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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“There is no comparable asset to Bitcoin. You have another category, let’s call it ‘unicorns.’ I’d put Ethereum in there, it’s a unicorn like Airbnb or Uber, it’s big … it’s complicated and compelling, there are a lot of people enthusiastic about it.”
–
Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor, explaining how Bitcoin is the perfect treasury asset whereas Ethereum and “the other 10,000 cryptocurrencies” are competing for space in the cultural imagination
In his Quanta guest column “How Claude Shannon Invented the Future,” Stanford Professor of Engineering David Tse relates how the American mathematician’s 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” birthed information theory. “Shannon’s genius lay in his observation that the key to communication is uncertainty,” writes Tse. His concept of the information ‘bit’ (short for binary digit) as the “basic unit of uncertainty” introduced probabilistic data modelling and signal processing, heralding the coming of the Information Age.
DOSSIER :
“The reality is that the art world is rife with wealthy corporate donors and philanthropists who make their millions, even billions, from work that many might consider morally or ethically fraught.”
–
Matthew Braga , on how patronage in the arts is often a Faustian bargain
OUT NOW :
Liz W. Faber
The Computer’s Voice
An analysis of computing and culture that asks ‘what is the significance of HAL having a male voice while Siri is female?,’ and other related questions of gender and embodiement
“Gnau, Dosher! gnau, Danser! gnau, Rancher und Victim! Ahn! Commack, ahn! Cupit, ahn! Dunder und Platonists.”
– Generative artist
Kate Compton , tweeting proudly about the self-described ‘best thing she’s ever written with a computer,’ which uses phonetic similarity vectors to thoroughly discombobulate Clement Clarke Moore’s classic 1823 Christmas poem “
A Visit from St. Nicholas ”
Zachęta National Gallery of Art curator Anna Maria Leśniewska and chief restorer Anna Olszewska demo a fully functional Senster (1970) during the online opening of Sapporo International Art Festival (SIAF). The 2018 reassembly of Edward Ihnatowicz’ long-lost robotic sculpture was scheduled to make its Asia debut at this year’s SIAF. Due to COVID-19, it remained in Warsaw and will show at Zachęta’s “Sculpture in Search of Place ,” opening on Dec 28, instead.
“When failures are attributed to the underrepresentation of a marginalized population within a dataset, solutions are subsumed to a logic of accumulation.”
– American sociologist and Google researcher
Alex Hanna and team, on the pernicious consequences of AI ethics discussions being hung up on having sufficient data. “According to this view, firms that already sit on massive caches of data and computing power—large tech companies and AI-centric startups—are the only ones that can make models more ‘fair,’” Hanna writes.
OUT NOW :
Liam Young
Planet City
Commissioned for the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2020 Triennial, the Australian film director and speculative architect’s latest short imagines a world collapsed into a single city—an aspirational new home for 10 billion people—so that the rest of the globe may heal.
“Cyberpunk 2077 was a behemoth of the game industry, and it didn’t even exist. Now it looks like it’s taking a long, hard fall—like one of the cars in the game, toppling off the map, no longer running on hype.”
– Journalist Sydney Halleman, on the highly anticipated, much delayed, and ultimately disastrous launch of what might have been the game of the decade
OUT NOW :
Matt Nish-Lapidus
Work, Life, Balance
A procedural poem turned into a mammoth artist book,
Nish-Lapidus compiles every possible permutation of a poetic motif in which a hammer is repurposed in thousands of ways, “exploring what it means to make and destroy through the logic of computational loops and iterations.”
The culmination of a year of exploring emergent letterforms through machine learning and computation, Berlin-based type practice (and HOLO collaborator) NaN releases a collection of 28 procedurally generated display fonts and the codebase that was used to create them. Free-to-use and free-to-modify, the expressive set demonstrates that “scripting designs in this fashion can be both a creative and production tool,” writes NaN’s Luke Prowse. “There’s no reason why these scripts can’t be applied to icons, lettering or any other vectors either.”
DOSSIER :
“I fund my art by siphoning off parts of artist fees from gigs, grants, scholarships, and fellowships to live and make art in the margins of research, academia, and project funding.”
– Artist and composer
Suzanne Kite , on how to sustain an art practice
“This is 22,935 birds, counted in Brooklyn in 2001 by intrepid birders for NYC Audubon.”
“$4,100 (+242%)”
– @BitcoinStimulus on what a $1,200 U.S. stimulus cheque invested into Bitcoin on Apr 15 is now worth, as the cryptocurrency hits a $23,000 USD all time high propelled by looming inflation anxiety and a surge of institutional investment
“The digital comfort zone paralyzes and capitvate us with colourful apps, gadgets, new experiences, games, and pseudo-innovations. We are consumers and data suppliers and that doesn’t really seem to bother us.”
– Creative Technologist
Tim Rodenbröker in his “Creative Coding Manifesto 2021,” where the passionate programmer argues against complacancy and for tools like
Processing that can help us demystify technology
In protest of the (digital) opening of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum , a new museum embroiled in colonial controversy , local artist Aram Bartholl releases a site-specific AR sculpture, Greetings from Berlin! (2020), as an Instagram filter. Part of the artist-led Owned by Others initiative that examines problematic narratives, places, and artifacts from, around, and on Berlin’s Museum Island, Bartholl’s digital overlay ‘rekindles’ the fire that ravaged the south portal of the $700M edifice in April.
“This is a story about infrastructural work through which we’ve let the world become unlivable.”
–
Anna L. Tsing , anthropologist and author of
The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), on the recent launch of
Feral Atlas , a five-year curatorial project and online platform that maps the un-designed—‘feral’—effects human infrastructure has on the world
OUT NOW :
More-Than-Human
Co-published by Het Nieuwe Instituut, Office for Political Innovation, General Ecology Project at Serpentine Galleries and Manifesta Foundation, More-Than-Human compiles 34 essential texts by post-anthropocentric luminaries including Donna Haraway, Anna L. Tsing, and Octavia Butler.
“The AI itself, dubbed ARTUµ in an apparent Star Wars reference, is based on open-source software algorithms and adapted to the plane’s computer systems at the U-2 Federal Laboratory.”
–
Washington Post business reporter
Aaron Gregg , on the first (known) AI onboard a U.S. military aircraft. Controlling sensor and navigation systems on a U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane, the AI system was deliberately designed without a manual override to “provoke thought and learning in the test environment,” Air Force spokesman Josh Benedetti told Gregg over email.
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