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“Ten Thousand Suns,” the 24th edition of the Biennale of Sydney opens at venues across the New South Wales capital. Artists including Mona Al Qadiri, Dumb Type, Özgür Kar, and Lawrence Lek are featured at the White Bay Power Station flagship exhibition, which repurposes the former coal-fired facility as a cultural hub. Excitingly, Australian cyberfeminism originators VNS Matrix present a selection of their works from the last four decades on banners, displays, and zines throughout the venue (image).

“A default move within contemporary art over the past two decades: defunctionalized objects pulled out of usual circulation or infrastructural location appear to offer a kind of freezing and deictic insight.”
e-flux Contributing Editor Evan Calder Williams, taking aim at white cube infrastructure porn. “As if a hunk of undersea internet cable on a gallery floor confronts us with the materiality of communication,” he writes in the second part of an essay on sweeping cultural paralysis. [quote edited]

“Universal / Remote,” a show chronicling how “capital and data flow freely on a global scale,” opens at the National Art Center Tokyo (NACT). Artists including Xu Bing, Maiko Jinushi, Trevor Paglen, and Evan Roth contribute works addressing globalization and social atomization. Hito Steyerl, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, and Miloš Trakilović stage their video installation Mission Accomplished: Belanciege (2019, image), a sardonic reflection on post-Berlin Wall European culture—and the luxury brand Balenciaga.

“László Moholy-Nagy telephoned instructions to a factory in the 1920s to produce images without the need to be on-site to direct production.”
– Artist George Legrady, reaching back to the Bauhaus to locate an early precedent for AI-generated imagery. Taking stock of his ongoing experimentation with MidJourney and Stable Diffusion, Legrady explores the aesthetic and critical concerns around prompt-based art.
“We’d have kept our fossil fuel funding sponsors AND curated poetry competitions on climate change if it wasn’t for those pesky school strike kids.”
– English trip hop juggernaut Massive Attack, ‘decoding’ a Guardian op-ed on ethics and precarity in the cultural sector. The piece cites the criticism and climate activism offered by Bergen’s recent International Literary Festival as an example for why festivals matter, but fails to explore the Faustian bargain that sustains a lot of cultural infrastructure.

UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery opens “Bodily Autonomy,” Lauren Lee McCarthy’s largest solo show in the U.S. to date. Curator Ceci Moss brings together two major series of works—Surrogate (2022) and Saliva (2022)—in which the Chinese-American artist examines bio-surveillance through performances, videos, and installations. A newly commissioned Saliva Bar, for example, invites visitors to reflect on data privacy, race, gender, and class as they pertain to genetic material over traded spit samples.

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“So literally, I was like, what the fuck? Get these down. What are you doing? It’s as if I was the head of Gucci, and there’s all these knockoffs.”
– Veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher, on AI-generated clones of her memoir, Burn Book (2024), flooding Amazon. First reported by 404 media, the rip-offs have since blossomed in variety, sporting alt titles (Tech’s Queen Bee With A Sting), different authors, and illustrious synthetic cover photography. “So I, of course, put them all together, and I sent Andy Jassy [the CEO of Amazon] a note and said, what the fuck? You’re costing me money.”

Underscoring the direness of the climate crisis, Oliver Ressler’s “Dog Days Bite Back” opens at Belvedere 21 in Vienna. Featured are works spanning photography, film, and installation by the Austrian artist that lament the state of stalled climate policy and fossil fuel crony capitalism run amok. His 2-channel video installation Climate Feedback Loops (2023, image), for example, starkly documents the ice melt around Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago that is rapidly disappearing into the Arctic Ocean.

