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
Year
Month
Tag
Order
Custom
Filter
“I would like the body to be an open system, one that is exposed and fragile.”
– South Korean artist
Yein Lee , on her figurative sculptures, which assemble evocative cyborg-like bodies and organs from technological refuse (image:
status for the time being , 2023)
“Perhaps compassion simply needs to be performed, the healthcare provider must be seen to be sympathetic to relieve the patient.”
– Art writer Angeria Rigamonti di Cutò, reflecting on AI’s capacity for emotional labour after encountering
Sofie Layton ’s
Does AI Care? (2023). Inspired by how the audio piece draws on cancer patient and oncologist consultation to ‘perform’ empathy, di Cutò uses part of her review of Science Gallery London’s “
AI: WHO’S LOOKING AFTER ME? ” to imagine a near future where AI offers healthcare workers support to (better) tend to patients’ emotional needs.
Peter Burr ’s Sunshine Monument (2023) launches on the Whitney website as part of the museum’s Sunrise/Sunset series of timed micro interventions. Visible for up to 30 seconds twice a day, the “fleeting shimmer” translates the site’s layout into seven abstract architectures—one for each day—bustling with activity. Burr’s harsh signature style channels “the atmosphere of the late Web 2.0 landscape, characterized by an increasingly indexed, optimized, and gamified environment,” writes curator Christiane Paul .
Artist and researcher Daniel Temkin publishes “The Less Humble Programmer“ as part of Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) volume 17.2. In his article, Temkin outlines the history of esoteric programming languages , describing them as a search for “personal expression and elegance within chaos.” Of note: the close readings of ‘esolang’ precursors SNOBOL (hatched at Bell Labs in 1962) and FALSE (1993), through (more) recent languages like Soup! (2011, image), the source code of which doubles as ASCII art.
“On the whole, despite the ‘dystopian vibez’ of staring into an orb and letting it scan deeply into your eyeballs, it does seem like specialized hardware systems can do quite a decent job of protecting privacy.”
– Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, assessing
Tools for Humanity ’s plan to confirm proof-of-personhood for the global populace by scanning their irises for the
Worldcoin project. While he concedes it will probably be necessary to distinguish humans from AI soon, Buterin warns of the triple threat of security vulnerabilities, identity black markets, and overly-centralized hardware.
Worldcoin, a proof-of-personhood digital identity system for a future full of AI agents, launches. A Tools for Humanity (OpenAI’s Sam Altman and engineer Alex Blania) initiative, it proposes iris scanning everyone on earth to assign them an anonymized biometric identity—and a related cryptocurrency. Anticipating AI-induced cultural shifts, Altman & Blania claim Worldcoin will let users “prove you are a real and unique person online” and assist in universal basic income (UBI) disbursement.
Tech critic Evgeny Morozov launches The Santiago Boys , a podcast chronicling Chile’s Project Cybersyn , the early 1970s fusion of cybernetics with Salvador Allende ’s socialist agenda that yielded a technocratic control room (image) that anticipated big data and remains iconic in left-wing thought. Meticulously researched, Morozov tells the story of central consultant Stafford Beer , the CIA-adjacent telco that bankrolled the Pinochet coup, and a forlorn “future where technology helps democracy, not ruins it.”
“If IKEA sues us, I’ll be thrilled.”
“To Your Eternity,” the fourth edition of the Future of Today Biennial, opens at the Today Art Museum in Beijing. Taking its name from an eponymous Japanese manga series about an immortal amorphous being, curator Xin Wang tasks multigenerational artists including Morehshin Allahyari , Ani Liu , Isamu Noguchi , Agnieszka Polska , and Astria Suparak with schematizing bold futures “on longer throughlines in historical conditionings of our current technological and existential crisis.”
A computer art ‘deep cut,’ the likes of which only DAM Projects could present, Wolfgang Kiwus’ “Out of the Attic” opens in Berlin. Featuring a trove of 1990s stark noise field and monochromatic lattice plots from the musician and writer who took up computer art in 1987, the show honours Kiwus in the aftermath of his 2022 passing. Conceptually rigorous, he experimented with dot matrix printers before adopting plotters, and moved in the same circles as Max Bense , Frieder Nake , and Vera Molnar .
