1,580 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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“I think the Bitcoiners that are celebrating these enforcement actions tend to be later on the adoption curve and lower on the IQ spectrum than folks that actually know what’s going on. They’re cultists.”
– Crypto analyst
Ryan Selkis , on the Bitcoin purists vocally celebrating recent SEC
lawsuits that claim (at least as far as America is concerned)
other leading cryptocurrencies are securities
“Chasing the Devil to the Moon: Art Under Lunar Occupation Today” opens at Tallinn Art Hall (ES), constructing post-colonial cosmic imaginaries. Inspired by the 19th-century Estonian folk tale The Moon Painters , curator Corina L. Apostol presents six artists including Agate Tūna, Amélie Laurence Fortin , and Pau/a that explore social and political notions of “recolouring” the Moon. Fortin’s new CGI video The Blue Moon Project (2023, image), for example, offers a utopian vision of sustainable (blue) energy.
German media artist and Post-Internet purveyor Aram Bartholl unveals Delusion And Survival (2023), a collection of custom-made steel paper clips in @ sign form. Created in collaboration with The Internet Shop for an upcoming group show at Berlin’s A:D: Curatorial , the whimsical artifact fuses two concepts whose overlapping histories permeate contemporary digital culture—the paper clip that lives on in our interfaces and as a metaphor for AI dystopia , and the now ubiquitous @ sign , first introduced in 1971.
“If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cyberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns.”
–
LA Times tech columnist
Brian Merchant , channelling media scholar
David Karpf ’s critique of Apple’s “anti-metaverse,” where people disappear into a “totally immersive computer on their face”—alone. “If the world keeps getting worse,” Karpf says, “this will eventually have a lot of appeal.”
German AI artist Mario Klingemann releases A.I.C.C.A. , short for Artificially Intelligent Critical Canine (2023), into the current exhibition of Madrid’s Colección SOLO. Equipped with a camera, thermal printer, and ChatGPT, the furry AI art critic on wheels is designed to roam galleries and offer analysis—from its butt. The performative sculpture pokes fun at punditry but isn’t cynical, Klingemann assures. “Art critics play a very important role. The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be ignored.”
“Unfortunately it has become too late to save Arctic summer sea ice. This is now the first major component of the Earth system that we are going to lose because of global warming.”
– German climatologist
Dirk Notz , on the inevitability of breaching a major climate tipping point. In a
new paper published in
Nature Communications , Notz and team project that, even with dramatic emission cuts, Arctic sea ice will fully melt during the summer months as soon as the 2030s—much sooner than expected.
As part of LINZ FMR, a biennial festival for art in digital contexts and public spaces in Linz (AT), artist-activists Julian Oliver and Gordan Savičić turn their PerMillion (2022) CO2 web counter into a billboard. Every morning, the parts-per-million value is updated manually to match the website in what FRM calls “a non-digital performance.” Designed as a tool for protest, the website gets its numbers directly from the continuous readings at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory , the atmospheric CO2 baseline station.
“I believe that we’re moving away from surveillance capitalism and into PSYOP capitalism, where the media we consume will be increasingly not only targeted at us, but generated for us by AI systems. And being done in a way that’s intended to manipulate us.”
– American artist
Trevor Paglen , on the dangers of next level extractivism. In talking about “
Hide the Real, Show the False ,” his upcoming solo exhibition at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Paglen parses next generation “psychological and deception operations” and why they terrify him.
The London-based artist duo dmstfctn launches GODMODE EPOCHS (2023), a “multi-player AI frustration game.” Set among the lined shelves of an infinite, simulated supermarket, players race against time to train an AI to identify products. When frustrated, the AI seeks refuge in its memories—a separate game map where players can collaborate to cheat. The “reciprocal training program”—players train and are trained—is part of a long-term research project supported by the Alan Turing Institute and Serpentine Galleries .
