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“Conway’s LIFE changed mine, I think Conway himself thought it rather trivial, but for a nonmathematician like me, it was a shock to the intuition, a shattering revelation—to watch glorious complexity emerging from staid simplicity.”
– Musician Brian Eno, describing the sizeable impression John Conway’s Game of Life made on him
John Conway (1937–2020)
Mathematician John Conway dies from COVID-19 related complications at a New Jersey nursing home. Known for his prolific contributions across number theory, game theory, probability theory, topology, and algebra, his Turing complete
Game of Life endures as a foundational inspiration in both artifical life and computational art.
“I still think COVID-19 sounds like it’s a poorly-supported mid-2000s video codec.”
– Creative coder and Twitch streamer LunaSorcery, tweeting out what we’re all thinking
Operating under the rubric “connect online like it’s 1999,” this Faith Holland, Lorna Mills, and Wade Wallerstein-curated exhibition asks a big existential question of net art in the age of COVID-19: “Well Now WTF?” While it may not provide tangible answers, its 80-plus contributing artists (organizing in sardonically titled rooms including “stay home and masturbate” and “pants optional”) offer community, irreverence, and nostalgia—joyful respite during a moment of unprecedented isolation.
While the Cornavirus has brought the global economy to a halt, it’s a boon for some researchers. Due to the massive drop in transportation network use, scientists are able to monitor seismic and volcanic activity with far greater accuracy than usual.
Shanghai’s Chronus Art Center (CAC) launches “We=Link: Ten Easy Pieces,” a special online exhibition that responds to the unfolding global health crisis with new commissions by aaajiao , Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne (image: Get Well Soon! ), JODI , Weiyi Li , Slime Engine , Ye Funa , Evan Roth and others. “We=Link” is co-commissioned by Rhizome and Art Center Nabi , and co-hosted by 12 international institutions including Arts at CERN , HeK , iMAL , LABORATORIA , and V2_ .
“These messages express care, well wishes, sympathy and generosity in the face of personal adversity and systemic failure. This is an archive of mutual aid in response to a ruthless for-profit health system. It is an archive that should not exist.”
–
Tega Brain and
Sam Lavigne , on gofundme.com medical fundraisers that inspired their poignant online artwork
Get Well Soon! (2020)
Olia Lialina ’s solo exhibition “Best Effort Network” opens (online) at arebyte, London, showcasing new and re-made works including Summer (2013) and the titular Best Effort Network (2015/2020) in which the Russian net art pioneer positions browsers, hyperlinks, and GIFs as spaces for art. Her latest work, Hosted (2020), distributes a 70-frame animation across 70 different hosting services, creating a fully networked flip book experience.
“The egg is a huge cell, and these proteins have to work together to find its center, so that the cell knows where to divide and fold. Without these proteins making waves, there would be no cell division.”
– MIT physicist
Nikta Fakhri , on the quantum fluid-like wave pattern that drives the growth of organisms
OUT NOW :
Wendy Liu
Abolish Silicon Valley
Former Silicon Valley insider
Wendy Liu mounts a blistering criqitue of ‘big tech,’ arguing that corporate interests have no business monopolizing technologies that could be used for the public good.
Known as “2020 CD3” and only discovered in February, Earth’s temporary mini-moon has left orbit and is headed for the Sun. According to astronomers’ calculations, the car-sized object—likely an asteroid or lunar rock—had been circling Earth for at least a year. 2020 CD3 likely departed on March 7, astronomy-software developer Bill Gray tells The Atlantic ’s Marina Koren. It might return in 2044.
“When I was twenty, I made friends with an alien.”
– Data artist
Jer Thorp , reminiscing about his encounters with a giant Pacific octopus while working “a minimum wage dream job” at the Vancouver Aquarium early in his career
New York-based video artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki release the first episode of 2 Lizards (2020), an animated collaboration featuring two anthropomorphized CGI lizards that are “lucky they work from home.” Made while self-isolating because of COVID-19, the video captures a “beautiful moment of communion through sound waves in Brooklyn despite social distancing.” Remember: “The virus’ protective membrane is very sensitive to soap and heat but also bass.”
“A female artist sits in the tradition of female labour in early computer history—women were often used in the early half of the twentieth century as ‘human computers,’ working out calculations manually.”
– Artist and researcher
Anna Ridler , on her commitment to producing new “hand-crafted bespoke datasets” for AI-generated works like
The Fall of the House of Usher (2017)
After two years of extensive renovations, Brussel’s art and technology centre iMAL reopens with “Quantum: In Search of the Invisible,” an exhibition exploring the world of quantum physics. Featuring works by Julieta Aranda , James Bridle (A State of Sin , 2018, image), Yunchul Kim , Semiconductor , Suzanne Treister , Yu-Chen Wang , and others, the show assembles artist-scientist collaborations that emerged from the Arts at CERN residency program.
UC Berkeley astronomers announce the hibernation of the networked citizen science project SETI@home after 21 years of operation. Since the 1999 launch of its iconic (net.art-y) screensaver software, more than 5.2 million participants have reportedly donated CPU time to help scan data from the Arecibo Telescope for signs of alien intelligence. Now, diminishing returns—“we analyzed all the data we need for now”—and administrative costs force a pause: On March 31, 2020, SETI@home will stop distributing work to volunteers.
Another test of SpaceX’s next-generation rocket, Starship, ended in failure over the weekend, after a major test article imploded at the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
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