“Precisely because science fiction is so generative for our technological imaginaries, we need it to be genuinely experimental, committed to an expansive reimagining of not only what technology is, but what the future can be—and, most importantly, who gets to create it.”
“Olafur Eliasson’s recent and more spectacular work may be the product of this frustration, of seeing so clearly the change that has come and yet feeling so acutely our inability to respond.”
Reinterpreting revered Canadian art history, Jon Sasaki’s “Homage” opens at MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie (CA). The Canadian conceptualist presents photographs of bacterial cultures grown from palettes and brushes used by the Group of Seven (image: Microbes Swabbed from a Palette Used by F.H. Varley detail, 2020). Created for a 2021 McMichael Canadian Art Collection exhibition, Sasaki intervenes in “the tradition-bound genre of landscape painting through the lens of contemporary photography.”
“Image-making software shortcuts laborious processes. Studio training gets subbed out for tutorials. Painting becomes odourless and nontoxic, offering itself up as a swipe of the mouse.”
The latest addition to the Rice Public Art initiative, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Climate Parliament (2024, image) opens at Rice University in Houston (US). Installed in a public path through the Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science, an undulating canopy of 481 speaker-lights beam light patterns and play a dense mix of audio clips of environmentalist “protests, academic presentations, and civil disobedience” (featuring voices include Greta Thunberg and Timothy Morton) to foot traffic below.
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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.
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Over the last decade HOLO has curated more than 500 cultural initiatives worldwide
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