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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LaTurbo Avedon ’s Morning Mirror / Evening Mirror (2020) takes over the Whitney website twice a day as part of the museum’s “Sunrise/Sunset ” series of net art interventions. The avatar artist created 14 videos depicting digital flythroughs of a 3D apartment within the frame of a virtual mirror overlay. “The mirror functions as both a surface for reflection and a window into a different world,” writes Avedon, “showing nature flourishing across living rooms as well as green screens and stage lights consuming the home studio.”
“In times of pandemics, NFTs and cryptocurrencies are as much about buying certainty as they are about buying assets. They allow you to be hopeful about the future while being pessimistic about the present.”
–
Addie Wagenknecht , artist and researcher, on the psychology of the current crypto art craze. “It’s a new energy, but largely the same people,” she tells host
Hrag Vartanian . “They disrupt flawed systems only to recreate them in the virtual space.”
It’s refreshing to read commentary outside the “this will catch on/fizzle out” VR binary, or that dotes on headset sales figures, so this survey by Filippo Lorenzin is appreciated. For Hyperallergic , the Italian curator provides a very Italian reading of the pre-history of the medium: relative to linear perspective. Bypassing William Gibson and more or less igoring Palmer Luckey, Lorenzin goes way back—Brunelleschi 15th century back—connecting VR to “a point of no return for Western art” and later 360-degree paintings in considering the production and consumption of 3D space.
“It crackles with the realities of living in an era that has sounded the death knell for our commonly held belief that one can meaningfully distinguish between nature and humanity. Our world is too much changed for nature to be preserved simply by leaving it alone.”
OUT NOW :
Rebecca Morgan Frank
Oh You Robot Saints!
A poetry volume that “sings the lines between machines and the divine” by elegizing a menagerie of early automata including octobots, an eighteenth-century digesting duck, medieval mechanical virgins, and robot priests
“We require about 20,000 GPUs to perform the digital-twin calculations with the necessary throughput. This machine would have a power envelope of about 20MW.”
– Peter Bauer, co-initiator of
Destination Earth (DestinE), on the processing power needed for the EU climate supercomputer. The digital twin of planet Earth “would become a data assimilation instrument that continuously cycles real-time, highly detailed, high-resolution Earth system simulations and ingests observational information from all possible instruments.”
With the help of an ultra-precise X-ray microscope, a German-Polish research team successfully recorded the world’s first video of a space-time crystal . An enigmatic state of matter confirmed to exist only recently, this micrometer-sized specimen was created using magnon quasiparticles at room temperature—another first. The video reveals the atomic oscillations known as ‘ticking’ associated with time crystals as their structures repeat in space and time. “We were able to show that such crystals are much more robust and widespread than first thought,” states Pawel Gruszecki of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland. “The potential for communication, radar, or imaging technology is huge,” adds Joachim Gräfe of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany.
“People don’t associate softness with programming languages and I think that the p5.js community and the language itself actually shows that that kind of [love ethic] is possible.”
Agnes (Kingston, CA) launches the online component of the exhibition “Drift: Art and Dark Matter.” This residency put artists Nadia Lichtig , Josèfa Ntjam , Anne Riley , and Jol Thoms (image: Orthomorph (Tunneling) , 2020) in dialogue with astroparticle physics researchers, and the exchange here is deep (beyond the central SNOLAB research facility being 2 km underground). Surpassing standard ‘online exhibtiion catalogue’ expectations, this folio richly detais a noteworthy transdisicplinary collaboration.
“These new marketplaces are fatally flawed. The leveraging of an artist or artwork into a speculative investment scheme is underpinned by neoliberal techno-politics.”
Post-Zoom, post-Twitch, ‘share screen’ has ushered in a new visual regime. Picking up on this, curator Domenico Quaranta has launched “Studio Visit,” where “the desktop studio is shown off as the real space where an artist’s practice manifests,” baring its “files, tabs, programs” while the artist works away, their routine on display. Developed for the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève ’s digital platform 5th floor , the first video features gonzo CGI artist Lu Yang , with future ‘visits’ planned to the desktops of Petra Cortright , Oliver Laric , Eva & Franco Mattes , and others.
“It’s not that the music they make will sound ‘more Western,’ but it is forced into an unnatural rigidity. The music stops being in tune with itself. A lot of the culture will be gone.”
–
Khyam Allami , multi-instrumentalist musician, researcher, and founder of Nawa Recordings, on the colonial legacy of MIDI-based music software and how
Apotome and
Leimma —free software he introduced at
CTM Festival —can help break tuning hegemony
Curated by sci-fi author and OG cyberpunk Bruce Sterling , Turin-based Share Festival launches “Born to Be Online,” a ‘best of’ Share Prize -winning projects exhibited over the years. Among Sterling’s twelve picks are Paolo Cirio & UBERMORGEN ’s Amazon Noir (2006, image), Lia ’s Proximity of Needs (2008), Lauren Lee McCarthy ’s Follower (2016) and Milad Tangshir ’s VR Free (2019), all exploring different aspects of the Internet age. “With this summary of 15 years, we at Share Festival are bracing ourselves for what comes next.”
DOSSIER :
“We hit a wall: how can we pick a single theme with so many simultaneous urgencies? What’s the longevity of a timely research topic in light of mutating global crises and rapidly evolving tech?”
– Team HOLO, on the vexing questions surrounding the
next print edition and how, eventually, a new research method provided answers
Co-curated by Sean Sandusky and Dana Snow for Toronto’s InterAccess , “QUEERSPHERE” is an online exhibition inspired by Queer and Trans social media communities in the 2000s. A site where “worldbuilding is allowed to flourish outside of the pressures of corporatization and flat representation,” the show nostalgically yearns for pre-NSFW content ban Tumblr and other platforms, while looking forward via ruminations on Queer AI and campy caricature of Boston Dynamics’ robodog Spot. Featured artists include Keiko Hart , Maxwell Lander , and Lucas LaRochelle (image: QT.Bot , 2019).
ENCOUNTER :
“So many people are afraid of science in the art world because it is more creative and innovative. There are far more new ideas in New Scientist than in frieze .”
Brighton-based artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, on the deep chasms between disciplines
ENCOUNTER :
Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt use scientific data as material, dialing into and amping up the noise in natural systems to conjure abstract animations and visceral embodied experiences.
“We have been told there would still be access to Double Negative , but the power of the place would be lost forever.”
– Lisa Childs, founder of
Save Our Mesa , on how a solar power plant currently in the works near Overton, Nevada, could occlude views surrounding
Michael Heizer ’s iconic 1969 Land art work. Once finished, the plant will occupy some 9,000 acres atop the nearby Mormon Mesa.
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