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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Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley ’s solo exhibition “SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE” opens at London’s arebyte. Subverting the language of the first-person shooter, the game asks players—armed with a hot pink firearm—to NOT shoot Black Trans people, and then witness the results of their (in)action. Inverting the standard logic of the shooter genre, the installation creates a space to “capture, preserve and archive Black Trans existence” and reflect on personal responsibility.
“Telepathy becomes a puppet concept, intensifying surveillance by allowing private interest to become less conspicuous, while rendering the consumer more accessible.”
– Writer
Dolly Church , rejecting Big Tech’s notion that “conceptual telepathy”—or “mindspeak,” a term coined in Ursula K. Le Guin’s
Left Hand of Darkness —is the “natural conclusion of digital communication”
DOSSIER :
HOLO Annual (HOLO 3) editor
Nora N. Khan shares insight into searching for meaning
beyond words in the forthcoming issue’s third chapter. “I found I needed to rescind the position I’m entrenched in as a critic—that of the capacity for language as the primary medium through which we understand the world,” Khan writes about working with choice contributors
Francis Tseng ,
Nick Larson , and
K Allado-McDowell .
“The characters experience their various BOB plugins through a hallucinatory interface; their neural guides are represented by red worms with up to three heads, each tipped with eye-like shapes, as if they can see the future.”
OUT NOW :
Marie Foulston
The Grannies
Foulston ’s documentary follows a group of players—the Grannies—beyond the boundaries of the videogame
Red Dead Online (2018) and into “an ethereal space that reveals the humanity and materiality of digital creations.”
Featuring 12 international artists including Memo Akten , Ralf Baecker , Ryoichi Kurokawa , Anna Ridler , Tomás Saraceno , and Theresa Schubert , “New Elements” opens at Moscow’s New Tretyakov Gallery. Organized in thematic sections—Autographic World, Material Computation, and Digital Materiality—the works curated by Laboratoria Art&Science Foundation remind viewers of the physical dimension of information and “how to close the gap between data and the world.”
“If everything goes according to plan and Peng! sells NFTs worth 628,453 EUR, a family of five from Afghanistan will be able to start the visa process in Portugal.”
OUT NOW :
Dani Ploeger
Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences
Drawing on field research in conflict and disruption zones, the Dutch
artist and cultural theorist examines “everyday technologies in extreme circumstances”
The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan, announces the acquisition of the Lillian F. Schwartz collection. Comprising films and videos, 2D artwork and sculptures, personal papers, and computer hardware, the material documents the “expansive and inquisitive mindset” of the Bell Labs veteran. Born in 1927, Schwartz was “present at the birth of digital art” and pioneered “computer-based work at a time when artists had to defend it as a viable medium.”
“It’s very Newtonian thinking: if you know how it started, can you predict where it may go? And I think every single location in latent space resonates with how we perceive what happens in our lives.”
– Media Artist
Refik Anadol , on the affective quality of the AI ‘hallucinations’ that shaped
Unsupervised , an NFT series on Feral File in which the Turkish-American artist trained an AI to make images based on MoMA collection metadata
“Now we’ve defined the entire choreography for web building, which has never been done for any animal architecture at this fine of a resolution.”
–
Andrew Gordus , behavioral biologist at Johns Hopkins University, on using AI and night vision to study spider leg positions during web construction. The resulting model, published in
Current Biology , can predict web-building stages based on leg posture—a first step towards recording how tiny spider brains can support such complexity.
Mary Bauermeister (*1934), whose experimental practice helped shape the Fluxus movement, is announced the first recipient of a new art prize issued by the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia . The award honours Bauermeister’s legacy of drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations that explore entanglements in science, music, and mathematics. “She has always worked transdisciplinary long before this became a category,” said Hendrik Wüst, the state’s Minister President.
“In 1788 the Constitution became the law of the land when it was ratified by 9 of the 13 original states. In keeping with this tradition, the Constitution DAO multi-sig wallet requires 9 of 13 signatures to approve transactions.”
–
ConstitutionDAO , in an FAQ post explaining how the
multisignature wallet at the heart of their project requires consensus. The DAO is currently crowdfunding $20M in ETH to (attempt to) buy a first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution in a
Sotheby’s Auction .
“Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota,” the first major survey of the work of the pioneering artist in Japan in three decades, opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT). A fixture in Fluxus , Kubota made pioneering contributions to video sculpture, exploding the screen into scenes and structures bathed in shapes and colour. “Viva Video!” includes the triumphant Skater (1991-2, image), the cascading Niagara Falls (1985), and her signature Duchampiana series (1970-90).
Part of the London-based collective’s ongoing eco-fiction project Untertage where salt emerges as an agent of cultural evolution, Troika ’s No Sound of Water opens at Arte Abierto , Mexico City. Taking the form of a towering salt waterfall that is juxtapozed with Troika’s Terminal Beach (2020), the installation channels “the extractive technologies that have contributed to the planet’s transformation.” Over time, salt crystals spill across the exhibition space, and into people’s pants, lungs, and lunches.
A new installation conceived for (and inspired by) the Tadas Ivanauskas Zoological Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania, artist duo Pakui Hardware ’s Skewed Taxonomy opens as part of this year’s Kaunas Biennial . The sculptures, hybrid creatures made of wasp nests, stainless steel skeletons, glass body parts, and textiles, are integrated into the museum’s insect section and invite viewers to speculate on life “born from human activities merging with the evolution of the natural world.”
“The ‘discontinuation’ of a major marketplace today pushed all my buttons. The URLs for a half-million artworks were destroyed; livelihoods of ~10,000 artists were damaged; the energy and optimism of a creative community was diminished; and the guy who did it left town with $1M.”
–
Golan Levin , media artist and educator, on the end of
Hic et Nunc in a Twitter thread about what NFT-curious artists should know about
DOSSIER :
Returning HOLO art directors Jan Spading and Oliver Griep of studio
zmyk share insight into the design logic and development process of
HOLO 3 . “Conceptually, we were interested in creating tension by offsetting the writing with a very technical form,” they explain in our interview. “So while the authors ruminate on enchantment, mysticism, and the limits of human knowledge, the design speaks ‘assembly language.’”
“For most people, Arial, designed in 1982 and released as a TrueType font in 1992 is the typical digital font. It was already a mockery of Helvetica, born in 1957.”
– Typographer
Frank Adebiaye , exploring the “tragicomedy of digital fonts.” In a research essay for
NaN , Adebiaye lays out a brief of history of “theatrical” screen-first font substitutes, tributes, and surrogates that emerged at the behest of type foundries, Big Tech, the Web, and, recently, NFTs.
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