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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“We should all be worried about the McCarthyism that seems to permeate even the most experimental and ‘liberal’ of cultural spaces. Furthermore, there’s a disturbing link between this kind of thought-policing and the total erosion of public funding that has created a dependency on private sources of money.”
– Curator Vera May, describing her two big concerns in cultural production right now
“Pink Noise,” a major Troika solo exhibition, opens at Langen Foundation near Neuss (DE), foregrounding the Franco-German trio’s artistic reflections on mediated nature and our dis/orientation within it. The show explores “how our perception of ‘nature’ is calibrated to digital media’s frequencies and spectra,” write curators Dehlia Hannah and Nadim Samman about their selection of new and recent works. As new technologies invade the human sensorium, they ask, how does our environment change?
“By the time I’d learned that Brendan Eich, author of JavaScript, is an anti-vaxxer and was a supporter of a campaign to have same-sex marriage nixed in California, I wasn’t surprised.”
– Journalist and
Devil in the Stack: A Coding Odyssey (2024) author
Andrew Smith , on the values and assumptions encoded in various programming languages. Recounting his journey into coding, Smith reflects on his attempts to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in his 50s and why he ultimately fell for
Python : “Its community is easily the most culturally and neurologically diverse I’ve ever seen.”
“In other words: On average over the last 3 years, the planet has been heating by just over 1 million Hiroshimas per day.”
– American mathematician, computer scientist, and unflinching climate truth-teller
Eliot Jacobson , on Earth’s escalating energy imbalance, fuelled by our burning of fossil fuels. Measured in Hiroshima bombs per Second (HpS), Jacobson’s calculations reveal the most recent 36-month average to be 11.73 HpS.
Basel’s House of Electronic Arts (HEK) opens “Tools for Change,” an international group exhibition arguing that “artists have always been more than mere users of technology.” Curator Julia Kaganskiy considers Tega Brain , Heather Dewey-Hagborg , Fragmentin , Mary Maggic , Caroline Sinders , Superflux , Alice Yuan Zhang and others as inventors of “tools for conviviality ” (Ivan Illich). These tools, both as software and social structures, “create alternative visions by emphasising access, creativity, justice, and interdependence.”
“If chatbots can be persuaded to change their answers by a paragraph of white text, or a secret message written in code, why would we trust them with any task, let alone ones with actual stakes?”
– Tech columnist
Kevin Roose , on how easily AI systems can be gamed. Eager to improve his tainted reputation with chatbots after his viral
Sydney take-down forced industry-wide safety measures (Meta’s Llama 3: “I hate Kevin Roose!“), the American author and journalist uncovers a number of shockingly simple hacks to steer answers. “Oracles shouldn’t be this easy to manipulate,” he warns.
“Being unseen is protection itself, hiding is independence, opacity is freedom. Obfuscation is the choice to live opposite of an increasingly virtualized and surveilled experience of life.”
– Artist and researcher Lindsay Sorell, summarizing the ethos of the Remai Modern exhibition “
How Not to Be Seen .” Artists including
Zach Blas ,
Sondra Perry , and
Hito Steyerl contribute to the Saskatoon (CA) show, which Sorell encapsulates as “a tour of reactions to colonial systems of surveillance and control.”
Cornell researchers harnessed fungal mycelia’s innate electrical signals as a new way of controlling “biohybrid” robots. “By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment,” says Rob Shepherd of Cornell’s Organic Robotics Lab . Using light as an input, the spider bot walked in response to natural spikes in the mycelia’s signal. “It’s about creating a true connection with the living system,” explains lead researcher Anand Mishra .
“I think I always knew that if I had to quit or get fired for making a moral choice, I would. So I kept one foot out the door to protect myself and my decisions.”
– Anishinaabe curator
Wanda Nanibush , reflecting on her departure from the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in late 2023. Journalist
Jason McBride delves into the decolonial agenda that Nanibush enacted during her tenure at the Toronto institution—and how its Board of Trustees forced her out of her job for speaking out in support of Palestinians.
Sarah Friend launches Prompt Baby (2024), a series of 69 NFTs on [Modularium] and the Celestia blockchain. Collectors purchase the right to send Friend an image prompt, which the Canadian artist may use to generate a one-of-a-kind AI image of ‘Sarah Friend’ with a model trained on photos of herself and NSFW images. She reserves the right to reject any prompt and negotiate image contents. The collector-artist dialogue centres “consent and identity, and models an alternative to the harmful proliferation of deepfakes,” writes Friend.
OUT NOW :
Craig Gent
Cyberboss
Researcher and editor
Gent takes stock of the impact of algorithmic management techniques used by Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo on workers and offers a “politics of resistance in the face of digital control.”
“If a government comes knocking at Telegram’s door asking for information on a wrongdoer, real or perceived, Telegram doesn’t have the same safety that its peers do. An end-to-end encrypted service can sincerely tell law enforcement that it can’t help them.”
– TechScape columnist
Alex Hearn , on the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov. Hearn observes that had Telegram adopted end-to-end encryption in the first place—Durov would probably never have been arrested for hindering French law enforcement when he landed in Paris on Aug 25.
Google and Tel Aviv University researchers present GameNGen, the first game engine powered entirely by an AI diffusion model. To demonstrate the capacity for high-quality, real-time interaction with complex environments, the researchers had GameNGen simulate the FPS classic DOOM (1993) at over 20 frames per second on a single TPU . The results are so good, human raters can barely distinguish short clips of the game from clips of the simulation, the researchers argue in their paper .
“A wristwatch featuring a smiling Mickey Mouse is still ticking, reminding us that time goes on even after we are gone.”
“The large, square, prints on C-type paper hold the attention effortlessly, having a modernist typographical level of simplicity, while simultaneously conveying a point of radical transition from a logic of held type to a logic of generative data.”
“She examined a belt as she twisted it left and right,” Yasemin Saplakoglu writes of American biophysicist Jane S. Richardson ’s late 1970s breakthrough in representing protein structures. For Quanta , Saplakoglu explains how Richardson first drew “the folds of a protein’s amino acid backbone without getting bogged down in the details of specific atomic arrangements” for a journal article (1981, image). The (M.C. Escher -inspired) ribbon diagram technique is now ubiquitous in structural biology.
“It glorifies a data-intensive reality, increasing complexity, and growing resource consumption by digital devices. Here, there is no concept of boundaries and limitations.”
– German graphic designer Hannah Gmeiner, unpacking the term ‘maximalist techno-aesthetics’ that corresponds to a growth mindset and the constant pressure for artists and cultural workers “to adopt new tools and techniques.” In her
bachelor thesis , Gmeiner explores
Permacomputing as an alternative: “I tried to work as resource-efficiently, small-scale, with low complexity, and as transparently as possible,” she tells fellow designer Tim Rodenbröker.
The investigative researchers of Bellingcat announce Shadow Finder Tool , a simple way of geolocating photographs using the position of Earth’s subsolar point —where the Sun is directly overhead—to narrow down search to a handful of countries and locations. “If you know the date and time an image was taken, and can make accurate measurements of the height of an object and the length of its shadow, you can identify the ring of possible areas where the image was taken,” the researchers explain.
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