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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“Governance challenges arise in similar ways to those already existing around the internet, only to be enhanced by the invasive and intimate nature of this immersive technology with sensors and devices connected close to the body.”
– Videogame policy researcher
Micaela Mantegna , on the looming quagmire of new, more intimate iterations of familiar surveillance, data privacy, and (lack of) regulation problems in the Metaverse
In wiring a vintage Commodore 1541 floppy drive directly to a CRT monitor, German software engineer and demoscener Matthias Kramm releases Freespin , “a C64 demo … without the C64,” at Gubbdata , Sweden. Working wonders with the drive’s I/O chips and a hacked serial cable, Kramm sets 16 visual effects including scrollers, plasma, and raster bars to beats generated by the drive’s stepper motor. A C64 is only used to install code on the 1541, explains Kramm in the demonstration video—“I’ll now remove it because it is not needed anymore.”
“Zeroes and Ones” opens at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Connecting zeitgeist theme ‘the algorithm’ with conceptual art, its works span contemporary installation to early-Modernist furniture design. Highlights include Tishan Hsu ’s uncanny health care object Biocube (1988, image), Carolyn Lazard ’s noise machine array A Conspiracy (2017), and Lee Lozano ’s didactic A Boring Drawing (1963–9). The common thread: “scripting, scoring, coding” are “complicated through lived experience,” write the curators.
“Dave is a sort of rubbery fuck boy, eloquent in his melancholy but easily deflated. He resembles both the owner of a sex doll and the doll itself.”
– Critic
Lucy Ives , on ‘Dave’ the CGI protagonist of Ed Atkins’
Ribbons (2014). Ives further describes the character as “an abject white guy who drinks, smokes, and croons self-pitying ditties through a computer-generated haze replete with lens flares and dust particles” in a consideration of Atkins aesthetic and tone relative to post-internet art canon
OUT NOW :
The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 61-62
An examination of the “changing ontology of the image” from AI to Iconomics, edited by Jacob Lund, and featuring Claire Fontaine, Jussi Parikka, Cecilia Sjöholm, Eyal Weizman, and others
“It’s over. Medialab-Prado closed its doors for the last time. Gone are the efforts to make this space a welcoming and lively place and a lot of wonderful and incredible projects for the city proposed by its inhabitants. It remains an empty space without a project.”
An NFT of Tim Berners-Lee ’s 1989 source code of the world wide web sells for $5.4 million USD in a Sothebys auction —a price at parity with Nyan cat , but a fraction of Beeple’s Everydays . The NFT includes a video the Web’s creator describes as “what the source code would look like if it was stuck on the wall and signed by me.” The buyer also receives a time-stamped archive of the 10,000 lines of code and a letter from Lee, the transaction underscoring how the internet remains a conflation of culture and commerce.
Taking a meta view of information commons throughout history for the Atlantic , law professor Jonathan Zittrain argues that internet link rot is really a problem. Tracking the jump from libraries to Google and across storage materials of varying durability (papyrus, paper, floppy disk, hard drive), he describes how broken links and bygone websites represents a “comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts” that limits our ability to cite in legal and academic contexts, and everyday life. Drawing on Berkman Klein Center initatives and the legacy of Project Xanadu and Internet Archive , Zittrain diagnoses how seemingly benign elements of our information diet (the Amazon Kindle, the lack of canonical TikTok URLs) may be symptoms of a more troubling condition.
OUT NOW :
Benjamin Bratton
The Revenge of the Real
A global governance stocktaking, after myriad cracks were revealed in public and private infrastructure by COVID-19
A hat tip to the star-studded browser space of Olia Lialina ’s net art classic Some Universe (2002), the 11th edition of Eastern Bloc ’s Sight + Sound Festival opens with the online exhibition “Some Universe—Internet Spaces in a Postdigital World.” Featuring 13 VR, video, and net art pieces by AAA , Banz & Bowinkel , Ronnie Clarke , Mara Eagle , Jiwon Ham , Jakyung Lee (image: Exodus , 2020), and others, curators Erandy Vergara and Tina Sauerländer explore how the pandemic shift online has changed our sense of space.
“Corporate support for art and technology practice in the U.S. has traced the tumultuous peaks and troughs of capital. These investments, however, usually entail a quid pro quo; whether at incubators or museums, the product is rarely divorced from the brand.”
– Writer and curator
Vanessa Chang , on the American National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA)
report “Tech as Art: Supporting Artists Who Use Technology as a Creative Medium”
Named after William Gibson’s 1977 short story , “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” opens on the curated NFT marketplace Feral File . Inspired by the dark flower fiction, curating artist Rick Silva asked ten peers including Lawrence Lek , Peter Burr , Rosa Menkman , Sabrina Ratté , and Sara Ludy (image: Plants are everywhere you can’t see them ) “to create their own sci-fi plants.” Similar to Gibson, “these artists cultivate their fictions into existence,” writes Silva, “like botanists from a parallel future or an unknown world.”
“A lot of the protocols seem to be wrapped around each other, DeFi wrapped around DeFi wrapped around DeFi—all the way down. And it’s hard to figure out exactly what the application is for people outside the space.”
The latest in his Pulse series of heartbeat-synched light works, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ’s Pulse Topology premieres at Kansas City’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. For the first time, the Mexican-Canadian artist integrated touchless photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors that use computer vision to detect visitors’ heartbeats. Another first: the use of LED filament light bulbs that lower the installation’s energy footprint while allowing for greater scale—instead of 100–300 bulbs, Pulse Topology is made of 3,000.
A loose response to MoMA’s iconic 1970 “INFORMATION ” exhibition, “INFORMATION (Today)” opens at Kunsthalle Basel, examining how AI, digital currencies, and data harvesting—all products of 21st-century capitalism—drive post-truth proliferation. To illuminate “data’s nebulous modes of circulating,” curator Elena Filipovic gathered works by Sondra Perry , Trevor Paglen , Sung Tieu , as well as new commissions including Simon Denny ’s Economist Chart NFT and American Artist ’s Veillance Caliper (Annotated) (image).
Showcasing a series of pen plotter drawings, Travess Smalley ’s “Pixel Rugs” opens at Arcade on Stadium in Provo, Utah. Produced in Photoshop and then output to a plotter armed with a black ballpoint pen (imperfectly) printing to cream cardstock, Smalley, a self-described maker of “generative image systems,” frames the resulting dense hypnotic grids of orthogonal blotches, arrhythmic jazzy tile forms, and amorphous diamonds seemingly melting into one another as “like a punch card weaving … like a game asset … like a rug in my Minecraft house.”
“In order to fuck with profit, you have to understand your own role in the circulation of capital. You have to confront how profit is produced. In this way, sabotage reveals where value comes from: the worker.”
–
Sam Lavigne , framing his artworks as “digital self-sabotage,” necessary for political action. Projects like
Slow Hot Computer (2016),
The Good Life (2017), and, more recently,
Zoom Escaper (2021) create ‘friction’ in order to “reveal the politics and power structures inherent in the systems that mediate our lives.”
A bestiary of post-anthropocenic creations curated by Charles Carcopino , “Hyper Organisms” opens at iMAL, Brussels. In assembling objects, installations, prints, and video works by twelve artists including Jonathan Pêpe , Katherine Melançon , Ryoichi Kurokawa , Doug Rosman , Justine Emard , and Ujoo + limheeyoung (image: Machine with Pink , 2019), Carcopino looks for hope in the dramatic acceleration of technology and examines how species—natural or artificial—may influence and nourish one another.
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