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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“Where Big Data is merely aestheticized, a new court art is created, in whose flickering lights you can ‘talk about e-cars’ with politicians and lobbyists undisturbed, as entrepreneur Frank Thelen enthusiastically posted.”
“A future that de-centres the human in artistic practice to make room for other-than-human, living, and nonliving configurations also ignites the field of art itself—re-framing the artist as an engineer, designer, and system architect.”
Taking its name from the eponymous searing neon work by feminist conceptual artist Claire Fontaine (2012, image), “Someone is getting rich” opens at Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum. Curated by Carrie Pilto, the show invites the aforementioned Fontaine along with Eline Benjaminsen , DIS , Femke Herregraven , Petr Pavlensky , and 10 other artists to present works that speak truth to power by “revealing how the aftermath of colonialism is still embedded in the financial sector today.”
“The board advised all their shareholders to vote against this resolution, making it clear that in addition to promoting conflict and violence around the world, Lockheed Martin is also uninterested in scaling back its significant contribution to climate change.”
– Activists
Danaka Katovich and David Gibson, reporting on whether the U.S. government’s largest military contractor will disclose plans on how to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. To do so would be “premature and not in the best interest of our Company or our stockholders,” the board argues.
Manifesting how data centres “buzz, hum, and groan around the clock,” 24/7 (2023, image), a new audiovisual installation by composer and visual artist Esmeralda Conde Ruiz opens at HELLERAU in Dresden (DE). Produced during her residency at TU Dresden’s multidisciplinary Schaufler Lab , the installation transforms the HELLERAU orchestra pit into a pseudo-server farm, inviting visitors to explore a noisy labyrinth that foregrounds the sound of ubiquitous data flows.
OUT NOW :
Brendan Keogh
The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist
Australian researcher
Keogh engages independent developers, contractors, artist collectives, hobbyists, and students—not
AAA game makers—to tell the story of the medium.
“New Visions,” the 2nd Edition of the Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media opens in Oslo (NO). A total of 22 artists including Anna Ehrenstein , Anna Engelhardt , Kristina Õllek , Monira Al Qadiri , Emilija Škarnulytė (image: RAKHNE , 2023), and Istvan Virag contribute media and installations, drawing on traditional mediums and new modes of automated image-making to underscore the ubiquity of “resource extraction, energy distribution, and data harvesting.”
Matt Nish-Lapidus ’ solo exhibition “The Path” opens at Écart, Rouyn-Noranda (QC, CA), presenting recent computational and sculptural works that draw on Kabbalah mysticism and the educational programming language Logo to explore personal computing, linguistics, and materiality. In the piece Allegory (2020, image), for example, the Canadian artist uses vocabulary from the book Mindstorms (1980), written by Logo-inventor Seymour A. Papert , and an 19th Century William Wordsworth sonnet to generate “statements about other ways the world could be.”
“Regulation should avoid endorsing narrow methods of evaluation and scrutiny for GPAI that could result in a superficial checkbox exercise. This is an active and hotly contested area of research and should be subject to wide consultation, including with civil society, researchers and other non-industry participants.”
– AI researchers, in a policy brief arguing that “general purpose artificial intelligence” (GPAI) poses serious risks and must not be exempt under the forthcoming EU AI Act
The 2023 edition of STRP Festival opens in Eindhoven (NL) examining “The Art of Listening” with a city-wide conference, performance, and exhibition program. The latter features 14 mostly new works that boost receptiveness to “our fellow human beings, plants and animals, and nature.” French artist Guillaume Cousin ’s “air sculpture” Le Silence des Particules (2023, image), for example, “amplifies the ‘voice’ of seemingly invisible elementary particles, by recreating a vortex through a ring of smoke.”
“The fossil fuel industry doesn’t just happen to buy Autodesk’s products the way anyone could purchase Word, Microsoft’s ubiquitous word processing software. Instead, Autodesk courts polluters with industry-specific tools.”
–
Joanie Lemercier , discussing his campaign to pressure the American software company to end its business dealings with German coal giant RWE. Instead, Autodesk hatched a Lemercier “mitigation plan” that encouraged employees to block or ignore him on social media and provided talking points in response to his criticisms.
“What just drives me up the wall is that we appear to have decided the way AI is going to work is through a competitive dynamic between Google, Microsoft, and Meta.”
–
New York Times columnist
Ezra Klein , airing frustrations about the AI ethics and safety communities’ inattentiveness to capitalism. Citing DeepMind’s
AlphaFold as a prime example for positive AI breakthroughs (rather than manipulative chatbots tied to advertising), Klein imagines a world where governments offer prizes for AI challenges and results go into the public domain.
Hearings begin at the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC): Extinction Wars at the Gwangju Museum of Art (KR). The Netherlands Pavilion at the 14th Gwangju Biennale , this second iteration of lawyer-activist Radha D’Souza and artist-researcher Jonas Staal ’s CICC invites attendees to sit in as “prosecutors and witnesses from various social movements and activist organizations testify to the role of states and corporations in perpetuating climate war crimes” through April 9th.
“Current mining operations have now become their own geological force, scraping, sorting and collecting more dirt, rock and sediment than the world’s rivers, wind, rain and glaciers every year.”
– Canadian journalist
Andrew Nikiforuk , citing British geologist and
Extraction to Extinction (2021) author David Howe in a scathing critique of the extractivism-powered “green techno-dream.” If continued, he writes, “the pile of human mined materials on this groaning planet will triple global biomass by 2040.”
“If you’re possessed by one, there is that trouble—the horror—of interruption of flow, of being in your life. It’s almost like they’re hacking into a system. Maybe, jinn are a kind of hacker.”
– Iranian-American artist
Morehshin Allahyari , on her obsession with West Asian spirits and their cyborgian nature. In her work
She Who Sees the Unknown (2017–2021), Allahyari used 3D modelling to visualize female and/or queer demons as avatars for hysteria, gendered morality, and the experience of “living in a female body in the Middle East.”
“Grand Bal,” a retrospective of works by Ann Veronica Janssens , opens at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. Presenting works from the last three decades, the British artist offers a “visual and sonic choreography” of glass, fog, light, and video for visitors to traverse. Featured works include Golden Section (2009), suspended mirror foil and wrinkled PVC made with Belgian artist Michel François (image), and Blue Glass Roll 405 (2019), a series of cast glass sculptural forms (image foreground).
“ChatGPT needs to ‘drink’ a 500ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of 20-50 questions and answers, depending on when and where ChatGPT is deployed.”
– University of California researchers, on the “thirstiness” of AI. In their new paper, Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, Mohammad A. Islam, and Shaolei Ren offer a “principled methodology to estimate fine-grained water footprint of AI models” and highlight the need for a “truly sustainable AI.”
OUT NOW :
James E. Dobson
The Birth of Computer Vision
Providing a “genealogy of image-recognition techniques and technologies,” cultural critic
Dobson reveals the Cold War origins and enduring biases that continue to shape automated perception.
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