1,721 days, 2,667 entries ... Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
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“Many bands have sought to confront the relationship between mankind and technology, but they have built on Kraftwerk’s pioneering accomplishments while placing emphasis on the human interaction inherent within both society and music rather than either celebrating or accepting as a given the subordination of man to machine.”
– Paul Bond, on the recent passing of Florian Schneider
“Blogging is akin to stand-up comedy—it’s not coherent drama, it’s a stream of wisecracks. It’s also like street art—just sort of there, stuck in the by-way, begging attention, then crumbling rapidly. A blog evaporates through bit-rot.”
– Bruce Sterling, on the closure of his long-running WIRED blog “Beyond the Beyond”
Carrie Mae Weems, Christine Sun Kim, Duke Riley, Jenny Holzer, Pedro Reyes, and Xaviera Simmons are among three dozen artists producing digital billboards to thank New York City, Boston, and Chicago’s essential service workers.
Combining the talents of Araiz Mesanza (illustration) and Raquel Meyers (animation), Inattention is a short film that revels in the anxiety of our current moment. Initiated during a residency at Irudika earlier this year and completed during lockdown, the Teletext-animated short was just released on YouTube.
“Because astral stories can exist without the telescope, they are both woefully unreal and extraordinarily resilient narrative technology for institutional memory—perhaps one of the few intergenerational computers we’ve managed to construct so far.”
– Writer and researcher
Kei Kreutler , on astrology—the “oldest and most impactful science fiction ever created” [quote edited]
Given the transition that art galleries, fairs, and all manner of cultural producers have made in switching from IRL events to online content, Rhizome Artistic Director Michael Conner has begun a timely multi-part essay project cataloguing essential history and clarifying what is at stake. The first installment, on ‘performance, variability, objecthood’ is up and more are promised in the coming weeks.
“Palatnik’s device made us think about the artwork in terms of its livelihood, forcing us to consider its mortality and need for rest and repair.”
– MoMA’s Karen Grimson , on Abraham Palatnik’s Kinechromatic Apparatus S-14 (1958), exhibited as part of “Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction—The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift,” in a tribute published following the artist’s passing
Abraham Palatnik (1928–2020)
Brazilian artist, inventor, and designer Abraham Palatnik, a giant of kinetic and Op art who harnessed technology to create painterly images with light, movement, and shadow in his groundbreaking series Kinechromatic Devices (1951–2004), dies from COVID-19 in Rio de Janeiro.
“It is one of the great ironies of the present situation that what may be the only exhibition in London that you can currently go and visit ‘in the flesh’ consists entirely of work meant originally to be experienced online.”
Inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure book series first popularized in the 1980s, Russian artist Dasha Ilina and screenwriter Sofia Haines launch Choose Your Own Quarantine , a browser game about navigating the uncertainties of the pandemic. “The user is presented with a scenario that initially follows the real timeline of COVID-19 development,” write the authors, “but as the game goes on, users will notice that the options become increasingly speculative and fictitious.” Which values, practices, and cultures will ultimately be enduring, and which may become outdated remnants of the pre-pandemic world?
Citing the economic upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic, Google smart city affiliate Sidewalk Labs cancels its much-maligned ‘city of tomorrow’ redevelopment plan for a neglected portion of Toronto’s waterfront.
“But, as Instagram quickly achieves primacy in the exhibition world, its functionality remains disturbingly ill-suited to the art market’s need for sustainable growth and reach.”
– Jacob Barnes, on how the current rush to online platforms—Instagram in particular—has thrown the art market into dissolution, to the immediate disadvantage of galleries and to the long-term disadvantage of artists
Inspired by children’s book illustrations, Sciuridaes is CMU animation student Lumi Barron’s ingenious use of high-speed photography to capture “anthropomorphic videos of little beasts in my backyard.” An final project for Golan Levin and Nica Ross’s Experimental Capture course, Barron spent eight weeks training local squirrels to eat at a miniature dinette.
“This is a particularly dangerous message to send during a pandemic, when chilling worker speech about health and safety practices could literally be a matter of life and death.”
– New York Attorney General Letitia James, outlining how Amazon may have broken state whistleblower laws for firing a warehouse worker who organized a protest at a Staten Island distribution hub
“By channelling patterns of fluid single-cell forms and the spiritual presence of artificial intelligence, she opens up the possibility of an encounter with other beings who have been ‘in the room’ all along: our cohabitants, symbiotes and other ghosts in the machine.”
–
Gary Zhexi Zhang , on the work of Finish artist
Jenna Sutela who “incorporates shapeshifting slime molds, algae blooms, and machine learning algorithms into her practice to foster a new understanding of the world”
In celebration of the 50th Earth Day , The Atlantic compiles 31 iconic photographs, “each a glimpse into some aspect of our environment, how it affects and sustains us, and how we affect it.” Included are pictures taken during the inaugural Earth Day protests in 1970: “Conceived as a national teach-in, patterned after the Vietnam teach-ins held on hundreds of campuses in the Spring of 1965, Earth Day is a nationwide demonstration of concern for the planet and all forms of life—not only man—who live on it.”
Florian Schneider (1947–2020)
Pioneering electronic musician Florian Schneider dies in Düsseldorf, after a battle with cancer. Along with Ralf Hütter, Schneider (and later, a rotating cast of collaborators) formed Kraftwerk, which created the template for electronic music sound design, groove, and mythologizing the future in the 1970-80s. Impacting the sound of everyone from Afrika Bambaataa to LCD Soundsystem, Schneider’s immense influence endures.
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