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An output of curators Peter Kirn and Anna Titovets plus partner Kotä , “Experimental Music and Art” Expo opens at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA). !Mediengruppe Bitnik , Sara Culmann , Mikhail Myasoedov , and other participants’ expertise spans hard sciences, installation, and sound. The thematic: a search for new forms in a moment of crisis, as evidenced by Byrke Lou ’s postdigital materials research (image: CODE_xi {isbtm}•{~} 2014-).
“These NFT sites are victim factories, and it’s not just naïve tech investors that are the victims—it’s artists since every artist selling work on these platforms is now an Ether investor too.”
– Artist
Kimberly Parker , on the “headless Ponzi scheme” that are Ethereum-based NFT marketplaces. Digging deep into the sales data of major platforms, Parker reveals what happens when the value of artwork is tied to the speculative value of the currency. “This feudalist system quickly turns artists into crypto recruiters, desperate to bring even more people into the fold.”
An effort to encourage NFT artists and collectors to transition to greener blockchains, curator Juliette Bibasse and visual artist Joanie Lemercier kick off a series of coordinated cryptoart releases on Hic et Nunc , an indie marketplace on the energy-efficient Tezos chain. Named “The FEN” (image: generative type by Mike Brondbjerg ), the campaign launches with pieces by Dave Whyte , Zai Divecha , and Auriea Harvey . Drops from more than 30 other artists will follow in the coming weeks.
The Chelsea branch of Dia Art Foundation reopens with newly commissioned works by American artist Lucy Raven . Two kinetic light sculptures, Casters X-2 and X-3 (2021), surveil the gallery with moving beams, while the immersive film installation Ready Mix (2021, image) documents the workings of an Idaho concrete plant. Capturing the churn of mineral aggregates and cement binders with optical and durational experiments, the 45-minute film expands on Raven’s preoccupation with resource extraction in the American West.
“The employer in an anti-union campaign is running a psychological terror operation, so that no worker in that facility ever considers the question of a union again. Amazon was sending a message to its workers across the United States.”
– Labour organizer
Jane McAlevey , on Bessemer, Alabama Amazon workers’ recent
failed unionization bid —and how inept media coverage of the doomed campaign
supported the company’s PR goals [quote edited]
“Last year, we created a new artwork Time Synthesizer . It was seen by almost no one. It doesn’t feel that it fully exists yet.”
–
Evelina Domnitch , sharing
documentation of her and Dmitry Gelfand’s latest installation. Visualizing water turbulences via laser-illuminated hydrogen bubbles,
Time Synthesizer premiered at Le Fresnoy’s “
Panorama 22 ” in Tourcoing, France during the October lockdown.
“The aesthetic of the glitch reveals the intrinsic mechanisms of a digital environment—a fleeting moment in which the interruption of fluidity becomes a symbol of new awareness and possibility of choice.”
Mario Santamaría ’s installation Unfixed Infrastructures and Rabbit Holes (2020) opens at Aksioma, Ljubljana, articulating invisible data flows. The Spanish artist programmed a “rabbit hole” network to cycle signals through different geolocations, seeking the maximum possible route allowed by network protocols. The delay—a measure of the materiality of digital time—is visualised by two screens video-streaming a Foucault pendulum, one connected to the gallery WiFi, the other to the “rabbit hole” network.
“We already live in a society which is very heavily gendered and very visually gendered. What these technologies are doing is making those decisions a lot more efficient, a lot more automatic, and a lot more difficult to challenge.”
– Data ethics researcher
Os Keyes , on algorithmic detection of gender and sexual orientation in the wake of a
new campaign to ban these applications in the EU
From “Cybernetic Serendipity” (1968), to the first Ars Electronica (1979), to SFMOMA’s “010101: Art in Technological Times” (2001)—Wolf Lieser’s Digital Art Museum website adds a neat event timeline that lets visitors scroll through a genre chronology. The feature is one of several additions (see the essay section ) since the site’s major overhaul in 2020. Launched in 2000, the online museum (that precedes Lieser’s eponymous Berlin gallery) is one of the first internet resources on the history of digital art.
“It seems as if we’ve successfully found a structure for the ‘machine code’ of the universe—the lowest-level processes from which all the richness of physics and everything else emerges.”
–
Stephen Wolfram , British-American computer scientist, physicist, and Wolfram Research CEO, on the 1-year-anniversary of the
Wolfram Physics Project , a daring initiative to find the fundamental theory of physics through computation
“Unmanned aircraft were seen as popular because U.S. soldiers didn’t have to go to the battlefield. But what about the casualties in the countries that were attacked by our drones?“ American artist Sam Durant asks in a wide-ranging interview about his new public artwork Untitled (drone) . “The idea was to bring this conversation home to America.” Originally conceived in 2016, Durant’s life-sized fiberglass sculpture of a Predator drone will be installed atop a 25-foot-tall pole on New York’s High Line in May.
“When invited to make temporary pieces for exhibitions, she would sculpt them so well they’d be impossible to dismantle. And then she’d refuse to gift them to the institution.”
– Writer
Dale Berning Sawa , on the determination of late land and conceptual artist
Nancy Holt . In a genre that “appears as an almost perfect distillation of the art world’s history of male privilege,” (critic Megan O’Grady), Holt was making sure that her voice was there to stay.
Software artist Everest Pipkin launches an exhaustive directory of 600+ open-source tools for building games, websites, and interactive projects. Supported by the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and the Clinic for Open Source Arts (COSA), Pipkin’s list includes anything from quirky single-purpose utilities (ASCII PAINT ) to major applications (Blender ). “The goal is to enable making entirely outside of closed production ecosystems or walled software gardens,” writes Pipkin.
“I think it’s something about concrete’s heavy dumbness as a material that needs a form to be of use. There is musique concrète and concrete poetry. Why not concrete cinema, then?”
– American artist
Lucy Raven , on the unlikely protagonist of her new film
Ready Mix (2021), that documents the workings of a concrete plant in Bellevue, Idaho. It and other works will feature in Raven’s upcoming
Dia Chelsea solo exhibition .
“I for one enjoy watching Mercedes Benz simulate the Autobahn. It’s the Kraftwerk in me.”
–
Peter Kirn , musician and creative technologist, on NVIDIA’s
GTC 2021 keynote , in which the GPU giant demonstrated how, for example, car manufacturers are training AIs for future robotic factories in the company’s simulation platform
Omniverse . On his blog
CDM , Kirn explains why these advanced enterprise applications are relevant for artists, too
OUT NOW :
Rewired #3
(Anti)Trust
An examination of tech cynicism and ways to create “a digital future we can all have faith in,” featuring contributions by
Harith Khawaja , Angela Lee, Hannah Scott, and other Stanford undergrads and postdocs
“That’s never felt good to me, having to live in San Francisco and see the physical manifestation of capitalism’s inequality engine in geographical form. And today, with the pandemic and the economic crisis, the number of tents has exploded around here.”
–
Abolish Silicon Valley author
Wendy Liu , on living in Big Tech’s ‘belly of the beast’ and routinely being confronted by the jarring mix of obscene wealth and extreme poverty
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