1,770 days, 2,700 entries ...

Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
● 08/06/2023
“If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cyberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns.”
– LA Times tech columnist Brian Merchant, channelling media scholar David Karpf’s critique of Apple’s “anti-metaverse,” where people disappear into a “totally immersive computer on their face”—alone. “If the world keeps getting worse,” Karpf says, “this will eventually have a lot of appeal.”
Los Angeles Times
● 02/11/2022
“The Flipper Zero is not going to turn a legion of IT guys into Watch Dogs protagonists.”
– Tech journalist Chris Person, joking the wireless, NFC, and RFID-capable Flipper Zero multi-tool (aka ‘Tamagotchi for hackers’) will not transform its users into clichéd cyberpunks
The Verge
● 24/06/2022
“If we had the Web3 dream world, it would be William Gibson with a concussion. It would be a really stupid cyberpunk hellscape—far dumber than the world we’re actually in.”
– Crypto skeptic David Gerard, imagining the (already wildly dystopian) Sprawl Trilogy plus brain injury, when asked to describe crypto’s ‘vision for the world’ by interlocutor Edward Ongweso Jr.
This Machine Kills
● 08/01/2022

Tokyo’s SAI gallery dedicates a new solo show—his largest yet—to the cyberpunk creations of Ikeuchi Hiroto, showcasing mechanical masks, VR headsets, wearable exoskeletons (made in collaboration with Skeletonics), and a futuristic vehicle (image). Ikeuchi, who rose to fame with robotic augmentations in the fashion world, combines ready-made plastic models with industrial parts, imparting decontextualised objects with new meaning through amalgamation.

SAI Gallery
● 25/02/2021

Curated by sci-fi author and OG cyberpunk Bruce Sterling, Turin-based Share Festival launches “Born to Be Online,” a ‘best of’ Share Prize-winning projects exhibited over the years. Among Sterling’s twelve picks are Paolo Cirio & UBERMORGEN’s Amazon Noir (2006, image), Lia’s Proximity of Needs (2008), Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Follower (2016) and Milad Tangshir’s VR Free (2019), all exploring different aspects of the Internet age. “With this summary of 15 years, we at Share Festival are bracing ourselves for what comes next.”

Born to Be Online
● 11/02/2021
“The glint in Cyberpunk 2077, then, is not simply a lighting effect but an opportunity to relish the sheer quantity of unseen micro-temporal computations, supply chains, research, and labor required to produce it.”
– American media theorist Hank Gerba, on the elusive gleam reflecting off so many surfaces in ads and videogames
Real Life
G
● 18/12/2020
“Cyberpunk 2077 was a behemoth of the game industry, and it didn’t even exist. Now it looks like it’s taking a long, hard fall—like one of the cars in the game, toppling off the map, no longer running on hype.”
– Journalist Sydney Halleman, on the highly anticipated, much delayed, and ultimately disastrous launch of what might have been the game of the decade
Slate
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