“Introducing iPhone, on your face,” quips ‘Famous New Media Artist’ Jeremy Bailey about the reveal of Apple’s Vision Pro. Bailey anticipated the company’s mixed-reality goggles after coming across a 2015 patent (image), while patenting (whimsical) AR interfaces of his own . “Current AR and VR patents,” Bailey wrote in 2016 , “are hilariously broad and forecast a future where culture itself belongs to the world’s largest tech companies.” The new Apple face computer still gets a thumbs-up (“this is incredible”).
“We may one day possess tools that keep us plugged in all the time, yet trick us into believing we’re not. The beauty of these ugly goggles is that they show what’s really going on.”
– Tech reporter Molly Roberts, on Apple’s newly announced
Vision Pro mixed-reality goggles. “We will be able to be not present while also being present—to fail to pay full attention to what’s around us without technically having to look away from it,” Roberts writes. “Welcome to the future.” [quote edited]
Basel’s House of Electronic Arts (HEK) opens “Collective Worldbuilding,” an international group exhibition of “Art in the Metaverse.” 16 artists including Ian Cheng , Simon Denny , Sarah Friend , Holly Herndon , LaTurbo Avedon , Jonas Lund , and Omsk Social Club explore how—or if—a decentralized internet advances self-determination. In her new video piece Untitled (2023, image), for example, Friend explores market edge cases and identity boundaries with NSFW (not safe for work) AI images fine-tuned on herself.
“Thus far, this has been an extractivist discussion. Instead of only focusing on what we festival makers need, maybe we should also ask ourselves what we can give.”
– Naomi Johnson, Executive Director of
imagineNATIVE Toronto, the world’s largest indigenous film and media arts festival, during the first Future Festivals Lab at
NEW NOW in Essen (DE). Over the next 18 months, the
MUTEK -led think tank brings together seven organizations from Canada, Germany, and Mexico to prototype festival futures.
A show parsing post large-language model (LLM) “shared discourse,” Sarah Rothberg ’s “SUPERPROMPT” opens at Bitforms San Francisco. Through several performances, the American artist takes aim at the veracity of statements made by ChatGPT and its ilk, as well as virtualized social convention. In NEW MEETINGS (2021-, image), for example, Rothberg and mystery guests convene in VR to engage in a conversational game that demonstrates “how architecture and social arrangements distribute power.”
“Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings” opens at Akademie der Künste, Berlin, concluding JUNGE AKADEMIE’s AI Anarchies fellowship program with an evocative exhibition. Ten fellows including Sarah Ciston , Petja Ivanova , Sahej Rahal , SONDER , Aarti Sunder , and Natasha Tontey present new works that counter extractivist logic, algorithmic violence, and techno-solutionism. In Rahal’s video installation Anhad (2023, image), for example, an audio-reactive AI program interacts with the cacophony of the outside world—and falters.
“The result is a fantasy—or nightmare—of computers as both preternatural agents of their own histories and autocratic engines of meaning.”
– Art historian and Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator
Tina Rivers Ryan , on Lowell Nesbitt’s 1965 painting
I.B.M. Disc Pack . The piece is part of a series of “deadpan enlargements of IBM materials” and currently on view at the Leslie Jones-curated LACMA exhibition “
Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age ”—a “necessary survey” that “argues that early computer art
is art,” as Ryan writes in her review.
NEW NOW Festival returns to the industrial world heritage site of Zeche Zollverein in Essen (DE), once the world’s largest colliery, to conjure “Hypernatural Forces” in a major exhibition. Ten resident artists including AATB , Cinzia Campolese , Daniel Franke , Ali Phi , Sabrina Ratté , and Pinar Yoldas present new works that ponder the site’s political and environmental legacy. As visitors wander the caverns of the Mixing Plant, they encounter roaming robot packs and AI-generated ecosystems.
Swiss artist collective Fragmentin premieres G80 (2023), a Mudac -commissioned interactive installation, within the London Design Biennale “Global Game” exhibition at Somerset House. A console interpretation of Buckminster Fuller’s “World Game ” of equitable resource distribution, G80 challenges notions of total control and technocracy. 80 correlated sliders invite negotiation of societal values—freedom, GDP, ecology etc.—and taunt viewers with a motorized choreography when left alone.
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