1,580 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“The NFT market is increasingly reframing ‘digital art’ to mean image making in popular usage. This is a cultural setback, of about 50 years.”
–
Julian Oliver , media artist and ‘critical engineer,’ on how the crypto boom flattens the perception of computational art practice. “‘Digital art’ began as an image making practice, then in ’80s, ’90s, and noughts came to encompass a far broader and exciting diversity of practices, methods, and materials,” Oliver writes on Twitter. “Now, with the NFT market, it’s come full circle to refer to image making again.”
Currently setting up several major exhibitions all across Europe, Turkish-American media artist Refik Anadol shares a (stunning) glimpse of installing Alkazar Dream: AI Cinema at a yet undisclosed location in Istanbul. Los Angeles-based Anadol is renowned for his rich data-driven architectural projections, large-scale media facades, and immersive experiences. Alkazar Dream: AI Cinema will feature ‘machine hallucinations’ of an AI trained on 150 historic movies and is set to open on October 29th.
“Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age” opens at Mudam Luxembourg. Exploring the paradox that capitalism is ”both dependent upon and threatened by technological progress,” the show includes polemical works by Simon Denny , Oliver Laric , Martine Syms , and others. Strongly signalling the capital-collides-with-lifeworld aesthetic is Cao Fei’s Asia One (2018, image), a film about a burgeoning romance between two young workers in a gigantic logistics warehouse, set against a backdrop of automation.
“Atkins adapts the term corpsing … his examples are when a vinyl record jumps or a streaming movie buffers. To corpse a medium is to expose its materiality, even to underscore its mortality, and in this moment the real might poke through.”
– Critic Hal Foster, on the simulated bodies and ‘dead’ media in
The Worm (2021), the centrepiece of Ed Atkins’
recent show at New York’s New Museum
“Real-Time Limbo,” a solo show by Amsterdam-based CGI artist Jaehun Park opens at Seoul’s Alternative Space LOOP . Organizing a virtual itinerary of stopovers in global hotspots including Palestine and Syria, Fukushima, and CERN—explored through animation and installation—and a broadside against the colonial legacy of his country of residence (image: Overheated Windmill , 2020), Park’s collected works illustrate how “human greed and imagination have turned reality into something that surpasses purgatory.”
EIGENHEIM gallery launches an edition box dedicated to digital art. Curated by medienkunstverein (mkv), “Digital Art Collection” features 30 artists including LaTurbo Avedon , Jeremy Bailey , Lauren Lee McCarthy , and Zach Lieberman , who “deal with the effects of the (post)digital age on our everyday life, our culture and our society.” Each artwork is represented by an NFC-chipped wooden cuboid that activates the respective piece on an enclosed tablet. Box and works are now on view at EIGENHEIM Berlin.
“The participants are bureaucrats who live in the machine endlessly dragged along by conveyor belts, chutes, and pneumatic tubes from the time of birth to the time of death.”
–
Hito Steyerl ,
Department of Decentralization , and
GPT-3 , describing La Ville-Machine Habitée, one of “Twenty-One Art Worlds: A Game Map,” a choose your own adventure journey through various corners of the contemporary art world—both vital and obsolete
“Work Upside Down,” a group exhibition exploring labour, opens at the Cluj Cultural Center in Cluj, Romania, as part of the Cluj Future of Work program. Curated by Time’s Up , Corina Bucea, and Rarița Zbranca, the show presents 13 newly commissioned works by, among others, Blajin, Mihaela Drăgan, Ioana Păun & Flavia Giurgiu, Polina Kanis , and Cristina Vasilescu & Bob Bicknell-Knight . The latter’s 24-minute CGI film Pickers (image) concerns Amazon Fulfilment Centres, abusive workspaces, and the 24/7 churn of 21st-century capitalism.
“Chadslayer, Normie Slicer, Anprim Talon, Snowflake Skorcher, Soyboy Shredder—the weapons’ names echo the rage found in incel forums, far-right chats, black bloc groups, the manosphere and other rancid circles.”
Curated by British artist Bob Bicknell-Knight , “Algorithmic Bias” opens at [Senne] , Brussels, featuring works by 13 international artists, including Zach Blas , Heather Dewey-Hagborg , Ben Grosser , JODI , and Lynn Hershman Leeson , that critique computational systems of control. Among the new works included is one of Bicknell-Knight’s own: Second Variety imagines a Boston-Dynamics-inspired four-legged automaton unearthed in a distant future “by a society that has forgotten its original purpose.”
“Our memories, our tastes, our life knowledge, might owe just as much to embodied cells and tissues using the same molecular mechanisms for memory as the brain itself. The mind, I conclude, is fluid and adaptable, embodied but not enskulled.”
– Canadian psychiatrist, writer, and academic
Thomas R. Verny , parsing research that suggests memory persists
outside the brain
“For the first time, I publicly stated my desire to take testosterone—not to become a man but to leave the body I currently exist in.”
“I love NFT Twitter because it’s half 20-tweet threads about how blockchains will be the Medicis of a new artistic renaissance and half guys trying to convince you to spend $10,000 on stuff called, like, Darryl’s Deformed Donkeys.”
– Technology writer and
New York Times columnist
Kevin Roose , on how the cryptoart craze plays out on social media
Miffed about the meager fee offered for the reproduction of two of his banknote works, Danish artist Jens Haaning pocketed the 534,000 kroner ($84,000) lent by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg (DK), and delivered two empty frames entitled Take the Money and Run . “The work is that I have taken their money,” Haaning said in an interview . “It’s not theft. It is a breach of contract, and breach of contract is part of the work.” The frames are now on view as part of “Work it Out ,” the museum’s ongoing show about art and labour.
Museum Sinclair-Haus in Bad Homburg, Germany, opens “Tempo! All the Time in the World,” a group exhibition exploring the pace of natural cycles and “humanity as an initiator and victim of acceleration.” Among the highlights: American artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s Sleep Study (2021, image), a newly commissioned app and immersive installation that invites users to experiment with their own sleep cycles as a potential climate engineering technology.
“We were thinking about infrastructure, specifically: the railroad as one of the past, and the possible implications of augmented reality as another in the future.”
– Artist
Cat Blumke , speaking to
Reality Crossing , a work on rail, empire, and speculative real estate in Canada. Produced with Jonathan Carrol, the piece is part of InterAccess’ all-AR exhibition “
Geofenced ,” curated by Karie Liao.
“The art world seems preoccupied with bringing culture to the blockchain. But it already is a culture, and it’s fascinating, fast-moving, and inclusive. In many ways, the NFT space has succeeded where more traditional institutions have failed.”
– Artist and musician
Holly Herndon , during an
Art Basel panel discussion on NFTs. “I’m obsessed with the weird culture that’s coming out of this space,” says Herndon. “It has its own language, and understanding of aesthetics—and some of it is beautiful.”
A spatial collage of film and fabric, Metahaven ’s “Passphrases” opens at State of Concept Athens —the first solo show of the Dutch avantgarde film-and-design collective in Greece. Featured alongside a newly commissioned installation of their films Chaos Theory (2021) and Hometown (2018), both part of a trilogy that begun with Information Skies (2016), are textile works from the series Arrows (2020) and—a premiere—Blossoms and Secrets (2021), “embodying texture, dreams, and film stills.”
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