How does generative AI’s carbon footprint fare against human creators? Pretty well, according to a recent paper shared by American software artist Kyle McDonald . Comparing text and image creation energy use, University of California researcher Bill Tomlinson and team found that BLOOM, ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E2 beat human writers and illustrators (and their computers) by wide margins: “An AI creating an image emits 310 to 2900 times less CO2,” states the paper. McDonald’s dark take: “New eugenics just dropped.”
“While the show claims to operate under a framework of ‘ecologies of hope’ to ‘invite audiences to consider the unique and evolving role art has to play in today’s climate crisis’, the viewer is left with the impression that this art hasn’t really done much.”
–
ArtReview ’s
Marv Recinto , pondering the current “
Dear Earth ” show at London’s Hayward Gallery and ecological art writ large. “Given the current state of ecological degradation, perhaps it’s time for a more concerted effort towards action,” he writes, suggesting more focus on praxis and activism.
Spanish software engineer Inigo Quilez launches Human Shader, a web-project that aims to crowd-source the creation of “the first-ever brain-powered mathematical image.” Participants are invited to claim a random pixel, hand-compute its RGB values, and submit the results along with a photo of their pen-and-paper calculations. As a veteran demoscener, Quilez is no stranger to computer graphics wizardry: he’s behind the Shadertoy platform, the Quill VR painting tool, and Pixar’s Wonder Moss generator.
“At the beginning it’s still a very recognizable picture of ‘a cat in a party hat.’ But it soon becomes more and more alien.”
– Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, showing how the “alien mind” of generative AI is mostly populated by noisy “things on the shores of interconcept space”
“Sometimes I feel like Jane Goodall observing nature in the wild—and then I can just put on my engineering hat and go tinker around with their brains.”
– American ‘robot whisperer’ and
ATONATON founder Madeline Gannon, on the “handcrafted algorithms” that drive her menagerie of industrial machines. “My robots are distinctively obnoxious when you’re around them,” Gannon reveals to
Dezeen ’s Cajsa Carlson. “And I have to imagine that’s a piece of my personality embedded within that, you know; they’re in your face.”
OUT NOW :
Ralf Baecker
Cybernetic Imaginaries
Baecker ’s first monograph expands on his esoteric machinations exploring “the fundamentals of the digital, cybernetics, artificial neural networks, and artificial life” with detailed documentation and texts by
Siegfried Zielinski ,
Andreas Broeckmann , and
Daria Parkhomenko .
“Be less scared of large language models, be more scared of the people that own them saying things like ‘the new Turing Test should be can an AI make a million dollars.’”
Mischievous game modders 2girls1comp release Every Thing (2023), an experimental Grand Theft Auto V mod that “sequentially spawns every object from the game’s prop database until the program ultimately crashes.” A video showing it in action (image) reveals a small-to-large amassing of furnishings, signs, trees, and infrastructure into a dense illegible volume of CGI pseudo-matter. “It’s a reverse Katamari Damacy . The antithesis of Jenga,” quips machinima and videogame art scholar Matteo Bittanti.
Billed as their largest solo show to date, Eva & Franco Mattes ’ “Fake Views” opens at Frankfurter Kunstverein (DE), illuminating platform culture, internet infrastructures, and online communities. For their new installation P2P (2022-23, image), for example, the Italian net art duo invited peers Nora Al-Badri , Simon Denny , Do Not Research , Olia Lialina , Jill Magid , and Jon Rafman to create new works to be hosted on a peer-to-peer server enclosed in a wire cage—an ‘exhibition within the exhibition.’
Load More
To dive deeper into Stream, please
Log-In or become a
HOLO Reader .
Daily discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture: Get full access by becoming a HOLO Reader !
Perspective : research, long-form analysis, and critical commentaryEncounters : in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovatorsStream : a timeline and news archive with 1,200+ entries and countingEdition : HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print
Become a HOLO Reader