1,578 days, 2,409 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“We grow, grow and grow, we’re gonna be alright and this is our show” opens at Dortmund’s Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV), inviting visitors to enter the world of plants, bacteria, fungi, and other non-human organisms we tend to disregard. In their first institutional solo exhibition, curated by Inke Arns , artist duo Jana Kerima Stolzer and Lex Rütten speculate about symbiotic relationships between nature and the technosphere, invoking deep time, geoengineering, the carbon cycle, and immortality.
“No, these renderings do not relate to reality. They relate to the totality of crap online. So that’s basically their field of reference, right? Just scrape everything online and that’s your new reality.”
Marcel Schwittlick ’s solo exhibition “Composition #84: The Long Run” opens at SP2 gallery, Berlin, juxtapozing three eponymous plotter drawings with videos documenting their creation. The pieces, each measuring 36 x 115 cm and comprising 2.5 million dots plotted over 23 hours, record the emptying of a collection of vintage felt tip pens, marking the “end of an era.” Eight stripes per plot, drawn with pens of the same colour, yield subtle variations that tell the “unique history of each pen,” notes Schwittlick.
”Wherever you look, youth mental health is collapsing, and the inflection point is ominously consistent: 2010 give or take a year or two—when smartphones went from luxury to ubiquity.”
– Data journalist
John Burn-Murdoch , parsing research on the impact digital devices have on teens. Studies conducted by
Jean Twenge , professor of psychology at San Diego State University, reveal that the more time young people spend on social media, the worse their mental health is. A key metric: meeting friends IRL. “As screen-time has surged, everyone hangs out less,” notes Burn-Murdoch.
“Evolving Kinetics,” a show demonstrating just how much digital aesthetics can “float freely in space, create an immersive environment, and break the rigid structures” of Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen (DE) opens. Curated by Peggy Schoenegge of Peer to Space, artists including Kim Asendorf , Rosa Menkman , Nicolas Sassoon , and Robert Seidel contribute a range of eclectic moirés, textures, and primitives that splash across the venue via display, projection, and (imaginatively) as wallpaper.
A survey of artworks acquired by the Nam June Paik Art Center during its COVID-19 pandemic closure opens in Seoul. “On Collecting Time” presents Kim Heecheon , Sunmin Park , Jinah Roh , Sungsil Ryu , and 6 other artists whose collected works are thematically bound in their exploration of “human and machine time in various forms.” Unmake Lab’s Utopian Extraction (2020, image), for example, pairs video demonstrating janky real-time object detection and documentation of slowly evolving landscapes.
“The aim was to show how what we consider ‘art’ is not timeless but in fact socially constructed, powerfully conditioned by the conventions and normalizing practices of art institutions.”
– Art historian
Kavior Moon , discussing the institutional critique at the heart of Hans Haacke’s
Shapolsky et al ., a 1971 project documenting a NYC slumlord’s fraud. Full of rich analysis of artists including
Maria Eichhorn ,
Walid Raad , and
Hito Steyerl , Moon’s essay comprehensively answers the question ‘what is research-based art?’
“Terms of Use,” a show exploring “(re)framing of individual and collective selves, as we grapple with living simultaneously online and AFK,” opens at PHI Foundation in Montreal. Curated by Daniel Fiset and Cheryl Sim, the exhibition draws inspiration from feminists Ursula Franklin and Legacy Russell , and invites artists including Skawennati , Shanie Tomassini , Wu Tsang , Nico Williams , and Chun Hua Catherine Dong (image left: Meet Me Half Way , 2021) to examine tensions between identity and virtuality.
“In the absence of a capacity to reason from moral principles, ChatGPT was crudely restricted by its programmers from contributing anything novel to controversial—that is, important—discussions. It sacrificed creativity for a kind of amorality.”
– Linguistics and AI scholars
Noam Chomsky ,
Ian Roberts , and
Jeffrey Watumull , in an op-ed excoriating the “amorality, faux science, and linguistic incompetence” of ChatGPT. “We can only laugh or cry at the popularity of such systems,” they conclude.
“It is easy now to imagine a setup wherein machines could prompt other machines to put out text ad infinitum, flooding the internet with synthetic text devoid of human agency or intent: gray goo, but for the written word.”
– American researcher and media scholar
Matthew Kirschenbaum , warning of the impending “Textpocalypse.” Generative AI programs like ChatGPT may soon unleash “a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in
any digital setting,” Kirschenbaum writes.
Serendipitously coinciding with an economy on the brink, Isaac Julien’s multiscreen installation Playtime (2014, image) opens at Berlin’s PalaisPopulaire. Set during the 2008-09 financial crisis that catalyzed the Great Recession , the filmmaker experiments in visualizing the flow of capital from the perspective of seven interlinked characters (a pair of hedge fund managers, a journalist, an artist, an art dealer, an auctioneer, and a maid) whose lives and ventures span Dubai, London, and Reykjavík.
“Digitization reproduces and deepens existing social inequalities in regards to access to digital services, presence and visibility on platforms as well as discrimination through algorithmic decision making.”
– Equity advocates
SUPERRR Lab , contextualizing why feminist digital policy is necessary. Published in English just in time for International Women’s Day, their resource defines feminist tech policy, and provides case studies and references for further research.
OUT NOW :
Jenny Odell
Saving Time
An analysis of how our sense of time is structured by the relentless demands of capitalism, and a counterproposition arguing for “different rhythms of life.”
“Chain Reaction,” a collection of NFTs curated by Christiane Paul , is released on Feral File. Artists including Stephanie Dinkins , Sara Ludy , and Jennifer & Kevin McCoy contribute NFTs that probe the “social, aesthetic, and environmental contexts and networks in which these assets are embedded.” Ira Greenberg & Marina Zurkow’s The Dorises (image, 2023), for example, takes the programmable rarity associated with the medium, and uses it to generate weird oyster physiology and lore.
“We are thrilled to announce that our campaign to gather artist opt outs has resulted in 78 million artworks being opted out of AI training.”
– AI artist-activist group
Spawning , on the success of
haveibeentrained.com , a tool that allows artists to search for their works in the Stable Diffusion training set and exclude them from further use. “This establishes a significant precedent towards realizing our vision of consenting AI,” write Spawning founders
Mat Dryhurst and
Holly Herndon .
Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich’s single-channel video installation Onset (2023) opens at Aksioma, Ljubljana. Co-commissioned by transmediale , the film draws on medieval demonology, open-source intelligence, and CGI animation to ‘haunt’ Russian air bases the duo reconstructed from satellite imagery. “The true horror of Russian colonialism becomes manifest in the process of possession,” the artists write, “the imposition of external control that gradually destroys an organism from within.”
“Signals: How Video Transformed the World” opens at New York’s MoMA, showcasing over 70 media works from the past six decades that capture how “artists have posed video as an agent of global change—from televised revolution to electronic democracy.” Highlights include Nam June Paik’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984), Ant Farm’s Media Burn (1973), Martine Syms’ Lessons I–CLXXX (2014–18), and Dara Birnbaum’s Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission (1990, image).
“What we actually saw was a preview of what future products will look like. A lot of hype, a lot of misstatements, and an exploitation of people’s lack of knowledge about what cognition is and what artificial systems can do.”
– Tech critic
Edward Ongweso Jr. , on the ChatGPT launch. “The correct analysis is
they lied . They lied about its capabilities, they rolled out what was possible, and they’re going to keep lying,” he adds, describing how OpenAI cynically overhyped a half-baked product to capture the public’s attention—and drive up their valuation.
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