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
Year
Month
Tag
Order
Custom
Filter
“Dancing While Waiting (for the end of the world),” the 12th edition of Eastern Bloc ’s Sight + Sound Festival, opens in Montréal. Curated by Nathalie Bachand and Sarah Ève Tousignant, it features Adam Basanta , Johanna Bruckner , Faith Holland (image: Detumescence , 2021), Max Lester , Sabrina Ratté & Roger Tellier-Craig , Florence To , and 30 others in a program that explores tensions between (pandemic) before times and “a ‘future’ that may or may not live up to its name.”
In the works since 2019 and then postponed during the pandemic, Kurt Hentschläger ’s audiovisual performance EKO premieres at the Theatre Royal Plymouth, UK. Part of an ongoing series set in complete darkness, the Austrian artist’s composition interrupts the absence of light with intense millisecond-long bursts of “micro-animated geometric forms” emanating from an LED wall. As a maelstrom of ambient sound envelopes the viewers, “retinal afterimages unravel within their eyes.”
“AI art is, in my view, soft propaganda for the ideology of prediction. As long as it remains tied to the paradigm and politics of ever-large models, increasing capital and marketing hyperbole, its contribution to art practice will have little meaning, if any.”
– Artist and performer
Marco Donnarumma , fiercely arguing that AI art is a direct manifestation of “prediction ideology … the operating system of the Global North”
“Yeah, we solved narrative generation, but it turns out that no-one wants to read five thousand fanfic stories unless they have an emotional connection to the authorship, and it flopped. Was a total Bach Faucet.”
– Artist and scholar
Kate Compton , demonstrating the use of “Bach Faucet,” a new (
David-Cope -inspired) term she coined for the burgeoning “fully fractal” era of AI-powered cultural reproduction
Known for inventive hardware hacks, Swedish musician and self-professed ‘mad engineer’ Linus Åkesson debuts his Commodordion : an 8-bit accordion made from two Commodore 64s . Both run QWERTUOSO , Åkesson’s programmable SID chip synthesizer, played via computer keyboard. As with a real accordion, the sounds are triggered by the bellows (that Åkesson improvised from 5 ¼ floppy disks): a sensor measures air flow as the virtuoso plays.
“Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere” opens at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. Featuring Jes Fan , Jenna Sutela , and Anicka Yi , and 11 other artists that reveal the “interspecies entanglements” that shape our world. Contributed works range from Špela Petrič’s poetic shadow study Confronting Vegetal Otherness: Skotopoiesis (2015)—cast on germinating cress—to Candice Lin’s “communal piss” fungal sculpture Memory (Study #2) (2016, image).
An output of the STARTS4Water art-science research initiative, “Faces of Water” opens at Bozar Brussels. Featuring works by Haseeb Ahmed , Anna Ridler , Theresa Schubert , and Joshua G. Stein , each artist highlights different water challenges from across Europe. For Schubert’s Glacier Trilogy—Part 1 (2022, image), for example, the artist mused about how glaciers “embed information” (radiation, pollution, organic matter)—her video installation mourns their replacement with a “synthetic archive.”
“In everyday life, 13 is less common than 12. There’s no 13th month, 13-inch ruler, or 13 o’clock.”
– Sociologist Barry Markovsky, explaining how “sense of anomaly” can contribute to the irrational fear some people have of the number 13 (a phobia not so commonly referred to as
triskaidekaphobia )
“Terms & Expectations,” a group exhibition curated by Barbara Cueto & Bas Hendrikx , open’s at Toronto’s InterAccess. Focused on “distribution centres as agents within our natural environment,” the show hones in on critical infrastructure that underpins platform capitalism (e.g. the ubiquitous Amazon fulfilment centre). Featured are artists including Hiba Ali Simon Denny , Sophia Oppel , and Coralie Vogelaar , contributing works in mediums ranging from installation to performance.
“They’ve contributed $73 million through June 30th of this year. That’s more than the oil and gas industry has put into politics, more than defence, and more than the transportation sector.”
– Campaign finance reporter
Bill Allison , explaining how high-net-worth individuals from the crypto space (e.g.
Sam Bankman-Fried ) are U.S. midterm election megadonors. “They’re really focusing on Congressional races, and trying to influence the outcome of those races,” he continues, predicting industry friendly regulation in 2023.
The first retrospective of the late German artist’s five decade career, “Walter Giers: Electronic Art” opens at ZKM Karlsruhe . Initially producing kinetic and op art, Giers began referring to his works as elektronische spielobjekte (electronic playthings) in 1974. The show offers a broad survey of his light and sound sculptures, and his signature exposed circuits (image: Kunst Macht Nature , 1979), which let viewers get up close and personal with the materiality of electronics.
“I dunno exactly who wrote the headline for my column this week but give ’em a raise.”
–
Toronto Star tech and culture columnist
Navneet Alang , giving props to the heroic unknown editor that titled his
commentary on Meta’s latest VR developments. The headline: “Mark Zuckerberg’s Dream for the Metaverse Doesn’t Have Legs”
“Evolution,” an exhibition held within the ArtVerona art fair curated by Domenico Quaranta , opens in Verona, Italy. Featured artists include Matthew Attard , Léa Porré , Quayola , Marco Strappato , and Xenoangel (image: Bless the ghosts that bring the winds , 2022), contributing works focused on topics ranging from the machinic gaze to extractivism. Reflecting on the show’s title, the Italian curator writes “evolution means hybridization, adaptation, learning from nature.”
“I don’t have the level of knowledge of the classics as someone like Ezra Pound did, obviously. But I do know about Bonk’s Adventure , Sonic the Hedgehog , and Saturday morning cartoons.”
– Digital artist
Jon Rafman , contrasting the sprawling breadth of videogames and pop culture contemporary artists draw from versus the narrow canon referenced by modernist novelists and poets (like
Pound ). “But I
do also know a little about Shakespeare and Chaucer,” the Canadian artist adds.
“Transpositions,” the third in a series of exhibitions exploring the relationships between textiles and technology, opens at Hamilton, Canada’s Centre[3] for Artistic and Social Practice . Curated by Nicole Burisch , Emily Herman (image: Echo (Sabin) , 2019), Marisa Gallemit , Tong Zhou Lafrance , and Caroline Monnet contribute textile-based works made from unconventional materials (stripped cables, air barrier membranes, etc.) that repurpose (and reimagine) “networks of circulation.”
“The aim of immersion in possible futures is to break the imaginative gridlock we find ourselves in, when left to navigate our feelings with mere data and numbers. We want to evoke in people the hope that lies beneath the anxiety: that we are more resilient and able than we are led to believe.”
–
Superflux’s Anab Jain and Hanna Sarsa, on their goals when depicting
possible climate futures
“The role of the digital exhibition is not to imitate its physical counterpart. Digital art and its exhibitions exist to examine the affordances of their endemic space.”
DOSSIER :
AI Anarchies Autumn School co-curators Maya Indira Ganesh & Nora N. Khan share what inspired their imminent “experiments in study, collective learning, and unlearning” at Akademie der Künste Berlin. “The anarchic is not a point of arrival, but a search for practices of memory, body, collectivity, and other logics that can also sustain our hybrid selves,” writes Ganesh.
Load More
To dive deeper into Stream, please
Log-In or become a
HOLO Reader .
Daily discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture: Get full access by becoming a HOLO Reader !
Perspective : research, long-form analysis, and critical commentaryEncounters : in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovatorsStream : a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and countingEdition : HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print
Become a HOLO Reader