Seeding the intersection of agriculture and activism, “Art Farm” opens at the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto Scarborough. At the invitation of curator Amish Morrell, artist Shannon Gerard and the Outdoor School and Futurefarmers collectives, “model new—and old—ways of land stewardship.” The latter presents documentation of Soil Procession: A Movement of Soil from the Country to the City (2015, image), a parade transporting soil from 50 Oslo-area farms to a communal bakehouse and grain field.
“The things they were saying television would do to us and do to our culture are right. For better and for worse, they saw it all coming, and they described a world way less warped and deranged by all this than the one we actually live in.”
Canadian software artist Sarah Friend shares a batch of freshly minted Memoryforms (2024), the collaborative on-chain memorial for her NFT Lifeforms (2021) that invites past carers to inscribe a message. Widely celebrated as one of the more interesting social experiments in the Web3 space, token holders had 90 days to keep their NFT entity alive by giving it away to another carer. As one owner of several (now dead) Lifeforms laments: “I wish I had set calendar notifications to take better care of my pack.”
“People would answer yes or no to a question that I put up. And for about 16 years after that, I was not invited to participate in anything at the Museum of Modern Art.”
Advocating for ecological sustainability and solidarity, “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice” opens at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Guest curators Glenn Kaino and Mika Yoshitake present newly commissioned works from Cannupa Hanska Luger, Garnett Puett, Lan Tuazon, Ron Finley, and Mel Chin that “deconstruct polarized political attitudes surrounding climate justice.” Twenty international artists including Ryoji Ikeda (image: point of no return, 2018), ikkibawiKrrr, and Xin Liu also contribute.
Serials
In Progress
In Progress
In Progress
In Progress
Complete
Complete
In Progress
Complete
General
A new HOLO format, Dossiers are web-based research publications that contextualize and expand upon cultural initiatives in real-time
Dossiers are dedicated HOLO folios that augment and complement exhibitions, residencies, conferences, and educational initiatives. Realised in collaboration with artists, writers, curators, and cultural partners, they are designed to document process and disseminate knowledge through a variety of engaging formats—essays, interviews, artwork—all within a focused online magazine. If you’re interested in working with us on a Dossier, please get in touch via our Contact page.
Emerging trajectories in art, science, and technology (since 2012)
As an editorial and curatorial platform, HOLO explores disciplinary interstices and entangled knowledge as epicentres of critical creative practice, radical imagination, research, and activism
“I feel the language and concepts I’m working with don’t comfortably fit within the normal discourse about art and aesthetics. CERN’s physicists and engineers understood the tools I was using and I was able to talk about my goals. I just couldn’t have that kind of dialogue in an art context.”—sound artist Bill Fontana on his CERN residency (HOLO 2, p.206)
There is a space between a computer’s command line interface and the contemporary art museum, the legalese of Silicon Valley’s terms and conditions and the social contract, the whoosh of a particle accelerator and the romanticized “a ha” of artistic inspiration. For much of the twentieth century these gaps were chasms, separating science and engineering from the humanities and siloing them off; today, these gaps are narrowing and disciplinary interstices are the spaces to watch. Increasingly aware of how much technology governs not only entrenched fields of study but every aspect of modern life, we’ve come to realise that things are deeply intertwined.
HOLO emerged in 2012 to explore these entanglements—first with a periodical, now across an expanded platform. Set up in the grey zones between art, science, and technology, it frames scientific research and emerging technologies as being more than sites of invention and innovation—as epicentres of critical creative practice, radical imagination, and activism. The artists and designers working with related materials—algorithms and microcontrollers, meteoroids and fungi, data and archives—aren’t just updating notions of craft for the twenty-first century, they are researchers and cultural critics.
As an editorial and curatorial platform, HOLO occupies the same eccentric vantage points as these hybrid creative practices and puts them into perspective. Working across multiple avenues—print and online, events and production—HOLO collaborates with contributors and cultural partners to facilitate fruitful dialogue between domains and bring new voices into the conversation.
Selected collaborators:
We produce:
Artist talks
Panel discussions
Performances
Installations
Workshops
Editorial
Publications
Over the last decade HOLO has curated more than 500 cultural initiatives worldwide
Selected partners: