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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“Morris has been perfecting her oldest pet’s petpage since she first created her account as an 11-year-old. Neopia is filled with similar sparkling, homespun web pages—the fruits of thousands of late nights spent learning how to code.”
– Writer
Madeleine Morley , revisiting the “living time capsule” that is
Neopets . Thanks to pandemic-era nostalgia seekers, the “Animal Crossing meets Pokémon meets early Myspace” has seen a 30 to 40 percent spike in usership.
OUT NOW :
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Discriminating Data
The
media theorist and systems design engineer reveals how big data and machine learning encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage
“Although Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial recognition templates by December, it will not eliminate the software that powers the system. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition technology into future products.”
– Technology reporters
Kashmir Hill and
Ryan Mac , parsing Facebook’s
decision to shut down its decade-old facial recognition system over societal concerns
A “public service intervention” that exposes climate disinformation on social media during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), British artists Bill Posters and Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja launch Eco-Bot.Net , a system that collects, visualises, and flags corporate greenwashing (ads, sponsored posts etc) from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The dataset is updated every 24 hours and new ‘drops’ for different sectors such as lobbying, energy, and aviation will be released throughout COP26.
“It became very clear, very quickly, that things like diversity, inclusion, and access were something that we could foreground as a priority. We really wanted to support community members who hadn’t been supported in other open-source places and contexts before.”
–
Johanna Hedva , artist, writer, and
Processing Foundation ’s Director of Advocacy, on building community around values in part two of
Eye on Design ’s oral history of Processing
“Since there seems to be growing confusion on this: I have nothing to do with anything that Facebook is up to involving the Metaverse, other than the obvious fact that they’re using a term I coined in Snow Crash . There has been zero communication and no biz relationship.”
– American scifi writer and
Snow Crash (1992) author
Neal Stephenson , going on the record
After excursions into lenticulars and tapestries, Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal renders a new series of digital drawings (reminiscent of his trademark browser canvases ) on enamelled steel plates at Amsterdam’s Upstream Gallery. These Mechanical Paintings explore “the abstraction of everyday objects and scenes through the lens of the early internet’s innocence and optimism,” contrasting the heavy, long-lasting material with Rozendaal’s spontaneous and playful compositions.
“There is a poverty line below which no one should fall, and a wealth line above which no one should rise. We need wealth taxes, not carbon taxes.”
–
Guardian columnist
George Monbiot , making the case for
limitarianism . In his scathing critique of capitalism, “micro-consumerist bollocks,” and a distracted media, Monbiot calls for
private sufficiency and public luxury : “We should each have our own small domains but when we want to spread our wings, we could do so without seizing resources from other people.”
“Draw Like a Machine: Pop Art, 1952-1975” opens at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston. Featuring Roy Lichtenstein (image: Steak , 1960), Lee Lozano , Marjorie Strider , Idelle Weber , and other artists associated with pop art , the show chronicles the gradual erasure of gesture and the move towards a machine aesthetic informed by advertising and emerging reproduction technology. The selected works “upend the traditionally assumed connection drawing has to the hand of the artist,” writes curator Kelly Montana.
“The gesture of creating a kind of ‘anti-game,’ one that goes against the typical rules of game-making, is a gesture which has been famously repeated over the decades by both artists and other video game creators.”
A heartwreching visualization of COVID-19’s impact, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ’s A Crack in the Hourglass (2020) debuts IRL at the Brooklyn Museum . An “anti-monument,” the installation renders portraits of pandemic victims with grains of sand, once realized the delicate images fall away. Commissioned by MUAC (Mexico City), NYC is a fitting first stop, given the city endured amongst the “highest number of pandemic-related deaths in the U.S.—and worldwide,” note the curators.
“Now, just as we’re waking up to ways Facebook has knowingly eroded our social, mental and civic well-being, Zuckerberg is back with a new offering: a way out. Instead of struggling to make sense of or peace in the real world, we can surrender.”
– Media theorist and author
Douglas Rushkoff , on the Facebook
rebrand . “Going meta is Facebook’s escape hatch,“ he writes. “Facebook is not cool with kids, it’s in trouble with the government and its growth prospects are quite limited.”
Software artists and VRAME.io collaborators Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace launch DFACE.app, “the first website that provides neural network face redaction in your web browser.” Using an “impressively small but performant 13MB face detection neural network” (source ) called YOLOV5 , DFACE allows users to easily anonymise profile pictures with a variety of effects while keeping their data private.
“No matter what Mark Zuckerberg calls it, it will remain Zuckerberg Inc. until he relinquishes some power and yields to functional corporate governance.”
– Social media researcher
Jennifer Grygiel , on Facebook renaming itself as Meta (for meta-verse) amidst waves of backlash, condemnation, and revulsion
OUT NOW :
Daragh Byrne & Dan Lockton
Spooky Technology
A compendium of interaction design research produced during a
multi-year initiative exploring the “hidden flows of data, unknown agendas, imaginary clouds, and mysterious sets of rules” that
haunt everyday technologies
“Having the icon be basically the play button was a big innovation of the friendly language of Processing. It isn’t ‘compile’—it’s ‘play.’”
–
Dan Shiffman , Associate Arts Professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, reminiscing on
Processing ’s origins with co-founders
Casey Reas and
Ben Fry . “That was intentional,” explains Reas in
Eye of Design ’s “oral history” of the creative coding language. “If you were learning computer programming at that time you were doing classes in a computer science department. You were only working with text and math.”
“Some people said, ‘Oh, don’t you think the way that the image disappears is kind of violent?’ Well, that’s exactly what a funeral is … closure.”
Trinity College Dublin announces the end of Science Gallery , stating that it no longer considers the venue for science and technology-based exhibitions and lectures to be financially viable. Opened in 2008 to encourage interest in scientific discovery and creativity and counting more than three million visitors to date, the gallery will permanently close on February 28, 2022. The current exhibition, “BIAS: BUILT THIS WAY ,” on AI and algorithmic prejudice curated by Julia Kaganskiy will be its last.
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