AI art and biohacks that ponder post-humanism, CGI fever dreams that (further) distort reality, software that speaks truth to power: HOLO Readers enjoy full access to our weird and wonderful discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture. Join us and support indie publishing in the process.
“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.”
– Cyberethnographer Ruby Thélot, on science fiction’s enduring relevance
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“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.”
– Critic Emily Watlington, seeing cultural paralysis in Olafur Eliasson artworks. Reading pro-climate messaging in The Glacier Melt Series 1999/2019 (2019) and Adrift Compass (2019), and other works, Watlington observes that for both the Icelandic artist and viewers, “recognizing the effects of climate change is not the same as stopping it.”

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.”
– Critic Brian Droitcour, considering how software inflects painting. Through dialogue with Simon Denny, Chris Dorland, Pieter Schoolwerth, and Andrew Paul Woolbright, Droitcour examines how software-savvy artists put “digital image environments in dialogue with centuries-deep traditions of constructing the painterly image.”

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.

Serials
New Art City Virtualizes The Gallery, Abolishes Gatekeepers, and Increases Access
Burak Arikan Maps Power Structures, Financial Flows, and Networks of Influence
Total Refusal Collective Casts NPC Workers in Critique of Contemporary Labour
Akil Kumarasamy Parses Quantum Plotlines and Large Language Models
Wade Wallerstein Decodes Digital Art’s Myriad “Distant Early Warnings”
Maarten Vanden Eynde Encapsulates Human Fallibility for the Ages
Miriam Arbus Cultivates “Seed Systems” That Nurture New XR Ecologies
Martin Bricelj Baraga Builds Monuments to the Sky’s 53 Shades of Blue
Claire L. Evans Assembles Fifty Key Sci-Fi Voices to “Terraform” Futurity
Kyriaki Goni Weaves Counter-Narratives to Colonial Cosmologies and Space Expansionism
Dossiers
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.

Encounters
AI art and biohacks, CGI fever dreams, software that speaks truth to power—join us and receive full access to HOLO’s daily discoveries in critical creative practice.
$40 / $75 / $350
The AI Anarchies Book sheds light on the debate surrounding AI and ethics from an artistic and scholarly perspective, exploring new approaches to the topic.
$35
Created by Berlin-based generative artist Marcel Schwittlick, RGB Triptych (2023) translates signals from HOLO’s news archive into glorious matrixes of vintage plotter code.
$100-250
Questioning our problematic faith in AI, Nora N. Khan and fifteen luminaries measure the gap between machine learning hypotheticals and the mess of lived experience.
$45
A poster-sized portal into the year when generative AI burst onto the scene, cryptocurrency and NFTs sent markets into a frenzy, and Silicon Valley billionaires rode rockets into orbit: the HOLO INDEX charts some of 2021’s most memorable moments in art, science, technology, and culture.
$15
An inquiry into the nature of randomness—how science explains it and how culture (and art) emerges from it
$55
Parsing emerging representational and perceptual paradigms in the wake of the Snowden revelations and nascent computer vision technologies
$75
An illustrated field guide on plastiglomerates, robot dogs, antenna trees and other hybrid creatures (and objects) of our time
$35
The first three instalments of ‘anticipatory’ designers N O R M A L S eponymous graphic novel series delineate a dark and unsettling world of hyper-mediated futures.
$65

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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© 2023 HOLO V2.5.2 (beta)
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Over the last decade HOLO has curated more than 500 cultural initiatives worldwide

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A-B-Z-TXTCA
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IAMES
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