February 2024
“I hate this project. The idea that Jeff Koons may be the first point of contact when we encounter extraterrestrials—when they discover his crate left on the Moon—what a statement by humanity.”
Artnet critic Ben Davis, lamenting the gaudiness of American artist Jeff Koons’ Moon Phases (2024). Recently deposited on the Moon by a SpaceX rocket, it entails 125 stainless steel sculptures (each named after a historical figure), which Davis derides as “space junk.” [quote edited]
OUT NOW:
Tristan Perich
Pseudorandom
Composer Perich complements his new conceptual circuit album Noise Patterns, Pseudorandom with a hefty 1024-page printout of the 16,777,215 numbers that comprise one complete cycle of its central 3-byte random number generator.

“SOUND MACHINES,” a show exploring the untapped sonic potential of NFTs, opens on Feral File. Curated by MoMA, it features 0xDEAFBEEF, American Artist & Tommy Martinez, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, and Yoko Ono. Their works playfully introduce sound to tokenized art, as evidenced by 0xDEAFBEEF’s PAYPHONE (2022-, image), which allows collectors to purchase a phone card granting priority access to participate in a performance by the artist.

“The internet is filling up with ‘zombie content’ designed to game algorithms and scam humans. It’s becoming a place where bots talk to bots, and search engines crawl a lonely expanse of pages written by artificial intelligence.”
– Technology reporter James Purtill, on the accelerating degradation of the Web. Bot-overrun platforms like X were “never designed for a world where machines can talk with people convincingly,” says digital media scholar Timothy Graham of the deluge of AI-generated content. ”The platforms have no infrastructure in place. The gates are open.”

Tomás Saraceno’s solo exhibition “Live(s) on Air” opens at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles, showcasing, among other works, new cloud and foam sculptures that manifest as clusters of iridescent geometries suspended in mid-air. Juxtapozed with a series of infrared photography that suggests a new era of climate-neutral aerosolar flight, the Argentinian artist’s floating colour fractals “make visible the spectral hues and synaesthetic vectors that shape the cosmic web,” inviting meditation on “forms of life and eco-social interdependence.”

The Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego (ICA) opens “Pınar Yoldaş: Synaptic Sculpture,” the Turkish-American artist and UC San Diego Professor’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition. Expanding her oevre of speculative biologies, Yoldaş presents several new works including an algae bioreactor brewing plastic alternatives that illuminate the technocene. “If we ask ourselves what drives technological progress,” Yoldaş explains, “we can see that it is as much our collective desires as it is our collective needs.”

“Neither side in the debate on ‘killer robots’ has addressed the most potentially unnerving aspect of using them in battle: sooner or later, they’ll be able to communicate with each other without human intervention.”
– World security scholar and author Michael Klare, on the dangers of emergent behaviour in autonomous weaponry as DARPA expands efforts to create military AI systems capable of true swarming. “Autonomous weapons might jointly elect to adopt combat tactics none of the individual devices were programmed to perform”, warns Klare, “conceivably engaging in acts unintended and unforeseen by their human commanders.”

Rosa Menkman’s mixed-media installation, A Spectrum of Lost and Unnamed Colours (2024), opens at EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne (CH), concluding the “speculative dialogues” with computer and environmental scientists that informed the work and guided her EPFL residency. In a series of translucent, lens-like sigils, the Dutch artist and researcher tells the story of a future media archaeologist who, in mapping colour loss, uncovers how air pollution and AI deluge ‘dimmed’ the atmospheric rainbow—“nature’s original ‘glitch’.”

“Many technologies are modelled on our anatomy—they are extensions of us. I wanted to get closer to the sirens, to see them as a ‘circuit of an ear and a mouth, listening out for threat and broadcasting it to the population,’ to quote the film.”
– Artist Aura Satz, describing the noisemaking subject at the heart of her debut feature film Preemptive Listening (2024). In conversation with associate producer Tendai John Mutambu, Satz discusses sonic aesthetics and how adopting an abolitionist framework impacted her narrative.
OUT NOW:
Eleanor Drage & Kerry McInerney
The Good Robot
Building on their eponymous podcast (2021-), Cambridge University researchers Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney explore “why technology needs feminism” with leading feminist thinkers, activists, and technologists.
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