylum seeker’s burning death, while in police custody in 2005.
“The Octopus,” an exhibition of art made within a multi-year research-based educational program spearheaded by curator Başak Şenova , opens at Vienna’s Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL). For the show, Bengü Karaduman , Maarit Mustonen , Alina Rentsch (image: Figur(e)/ation , 2022) and 13 other artists share experimental works that draw on approaches including grassroots organizing, interdisciplinary collaboration, and seeking out alternative funding models.
AI art and biohacks that ponder post-humanism, CGI fever dreams that (further) distort reality, software that speaks truth to power: HOLO Readers enjoy full access to our weird and wonderful discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture. Join us and support indie publishing in the process.
“This is not AI ‘inventing language’ but rather an inhuman process turned to human patterns, picking up on already existent and present aspects there that humans do not currently use as footholds in understanding.”
– Software artist
Everest Pipkin , debunking a viral
Twitter thread about
DALL-E 2 ’s supposed use of a ‘secret language.’ “Machine learning could be humanist,” Pikin fumes, “but it’s only ever used to launder histories of human making into propaganda for a shiny tech futurism that won’t come to pass.”
Over the course of Melbourne’s RISING festival, local audio-visual artist Robin Fox alters the city-landscape with a newly commissioned laser composition. MONOCHORD features a powerful, one kilometre-long beam that, at regular intervals, articulates planes and patterns to synchronized sound just above the Yarra River. Playing the beam like a single-string instrument, Fox expresses the changing voltage both visually and sonically to create what he calls “mechanical synaesthesia.”
“For me the phrase was the perfect title for the exhibition, encompassing why Amazon is such a ruthless company, and how they make this fact incredibly overt, both to their employees and customer base.”
– London-based artist, writer, and curator
Bob Bicknell-Knight , discussing his current solo show, “
It’s Always Day One ,” at Office Impart, Berlin. Named after a hyper-capitalist Jeff Bezos phrase the company regularly uses in shareholder letters and press briefings, the exhibition includes, for example, 3D-printed body parts representing soon-to-be automated labour and interviews with Amazon workers.
“Institutional critique is ultimately reimagined for the crisis-ridden present as a praxis of care: a methodology for appraising the frameworks of state governance to ensure they meet the requirements of every citizen.”
–
Art-agenda editor
Ben Eastham , on the new voices, currents, and potential described in Karen Archey’s
After Institutions , which appraises the erosion of traditional institutions’ art world influence over the last several decades
OUT NOW :
Tom Tyler
Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity
A rumination on empathy and positionality emerging from games that allow players to become pets, predators, and prey
Dave Smith (1950–2022)
American engineer and “father of MIDI,” Dave Smith, dies at 72. The
Sequential founder revolutionised the music industry with the Prophet line of polyphonic, programmable synthesizers and, in 1983, the introduction of
MIDI . The protocol allowed drum machines, keyboards, and sequencers to speak to one another, and earned Smith a Technical Grammy in 2013.
“We’re outsiders, in this together; we’re doing something sort of ridiculous, but also sort of cool. Though DYOR may be used to foster a sense of community, what it actually describes is participation in a market.”
– Tech and media writer
John Herrman , in an article linking the prominence of ‘do your own research’ (DYOR) rhetoric across conspiracy theory, anti-vax, and crypto communities.
An excavation of the legacy of sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler , American Artist ’s solo exhibition “Shaper of God” opens at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles. Both spent their formative years in the Pasadena region, which the artist translates into ruminations on “technology, race, surveillance, identity, and place” that map Southern California sites inspired by Butler’s novels and life: To Acorn (1984) (2022), for example, is a sculpture resembling the city bus stops that Butler would have waited at.
“Grid Island,” a meta-exhibition questioning “fundamental tasks of a museum such as collection, research, exhibition, and education,” opens at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA). Ahram Kwon , SungHong Min , Nicholas Pelzer , contribute works that question boundaries of medium and (time) period; Jungki Beak’s Fusor (2021, image), presents a functioning nuclear fusion device designed in the style of the ganui, a 15th century Joseon Dynasty astronomical instrument.
“Another end of the world is possible,” an exhibition featuring Julieta Aranda and collaborators, opens at Milan’s Prometeo Gallery. Featured works include Double Death (2022, image), which explores “notions of infrastructure, and the technologies of life supporting other ideas of time,” and contributions from anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli and the Karrabing Film Collective that complement the Mexican artist’s preoccupation with ecology and deep time.
“Humans tended to prefer solutions from other humans over those proposed by algorithms, because they were more intuitive, or were less costly upfront—even if they paid off more, later.”
– Tech journalist
Edward Ongweso Jr , on human bias demonstrated in a new
study by researchers at the
Center for Human and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development that showed how “algorithmic agents and AI may play an active role in shaping cultural evolution”
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