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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A collaboration between CERN and the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics (IGFAE), Armin Linke ’s “Instruments of Vision” opens at the historic Igrexa da Universidade church in Santiago (ES). Presenting a selection of photographs shot over the more than two decades the Italian artist has spent documenting research at European particle physics facilities, the Mónica Bello -curated show starkly juxtaposes images of technocratic scientists and their tools with the divinity of a baroque church.
Coinciding with the summer solstice, Irish artist John Gerrard ’s yearlong performance crystalline work (arctic) (2024-25, image) commences on Feral File. The browser-based simulation presents a top-down view of a robot arm operating at the North Pole, organizing tiny light-catching shards into ornate crystal patterns called ‘archetypes.’ The 24 archetypes produced per solar day are tokenized as NFTs, and Gerrard will donate 25% of sales revenue to help restore the Wild Atlantic Rainforest in Connemara (IE).
“Crystalline work is present in the browser for a global audience. For me, this space—the phone, the screen—it’s the key interface for public art. And WebGL is the key medium for it right now.”
– Irish artist
John Gerrard , opining that browser-based art is the ultimate public art. Discussing his imminent Feral File launch with
Casey Reas , Gerrard talks through the conceptual motivations behind his “data performance”
crystalline work (arctic) (2024-25) and explains that the
WebGL graphics library democratizes access to it. [quote edited]
“These harms are not a failure of willpower and parenting; they are the consequence of unleashing powerful technology without adequate safety measures, transparency, or accountability.”
– U.S. Surgeon General
Vivek H. Murthy , contextualizing the correlation between screen time and mental health issues in adolescents. In an op-ed calling for warning labels on social media platforms, Murthy argues families need support as they are “pitted against some of the best product engineers and most well-resourced companies in the world.”
“PART TIME COMMITMENT SERIES,” a programming cycle exploring time and productivity, kicks off at Munich’s Lothringer 13 Halle (DE). Its first chapter presents Out of Your Head and Into my Body (2024, image), an installation by the OTC collective that mirrors workers in an assembly in which components “are connected to each other, face each other, hold each other.” Future chapters include presentations on agricultural and industrial labour by Verena Hägler and Nicola Reiter and an anti-work session.
Spanning two venues, Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme ’s “The song is the call, and the land is calling” opens at Copenhagen Contemporary (CC) and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek . At CC, they present May Amnesia: Only Sounds that Tremble Through Us (2020-, image), a poetic remix of social media clips depicting joyful moments of song and dance from Iraq, Palestine, and Syria. The work by the duo—both of Palestinian descent—explores “how shattered communities resist annihilation and reclaim place, self, and community.”
Exploring the intersection of Blackness and geological time, Cauleen Smith ’s film The Deep West Assembly (2024) debuts at her Astrup Fearnley Museum solo show in Oslo. In the film, the American artist juxtaposes imagery of geological formations and human-made landforms with narration drawn from various texts, including her Volcano Manifesto (2022), to articulate the deep time of the Mississippi River Delta . A video installation, textile banner series, and reading room round out the exhibition.
“The exhibition frames the history of zines as communities building toward a collective call for larger-scale resistance to capitalism and a rejection of the attitudes expected of bodies within it.”
Foregrounding artists born in the early 1980s through the mid-’90s, “Millennials: The Media Art of Generation Y” opens at LABoral in Gijón (ES). Curated by Pablo de Soto , artists including Emanuel Gollob , So Kanno , and Maria Smigielska & CompMonks are featured. Questions of social justice and criticality are top of mind, as exemplified by OPN Studio ’s The Pure Voice—Undoing Gender (2022, image), where viewers speak into a microphone and “free their voices from normative gender” via its wild audiovisual transformation.
“Now we’re so separated and split up that we don’t have this single mass-mediated culture anymore. We have these commodified, cellular microcultures which are turned into products and mechanisms of online engagement.”
– Activist and whistleblower
Chelsea Manning , lamenting the atomization caused by social media. In conversation with
e-flux to mark the 20th anniversary of McKenzie Wark’s
A Hacker Manifesto , Manning dwells on the slow death of journalism and how Silicon Valley venture capitalists will inevitably corrupt Web3.
“Decomputing is a logic for resisting datacentres, a way of cutting through the climate-washing and of extending those struggles. It’s a rationale for more collective action to constrain computing which is out of balance with social and environmental justice.”
– Social Computing scholar and
Resisting AI (2022) author
Dan McQuillan , making a case
against the unsustainable AI boom and
for “computing within limits” during
The Ecology of AI Workshop at the 2024 Hybrid Human Artificial Intelligence (HHAI) conference in Malmö (SE)
OUT NOW :
Claire Bishop
Disordered Attention
Art historian
Bishop muses over how the ceaseless demands of the attention economy and glut of online ‘content’ have shifted the way we consume art from being in a state of deep focus to distracted “browsing, skimming, and sampling.“
“This is Apple’s pitch distilled: the messy edges of your life, sanded down via Siri and brushed aluminum. You live; Apple expedites.”
– Tech columnists
Charlie Warzel and
Matteo Wong , describing how Apple’s
integration of ChatGPT into its voice assistant could
seem appealing to consumers. “The more you buy into its ecosystem and entrust it with your personal information, the more useful its AI tools theoretically become,” the duo concludes, worrying that AI-powered Siri will (further) lock users into reliance on Apple products.
A tour “leading us through the geological ages of the Earth all the way to space,” Pauline Julier ’s “A Single Universe” opens at Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau (CH). The Swiss artist and filmmaker presents works linking the deep time of terrestrial biomes to a Martian mountain range. Multimedia installations including Follow the Water (2023, image), which explores water rights and landscapes, and Naturalis Historia (2017-19), an interrrogation of our “thinking and representation of nature,” are featured.
“Even banal systems like campus ID cards, presence monitors, class attendance monitoring, and WiFi access points can create a record of student locations or tip off schools to people congregating.”
“Sometimes artists are being deliberately ambient and non-spectacular. And sometimes what seems appealing and fascinating turns out to be quite empty.”
– Art historian
Claire Bishop , discussing the depth (or lack thereof) of different artworks. Discussing her book
Disordered Attention (2024), she reveals that she asks herself “what lingers?” several days
after encountering an artwork before forming an opinion.
Showcasing recent works from his three decades spent building interactive mirrors, Daniel Rozin ’s “Contours” opens at Bitforms New York. Presented are One Candle Mirror (2023), an apparatus with 276 lenses that draws on the light of a singular candle, and RGB Lights Mirror (2023, image), a screen of 818 rotating aluminum knobs that reflect an LED screen-like image of the viewer. In aggregate, the new works demonstrate the Israeli-American artist “turning his focus to the outline of the human form.”
“Green cryptocurrencies show how technology and finance can support ecological sustainability, providing a model for others to follow. But there is always risk.”
– Finance scholar
Dulani Jayasuriya , expressing optimism for environmentally friendly cryptocurrencies including Ethereum and Solana. Taking stock of the state of
proof-of-stake blockchains, Jayasuriya explores how developers of green blockchains are wrestling with the decentralization, performance, and security required for mass adoption.
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